The Kitchen God's Wife
Amy Tan, 1991
A mother's long-guarded past surfaces in the stories she finally tells her daughter, changing how both see the family.
Amy Tan
Amy Tan writes about mothers and daughters who love each other across a gap of language and history, and she lets the older women hold the floor. The Joy Luck Club gathers four immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters around a mahjong table, where old hopes and new misunderstandings sit side by side; The Kitchen God's Wife lets a mother finally tell her daughter the story of her earlier life. Start with The Joy Luck Club if you want the wider circle of voices, or The Kitchen God's Wife if you would rather follow one mother and one daughter all the way through.
Feels like family, tenderness and wonder.
Start with The Kitchen God's Wife.
Amy Tan learned as an adult that her mother had survived an earlier, abusive marriage in China; that hidden history helped inspire this novel.
What kindness can cost the person who is already bracing for the worst.
Of course, Mary was only trying to be kind. I admit that it was more my fault that our friendship became strained. I never told her directly how much her gestures of sympathy offended me. So of course she couldn’t have known that I did not need someone to comfort me. I did not want to be coddled by casseroles. Kindness was compensation. Kindness was a reminder that my life had changed, was always changing, that people thought I should just accept all this and become strong or brave, more enlightened, more peaceful. I wanted nothing to do with that. Instead, I wanted to live my life with the same focus as most people—to worry about my children’s education, but not whether I would be around to see them graduate, to rejoice that I had lost five pounds, and not be fearful that my muscle mass was eroding away. Books by Amy Tan
The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan, 1989
Four mothers, four daughters and a mahjong table, where immigrant hopes land on American-born children who cannot quite hear them.
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