The Kitchen God's Wife

Title: The Kitchen God's Wife
Author: Tan, Amy
Publication: United States, Ballantine Books 1991.

Reason, Type, & Setting: After reading The Joy Luck Club and Malinche's Children a while back I decided to read, yet again, a novel relating to culture and family relationships mostly between mother and daughter. This story revolves around the lives of Pearl Brandt, her Aunt Helen, and her mother Winnie in San Francisco and is taken place in I believe around the 80s - 90s. It is a fictional piece with narrations from both Pearl Brandt and her mother Winnie.

Plot: As said earlier it is story of secrecy and the lack of relations between mother, daughter, and aunt. The way the story starts, with Pearl's narration, her mother calls her to get her to go to San Francisco to attend her cousin Bao-Bao's engagement party. Though she doesn't really have close ties to Bao-Bao and seeing that this is about the 3rd time he is getting married, she decides to go out of her mom's willing for her to. After coming to San Francisco, there she meets up with her Aunt Helen at her flower shop where Aunt Helen wanted to talk to her. Pearl Brandt was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which many people in the family knew about, and Aunt Helen obliged her to tell her mother about her condition since she was the only one left that didn't know. Aunt Helen felt it was her duty to tell Pearl this because she herself is in a sickly state and did not want to die knowing that Pearl kept this from her mother. Now, at the same time Aunt Helen talks with her sister Winnie, who is Pearl's mother and tells Winnie that she must tell her daughter her past secrets as well, with the same excuse of her sickly condition. So in this case, Aunt Helen acts as a mediator for both the mother and daughter. With this intro to the story, secrets start to unfold as Pearl and Winnie narrate their own story and Pearl, Winnie, and including Aunt Helen began to gain a stronger bond with each other towards the end of the novel while each hearing their story.

Character: Pearl Brandt is a Chinese-American that grew up in San Jose, California without her mother around. She is married to an American, has two girls Cleo and Tessa, and is a speech therapist. As mentioned before she is not as close as she could be with her mother because of their cultural difference. This made me think of the Joy Luck Club and the mother and daughter's relationship just as Pearl's. Sometimes I can see this and feel the same with my own mother and I, since our upbringings are totally different with my mother growing up in the Philippines. In turn, these differences lead to Pearl and Winnie's lack of communication towards each other with secrets that should be told, not. Pearl's mother, Winnie, had a hard and traumatic life in China which we later find out in the story when Winnie starts her narration and I believe that Pearl would have understood her mother's ways if she had known about her past.

Evaluation: Overall if I compare this book to the novels I've read before, I enjoyed this book more so than Malinche's Children but not as much as the Joy Luck Club. This novel was more descriptive when it came to the emotions of the characters and the scenes that were going on. You could somewhat get a sense of why these characters were the way they were and why they acted that way towards each other, especially since we get both perspectives of the mother and the daughter. This novel shows that the past really shapes who you are and why things why they are now.

Author, Context, & Trivia: Amy Tan grew up in San Francisco as well and wrote many other books inspired by Chinese-American culture. Her books include: The Hundred Secret Senses (which I will read next), The Joy Luck Club, The Moon Lady, and The Chinese Siamese Cat.