matters of the heart, the need to balance different
cultural values, and the role of food in transmit-
ting culture. Her fiction bridges the divide be-
tween mass market fiction and literary fiction. Her
emphasis on Pacific Northwest locales, especially
Seattle, makes her novels unique among contem-
porary South Asian American writings as many
writers of that community set their novels in New
York and California. Kirchner’s writing under-
scores how South Asian immigrant experiences are
diverse and influenced by the places where people
make their new homes.
Bibliography
Bharti Kirchner. Darjeeling. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2002.
———. Pastries. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003.
———. Sharmila’s Book. New York: Dutton, 1999.
———. Shiva Dancing. New York: Dutton, 1998.
Nalini IyerKitchen God’s Wife, The Amy Tan (1991)
AMY TAN’s second novel is closely based on her
own mother’s difficult life in China. Titled after
a Chinese mythological figure, The Kitchen God’s
Wife was well received and Tan began work on
making it into a film, but ultimately decided to
focus on her writing instead. The pair working
through their thorny relationship in this novel is
Pearl Louie Brandt and her mother, Winnie Louie.
Both have hidden essential facts about their lives
from each other—Pearl has not told her mother
of her multiple sclerosis diagnosis for seven years,
and Winnie has not told her daughter of her pre-
vious life in China, which includes information
about Pearl’s parentage. Both women are forced by
family circumstances to confront each other with
their own potentially devastating secret.
While the novel begins with Pearl’s narra-
tive and point of view, it is Winnie’s unbelievably
wrenching tale that anchors the novel. Pearl’s as-
sessment of her mother as she has known her,
given in the first few chapters, pales in compari-
son to the vivid and sometimes shocking life that
her mother had actually led before she came to
America. Left by her mother at an early age, Win-
nie (originally Weili) was promised in marriage to
Wen Fu, a cowardly wartime pilot and sadistic liar
who has misrepresented himself and his family in
order to gain access to Winnie’s family’s greater as-
sets. During the course of their marriage, Wen Fu
repeatedly rapes and abuses his wife and neglects
and mistreats his three children, all of whom die
in their first few years—one daughter dies through
Wen Fu’s deliberate refusal to send a doctor to treat
his seriously ill child.
Winnie attempts to leave her husband at dif-
ferent times, once after a public dance where she
meets her eventual second husband, Jimmy Louie.
Wen Fu, enraged by their dancing together, holds a
gun to his wife’s head that night and forces her to
sign a divorce paper. He then forces her to beg him
to take her back and rapes her. Winnie endures
more than eight years with this man and eventu-
ally escapes to America with Jimmy Louie, but not
without one more rape from her husband. One of
the secrets she reveals to Pearl is that Wen Fu is in
fact her biological father. As the novel concludes,
both mother and daughter are more at peace with
each other, and Winnie gives her daughter a re-
named Chinese idol as a gesture—once the abused
and downtrodden Kitchen God’s wife, she is now
Lady Sorrowfree, a symbol of new beginnings for
the two women.
In this novel, Tan uses the voices of mother
and daughter joined in their storytelling to ex-
amine the position of women in prewar patriar-
chal China in feudal marriages, and in modern
marriages in present-day California. The divide
between mother and daughter is not merely per-
sonal; it is also cultural and linguistic. Tan weaves
their lives together inextricably and forges a bond
between them that is even stronger than the secrets
that kept them apart.Bibliography
Huntley, E. D., ed. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion.
Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary
Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1998.154 Kitchen God’s Wife, The