The Kitchen God's Wife, by Amy Tan
A reminder that people just living lives can be a worthwhile read, even relatively unadorned
(Review posted 10 Dec 1995 12:12:12)

(Copied from an old review originally posted elsewhere.)

While visiting the California branch of my wife's family, in the big flat suburbs west of Oakland Bay, we were once sent out to buy four fruits. There was to be a dinner party that night at one of the usual Chinese restaurants where, among other things, we were to be introduced to Wong Tai-Tai, a leading light of the local Christian-Chinese-American community, and a great friend and confidante of my wife's mother's mother. The four fruits were to be a gift for her. Gifts of this sort, I was given to understand, should always be a multiple of four, and in this case eight would have been too many. The choice of this particular sort of fruit was, I'm sure, the result of a similar calculus. Although no one said anything of the kind, I also understood that, while great allowances would be made for me as the only non-Chinese present, I would be on my very best behavior that night.

All this came back to me vividly, reading Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife". The beginning and end of the book describe the interactions between a first-generation Chinese-American woman and her thoroughly Chinese mother, who came to America fleeing the Communists in 1949. In wonderfully authentic voices, Tan shows us each woman through the other's eyes, and the rest of the family through both sets. The love, tension, and misunderstanding between immigrants and their children, by now a reasonably familiar theme, is done in a comfortable low-key suburban way, without exaggeration or unnecessary crisis. In a recent Reason magazine, a reviewer recommended Amy Tan's novels to new immigrants, as texts on the subject of becoming American. Although my experience is only thirdhand, I will second that recommendation.

The middle of the book is the story of the mother's life in China, a life with the usual quota of mistreatment, oppression, bad marriages, dead children, lifelong friends, and so forth. If the head and tail of the book are about what happens when your children grow up American, the middle is an example of why you'd want them to. Readers of my other reviews will know that, heartless techy nerd that I am, I'm not generally interested in mere human lives, unless they're decorated with interesting new ideas, or presented in unusually striking prose. This novel is neither, and probably would not have been on my reading list except for its direct relevance to my own family. But people who enjoy reading about mere human lives are likely to find this part worthwhile; the voices are convincing and memorable, and the prose is above reproach. My wife assures me that, especially for someone whose own parents went through something similar, the book can be a moving and emotional experience.

Even fellow heartless techy nerds may find the book a welcome break from Delany or Gibson or Kafka; a reminder that people just living lives can be a worthwhile read, even relatively unadorned.

%A   Tan, Amy
%T   The Kitchen God's Wife
%I   Ballantine / Ivy Books
%C   New York
%D   1991
%G   0-8041-0753-X
%P   532 pp.
%O   paperback, US$6.99

P.S. The dinner went fine, by the way. We accomplished our two major goals: getting Mrs. Wong to accept the fruit, despite forceful and convincing attempts to refuse it (the Chinese custom is about three orders of magnitude beyond the vanilla American "you shouldn't have"), and keeping the conversation mostly away from the subject of religion.