Mothers, daughters, and ‘The Kitchen God’s Wife’

I thank my mother for urging me to read Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife, a book about women as survivors. This makes it a must-read also for men because, as my mother says, "The book shows that this world will be a better place with men giving women the respect that they deserve."

So far, no other book has given me so much insight and inspiration. It carries a message of hope for all women who want to be free from their bondage, both from without and within – repression by tradition, concubinage, arranged marriage, sexual and physical abuse, discrimination, and their own fears and regrets.

The riveting story takes the reader on a journey to China at a time when society dictated that "a girl’s eyes should never be used for reading, only for sewing…her ears never for listening to ideas, only to orders…and her lips should be small and rarely used except to express appreciation or ask for approval." Equally dismaying is the pledge of allegiance foisted on Winnie, the leading character, by her mother-in-law: "To protect my husband so he would protect me. To fear him and think this was respect. To make him a proper hot soup, which was ready to serve only when I had scalded my little finger testing it."

The story focuses on the cultural and generational conflicts between a mother and her daughter, and introduces intriguing personalities in two distant and contrasting worlds – the Chinese of feudalistic and pre-revolutionary China, and the Chinese-Americans in California’s Chinatown. From the book, I learned some Chinese idioms and expressions which somehow help me understand the mindsets of the characters as influenced and shaped by their traditions. Among those that I remember most are ying gai (living a life of regrets), dao mei ("when you think that a bad thing will happen, it will happen"), yi wan (calling a few things "ten thousand things" for emphasis) and sin kye ("heart liver"), a term of endearment for a loved one.

The crux of the story lies in the secrets that Winnie wants to keep permanently buried, but they keep coming to the surface, bringing fears, pains and regrets that cause emotional fissures in her relationship with her daughter Pearl. Deep inside, Pearl feels both sad and angry that the gap keeps her from sharing with her mother the most important matters in her life, both the good (such as her smooth-sailing marriage to an American physician) and the bad (an illness that can cripple her for life).

This aspect of the story makes me realize that, indeed, closeness among family members grows not so much in the great dramas of life as in their day-to-day interactions provided these are done with honesty and openness. With Pearl, Winnie seems to be always in a state of urgency, always off tangent, and that’s because she sees in her daughter a frightening link to the tragedy of her first marriage. On the other hand, Pearl picks up in her subconscious mind signals of her mother’s fears and unease, which make her feel the need to be angry. She knows, however, that her anger does not mean that she does not love her mother.

The book also offers an interesting study in friendship. Winnie and Helen have different economic backgrounds and breeding, and are often engaged in a battle of nerves yet they have remained together since the pre-Communist days when their first husbands were trained to become pilots to fight the Japanese.

Settling into a new life in America with their second husbands and families does little to change the tone of their relationship. Winnie thinks Helen is self-aggrandizing and manipulative, while Helen thinks Winnie is too rigid to appreciate the nice little things that make life a bit brighter. Winnie often tells Pearl that she wonders why she’s stuck with Helen. The truth is, she knows why: Because Helen is privy to her secrets.

In panning for gold in the streams of our relationships, we sometimes overlook the gold nuggets flowing along with the grains of sand. The story shows that Helen is indeed a loyal and grateful friend. Beneath her uncouth façade is a deep understanding of Winnie’s fears and sorrows. In her desire to bridge the gap between Winnie and Pearl, she uses her manipulative skills to compel Winnie into telling Pearl the truth about the past.

Revealing and admitting are courageous acts that can melt a wall of fear, pride and despair and replace it with a bond of love and affection. Winnie’s revelations awe Pearl: Her mystifying life as a child of a concubine; the pain and loneliness that she suffered as a young girl when her mother abandoned her; the cold and distant manner by which her father treated her; her arranged marriage to the importunate and sadistic Wen Fu; and a godly man, Jimmy Louie, coming into her life and opening her eyes to the true meanings of fate, destiny, and God’s will.

Winnie’s sufferings in the hands of Wen Fu can rend a compassionate heart. She suffers from the deaths of her three young children as a result of his cruelty and neglect; the schemes that he carried out to get her in jail; and his ferocious but vain attempts to foil her efforts to divorce him. Before she could fly to America to join Jimmy Louie, however, Wen Fu made sure that his perverse power over her would leave an indelible mark on her person: he raped her. As a result, she had Pearl.

Winnie led a quiet life in America with Jimmy Louie, all the while keeping from him the truth about Pearl. However, one can find some clues that he had known all along that Pearl was not his own child. Until his death, Jimmy had kept his pains to himself, caring for Pearl as a father would for his own daughter and remaining devoted to his wife and family, proving that a man who loved God could be capable of giving unconditional love.

Winnie’s tale parallels the Chinese myth about the kitchen god and his wife. The kitchen god was once an unfaithful husband who got his due punishment. He tried to avoid coming face to face with his forgiving wife by hiding in the fireplace of her kitchen where he died burning with shame. The good wife poured all her tears to put out the flames but it was too late to keep her husband’s body from turning into ashes. Moved by his remorseful act, the myth-makers deified him. This is why some Chinese keep an altar of the kitchen god in their homes and shops; they believe that he has the power to influence a higher god to change their fates. The altar, however, has no icon of his faithful and forgiving wife.

Amy Tan ends the book with Winnie intending to place a porcelain statue of a woman in the altar of the kitchen god. Calling the statue Lady Sorrowfree, she tells Pearl, "See how nicely she sits in the chair, so comfortable-looking in her manner. I heard she once had many hardships in her life. But her smile is genuine, wise and innocent. Maybe she is telling you to speak. She is ready to listen... You should tell her everything."

Pearl cries, and I find myself wanting to cry too. Now her mother is offering her the warmth of her affection and wise counsel. The kitchen god’s wife, now enthroned in her rightful place, has come a long way – just like Winnie Louie and her counterparts in real life, women who have emerged from the battles of life stronger and wiser than ever before.