Fairy tales and Amy Tan seem to keep close company. Two years ago Tan was just another struggling, unpublished, 37-year-old writer, making up brochures for computer companies while composing stories on the side. By the end of 1989 she was the author of the most admired novel on the best-seller list, her Joy Luck Club having conquered critics and the public alike. A literary star had been born overnight — and, in her wake, a fairy tale’s difficult postscript: How could she ever live up to what felt like a once-in-a-lifetime success?
At the outset of The Kitchen God’s Wife (Putnam; 415 pages; $22.95), one’s apprehensions begin to gather like avenging furies: the opening pages introduce us to a young Chinese-American woman, her all-American husband and her inalienably Chinese mother, living around San Francisco — precisely the contemporary scene that made up the least transporting parts of The Joy Luck Club. For two chapters the young woman tells a pleasant but unremarkable tale of sweet-and-sour tensions, haunted by her nagging mother — and by her nagging sense that her mother and she are speaking different languages. Then, on page 61, the mother takes over, and suddenly the book takes flight.
For almost all the pages that follow, the yeasty old woman unpacks the rich and terrible secrets of her past, as a young girl in Shanghai growing up amid a plague of sorrows: how her own mother abandoned her and she was married off to an ogreish ne’er-do-well; how they hid in a monastery famous for dragon- well tea while the Japanese invaded Manchuria; how somehow she endured the war, losing friends and children along the way; and how, in the end, indomitable as pain, she escaped China and her husband just five days before the communist takeover.
Almost every page of the old wife’s tale is lit up with the everyday magic of a world in which birds can sound like women crying and sweaters are knit in the memory of spider webs. Yet all the storybook marvels are grounded in a survivor’s vinegar wit (“In Nanking, snow is like a high-level official — doesn’t come too often, doesn’t stay too long”). And in front of the watercolor backdrops are horrors pitiless enough to mount a powerful indictment against a world in which women were taught that love means always having to say you’re sorry. In traditional China, the old widow recalls, “a woman had no right to be angry.”
Yet the end — and the point — of Tan’s novel is forgiveness, and the way in which understanding the miseries of others makes it harder to be hard on them. And as the story all but tells itself — so seamlessly it feels as if Tan’s ancestors are speaking through her — it bestows on us a host of luminous surprises. The first is that the dowdy, pinchpenny old woman has a past more glamorous than fairy-tale, and more sad. The second is that in the light of her trials, her curious superstitions come to seem as sound as legal evidence. The final surprise may be the best of all: Tan has transcended herself again, triumphing over the ghosts, and the expectations, raised by her magnificent first book.
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