"The Kitchen God's Wife"

Paper Summary:

In this article, the writer relates that Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife" is the moving tale of a daughter finding the roots of her own undiscovered heritage, in a winding juxtaposition between cultural tradition and modern assimilation. The writer notes that the work reaffirms Tan's tradition of building narrative through cultural expressions of change and strong character development, among the young and the old. The writer points out that the family Tan describes could be any Chinese immigrant family, or at least that is the feeling the reader gets from the narrative. The writer concludes that the lives of these women may seem sensational when taken out of context, but woven into this narrative they are at once sensational and very real.

From the Paper:

"There is little more compelling than the reconnection of people who share a past, but who see a very different future because of the difficulty the generations have in communicating the past to the present generations and more importantly the difficulty the present generation has in hearing the messages of such a foreign expression of life."
"The older generations in Tan's works frequently and realistically were forced to make life altering decisions that only years of safety in America can buffer enough to allow to come out. Including unhappy and often violent marriages, unknown and often long dead children and family relationships altered in traditions to make possible the immigration to America."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Huntley, E. D. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.
• Ma, Sheng-Mei. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures /. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.
• Tan, Amy. The Kitchen God's Wife. New York: Putnam, 1991.

More papers on "The Kitchen God's Wife":

• Book Review # 97146 : "The Kitchen God's Wife"--A Review"
• Analytical Essay # 65831 : "The Kitchen God's Wife"
• Book Review # 97235 : "Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: