Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between the figure of the kitchen god and the narrative as a whole in The Kitchen God's Wife (KG) by Amy Tan. The plan of the research will be to set forth the narrative context in which the kitchen god is explained in the novel, and then to discuss the role that the figure plays in elaborating the novel's underlying pattern of ideas and the means by which those ideas emerge.

The symbolic function of the kitchen god is established early in KG. The god is referred to in a more or less offhand manner by Winnie as "only a story," and then as the patron of luck. He is chiefly associated with living spaces--homes or shops--but his influence appears to permeate Chinese culture. As Winnie puts it, quoting the Jade Emperor of heaven upon providing the kitchen god with his divine mandate in the universe: "I make you Kitchen God, watching over everyone's behavior. Every year, you let me know who deserves good luck, who deserves bad" (Tan 61).

As the story develops, it becomes clear that luck can indeed be either good or bad--often bad, in Winnie's case, as it turns out. The story of the kitchen god's life very much parallels Winnie's own narrative, and the god's fate in myth serves as the symbolic frame for Winnie's experience. A number of specific parallels between the myth and Winnie's life can be identified. The kitchen god begins life as Zhang, a prosperous mortal with a comfortable home. Winnie, too, is born in

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rry that Winnie wishes to spare Pearl does not concern hurt feelings. Rather, she wishes to spare Pearl the insinuation of such a god into the household. Winnie later describes how she repeatedly failed to satisfy the god or the husband and repeatedly experienced luck that went from bad to worse (Tan 297). She also reveals that Pearl's display of inordinate temper from time to time made her worry that, so to speak, the sins of the father had been visited on the child: "I said to myself, Where does that temper come from? And then I thought, Ai-ya! Wen Fu!" (Tan 512). The god's domicile can be interpreted as the almost impregnable institutionalization of repression and convention in the culture, a filter through which all experience passes and through which all subject to the culture perceive the world. So pervasive is the--influence that Winnie never sorts out the source of the relatively distant mother-daughter relationship. Curiously, Winnie's experience of life influences married life for Pearl and Phil (a non-Chinese). Over the years that we've been married, we've learned to sidestep the subject of my family, my duty. It was once the biggest source of our arguments . . . Phil used to I was driven by blind devotion to

Category: Literature - A