Storytelling from China to America
Female Voices: A High Speed Quest for a Female Identity
From the best seller The Joy Luck Club, comes another unique tale of survival and a quest for identity in The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan.
As a mother and wife living in communist China during World War Two, Wei-Wei or Winnie, the protagonist in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife tries to cope with her emotionally and verbally abusive first husband Wen-fu and does so, through storytelling. Since patriarchy of the time makes no attempt to reverse the normal gender roles, Wei-Wei utilizes the speaking voice or, the voice that speaks the subject, typical of those subjects in Amy Tan’s first bestselling novel The Joy Luck Club whereby women communicate their abjection. In The Kitchen God’s Wife, her abjection is communicated on different levels – her fear to connect to her daughter, alienation and isolation as an immigrant to America, all are indicative of a basic need to gain access to the element that was always denied to her – her voice.
Wei Wei copes with female abjection by tapping into her friendship to Hulan. Like the themes of The Joy Luck Club, female friendship and storytelling represent two major elements for change. While living at an air base in Hangchow with Wen-Fu, Wei-Wei discovers she is pregnant, which prompts her to share the ignorance of her own body with Hulan.
So that’s how Hulan and I started this telling and keeping of secrets. I told her first, my ignorance about my own body. And she told me how she wished for revenge, and got happiness in return. (The Kitchen God’s Wife 231)
Her second major act of change happens when Wei-Wei finally connects with “Lady Sorrowfree” – a modern day earthmother, which encompasses univeral principles of love, trust and caring. Again, Wei-Wei’s taps into this female model for releasing repressed desires so as to overcome alienation and abjection.
Wei-Wei’s quest for achieving a stable female identity is achieved when she finally reunites with Pearl, her only daughter and struggles to become her own person as an immigrant living in American with her second Chinese-American husband Jimmie Louie, whom she met in China. By using her story to depict the problems of immigrant identity, Wei-Wei illustrates the immigrant identity as the model for taking action, or acculturating within a foreign society. Her struggle as an immigrant, therefore, reveals her need to find a voice, and since she lacks a connection to her unfamiliar surroundings, her self-discovery remains painful.
By sharing a one-on-one personal story of survival with the reader whereby she copes with and finally overcomes her abjection, Wei-Wei ultimately builds a stronger relationship with herself by avoiding those patriarchal attitudes she grew up with in communist China.
Works Cited
Tan, Amy. The Kitchen God’s Wife. New York: Ivy Books, 1991.
