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    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife"
    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife"
    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife"
    Ebook45 pages28 minutes

    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535837743
    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife"

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      A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife" - Gale

      1

      The Kitchen God's Wife

      Amy Tan

      1991

      Introduction

      Amy Tan wrote The Kitchen God's Wife about her mother, Daisy. Most of Winnie's story in the novel is drawn from Daisy's life, including the difficult life and marriage she left behind in pre-communist China. The presentation of Winnie's story, as she tells her story to Pearl, is reminiscent of the oral tradition. Tan, like Pearl, had never given much thought to her mother's life in China, and she was amazed at what she learned.

      When Tan started on her second novel, she wanted to avoid rehashing material and ideas from her successful first novel, The Joy Luck Club. She sequestered herself with soothing music and incense, realizing that solitude was her surest path to the next novel. Although she tried numerous times to write about something different, the story in The Kitchen God's Wife cried out to be told, and Tan realized that the pursuit of diversity was not a good reason to write about one topic over another. Her mother's eagerness to have her story fictionalized was also a major influence.

      And so, The Kitchen God's Wife shares certain themes with The Joy Luck Club. Both The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife portray strained relationships between immigrant mothers and their American daughters. The theme of alienation also appears in both works. Despite its similarities to the first novel, the second novel won applause from Tan's readers and critics. Her novels contain a multitude of stories that converge into a cohesive work, and Tan is admired for her ability to move from the past to the present in her storytelling.

      Author Biography

      Amy Tan was born in 1952 to first-generation Chinese-American parents. At her birth, Tan was given the Chinese name An-Mai, meaning Blessing of America. Her father, John, was an electrical engineer and a volunteer Baptist minister who came to America in 1947. Her mother, Daisy, was a medical technician who had fled China in 1949 to escape an unhappy arranged marriage, leaving three daughters behind. In 1967, Tan's older brother, Peter, died of brain cancer, and, within a year, her father died of the same illness. After consulting a Chinese fortune teller, Daisy left the evil house and took her surviving children, Amy and John, to Europe.

      The Tans settled in Switzerland, where Amy completed high school. It was an unhappy time for her; she felt like an outsider and was still grieving and angry over the losses in her family. Because being upright had not saved her brother and father, Tan decided to be rebellious and wild. Her friends were drug dealers, and she almost eloped to Australia with a mental patient who claimed to be a

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