Women In Fiction: Winnie Louie, The Kitchen God's Wife
Amy Tan is one of the few female authors who writes about and for women who consistently appeals to me. Her women have enormous variety and all have both highly likable, engaging qualities and annoying, irksome traits. Almost without exception, however, they have a backbone of steel. Winnie Louie, extraordinary heroine of Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife is my favourite - the bizarre inventiveness of many a reviewer's favourite, Kwan from The Hundred Secret Senses, notwithstanding.
Winnie, born Weili in China when it was still Formosa, is a tiny, fizzing, spark of a woman who runs a flower shop with her cousin Helen in San Francisco. Her daughter, Pearl, feels forever a disappointment to her critical mother, whose emotional ups and downs make her a force to be reckoned with, and whose Chinese thinking seems to clash with American-born Pearl's Western ideas. To make matters worse, both mother and daughter are concealing a secret and the book tells us of what happens when both feel forced to spill what they've been holding inside to each other.
Winnie's character evolution is told in flashbacks from her infancy as a pampered daughter to her existence as the spare part in her uncle's family when her mother mysteriously abandons her. Passed around as a servant and married off to a man not good enough to be given to her cousin, she develops a dual personality, outwardly polite and deferential, inwardly steely and clever. She learns to play quiet tricks to make her life easier; for example, she blames a servant who has left for stealing in order to conceal from her husband's family a small amount of silver from the dowry they're not supposed to touch but are relentlessly plundering. As her life with Wen Fu becomes more and more impossible, she has to call on vast reserves of strength to survive life as an army wife and refugee.
There is a strong vein of realism in Tan's creation of Winnie. Not only is she stubborn and holds a grudge like no-one on earth, but the way in which she describes surviving the harrowing events of her past makes perfect sense. She explains how blankness and blind denial help her to weather an abusive marriage, lost children and being caught alone in Japanese bombing raids. Her narrative voice is sometimes alarmingly matter-of-fact, coupling a strong feeling of long-restrained anger with a sense of helpless acceptance. Her story is not unusual the way she tells it; her lack of self-pity is admirable, her years-old frustration only too understandable.
Added to this is the natural way in which Tan has captured the mother-daughter relationship. It is loving but strained, familiar but strange, ritualistic but riven with complexities that mean that one party or the other is almost always grasping the wrong sense of the stick. Tan herself is Chinese-American, and as someone who was born here to a first generation immigrant Greek family I nodded with recognition at some of the ways in which anyone from two cultures feels that they have two homes and yet are sometimes strangers in each. Winnie veers towards ethnic minority stereotype at times, obsessed with her cooking and with not spending too much money on long-distance phone calls, but these stereotypes undoubtedly exist for a reason.
It takes a character with heart, intelligence and humour to grip you through such a harrowing historical tale, and with Winnie Louie Amy Tan has undoubtedly nailed it.
Alex Roumbas is Deputy Editor of Shiny Shiny and is considering writing about a woman she really doesn't like next time, just to see where it takes her.
