The Kitchen God's Wife
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terible truth even Helen does...
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Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events tha led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780143038108 (0143038109)
ASIN: 143038109
Publish date: September 21st 2006
Publisher: Penguin
Pages no: 416
Edition language: English
Category:
Novels,
Literature,
Cultural,
Book Club,
Adult Fiction,
Historical Fiction,
Adult,
Contemporary,
Asian Literature,
Asia,
China
Originally published in 1991, Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife gives us (well, at least me) more of what we loved from The Joy Luck Club: a story in which a mother reveals a hidden life of hardship in China to her daughter. While the book opens on Winnie Louie’s daughter and the misunderstandings th...
Well, it seems that I'm likely to have a Chinese-American son-in-law, so I figured I should begin learning something about his culture, or at least that of his parents. When my younger son lived in Japan, I read quite a lot of Japanese literature so as better to understand the culture in which he wa...
I officially do not want to read anything by Tan again. At least this is how I feel at the moment.Why the three stars: The Kitchen God's Wife is very well written, but I hated what this book was doing to me. The WWII in China is merely a backdrop for the protagonist's personal drama of epic proporti...
This is a story that spans decades. Begun in the present day by the first person narrative of Pearl, the bulk of the story is told by her seventy-four-year-old mother Winnie (Weili) as she relates to her daughter the tale of her first marriage, telling of what it was like in China during and after W...
The Undertaking of Lily Chen is a dark, moodily atmospheric graphic novel with an odd, snatched from the headlines premise. Apparently, recently deceased women go missing in China because an old tradition dictates that unmarried men be married and buried with a female corpse to insure they have some...
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