Kitchen God’s Wife

A relatively short read, and even shorter when listening on tape at double speed, but I didn’t do that!  The book was the Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan.  I would call it a “chicklit” book mainly because of the focus on female relationships.  The story is about a Chinese-American woman, Pearl, and her learning the history of her family’s heritage.  Pearl is called by her mother, Winnie, to attend a family engagement, which she doesn’t want to attend, but the next day learns of her aunt’s death.  When she arrives, she meets with her Aunt Helen, who wants Pearl to inform that she has the debilitating disease MS to her mother.  Aunt Helen holds over Pearl the fact that she has a brain tumor, though she doesn’t let Pearl know it is benign.  Helen also encourages Winnie to tell her daughter her life, and all of the things that she went through coming to the US. Winnie goes into great detail her horrific life in China, including being abandoned as a child, being married to a abusive man, not really being related to Helen, and finally the fact that Pearl was not really the biological daughter of the man that had raised her, a loving Chinese Baptist Minister, who helped Winnie escape from the rapist husband and come to the US.  Wu-Fen, the husband of Winnie at that time, was actually Pearl’s biological father.  After learning of these revelations, Pearl shares with her mother her serious medical condition. All the sharing leads the three women to plan a trip back to China.  Obviously there is much more to the depth of the sharing and issues that arose from Winnie’s history, but I provided some of the highlights.  The story gives insight to some of the atrocities and secrets that stay within families.  A well written story, but just not my favorite type of story.  I think this would be a good short book club read for twenty-somethings.