"Chinese and Dogs" in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive a la New Age - Critical Essay

Accordingly, Tan integrates 1990s realism with Orientalist discourse. Tan's vivid, richly-textured description of the lifestyle of the professional class, of their house-hunting saga, and even of the avalanche which threatens to demolish their life contrasts sharply with the fuzziness of Changmian, China. The idyllic preindustrial countryside exists for the express purpose of touristic impressions and narcissistic wish-fulfillment. The Bishops' "former life" or previous incarnation at Changmian during the Taiping rebellion is similarly packaged in a set of tropes to ease the Western reader's entry into the Orient. American missionaries, Chinese bandits, and the Hakkas of the Taiping Rebellion led by the Christian convert Hong Xiuquan in the year of "Yi-ba-liu-si" (1864) are arrayed to manage the alienness. And it is here that Tan's kinship with the New Age ethos is blatantly exposed: she kneads together cultural elements as mutually exclusive as Christian linearity and Buddhist cyclic reincarnation, or the 1990s yuppies and the 1860s Hakkas, to advance her plot.

Tan sets part of her story at the time of the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) during the Ching dynasty, a turmoil which exacted 30 million lives and, according to Rudolf G. Wagner, was "the most important rebellion of the nineteenth century ... with its decisive break with many traditional ideas such as footbinding, Confucianism, and its idea of selective adoption of Western technology and institutions" (1-2). Wagner attributes the cause for this "best documented rebellion in Chinese imperial history" to "the friendly contact sought by many missionaries and by the Taipings themselves," resulting in "an usually large, if far from complete, body of original Taiping documents" (2). The Taiping uprising is best documented for Westerners like Amy Tan, whose interest is aroused no less by the missionary mediation.

Moreover, the leader, Hong Xiuquan, was clearly influenced by the revivalist tradition of "England and Scotland, the United States, Germany, and Sweden in the first decades of the last century" (Wagner 11). The Taiping Rebellion was guided by a vision obtained in Hong's illness; in a state of delirious ecstasy, he revealed that he was the younger brother of Jesus, and son of God, mandated to eradicate the devils of Manchus and Confucianism. Much of this history is extracted by Tan, whose tale unfolds in the environs of the Thistle Mountain (Zijing Shan), the Taiping stronghold in Guangxi (41).

In a similar vein, Tan borrows from the historical Hakka and the Buddhist notion of reincarnation. Hong Xiuquan and most of his followers are Hakkanese. The feuding between the Hakka ("guest people") and Punti ("local Cantonese") leads to the eruption of the Taiping Rebellion, which serves to construct "Hakka identity through history" (29). Hakka's Christian belief, however fragmentary in Hong's interpretation, assuredly contradicts the motif of reincarnation in Secret. Progressing on a linear course toward heaven or eternal damnation, Christian theology is incompatible with the cyclic framework of Buddhism.