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Representing history in Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife
MELUS, Summer, 2003 by Bella Adams
Wong also proposes that Chinese history is marginalized in The Kitchen God's' Wife because it is used as "a foil for personal dramas" (200). Weili's personal experiences are represented, experiences that are told in a domestic setting to her American-born daughter, Pearl Louie Brandt. In addition to discussing Japan's hostility towards China, Weili articulates her experiences at the hands of the monstrous Wen Fu. The Kitchen God's Wife represents both the Rape of Nanking and the rape of Weili, drawing attention to the similarities between the Japanese military and a Chinese husband. For instance, neither Japan nor Wen Fu atone for their crimes, and both outrageously "assume the role of the victim" (Chan 21). Indeed, they distort events in order to represent themselves as receiving the "bashing." With respect to The Kitchen God's Wife, the patriarchal institutions of marriage and of law operate to ensure that Wen Fu's version of things stands. As he puts it to the court, Weili "had given up a respectable life, turned [her] back on [her] father, let [her] own son die--all because [she] was crazy for American sex" (478). Judith Caesar remarks that this understanding of Weili as a child-killer, a thief, and a whore "is as true as the printed leaflets the Japanese drop on Nanjing, explaining that civilians will not be harmed" (169).
However, the conflation of the rape of a city and the rape of a woman is problematic to the extent that the latter potentially detracts from the former, which is Wong's concern. Subjectivity in relation to history raises the question of reliability. Aside from the fact that individuals died, the bringing together of the suffering generated by Japanese imperialism and by Chinese patriarchy is rhetorically effective. As Caesar notes, Weili's personal experience conveys "a sense of the type of suffering that Tan suggests only metaphorically or seemingly incidentally--the Nanjing massacre, for instance" (169). Caesar also recognizes that representing the individual in history follows a current trend in American narrative: "personal emotional crisis ... is the only suffering interesting enough to write about" (169). Although offering a powerful critique of imperialist and patriarchal ideologies, The Kitchen God's Wife apparently legitimates the ideology of western liberal humanism.
Once again, Tan's novel demands further analysis because it makes possible a critical negotiation of this ideology insofar as the individual (western liberal humanism's principal figure) is assumed reliable regarding historical events only in terms of a rhetorical effect. Weili's Chinese identity, together with the fact that she is an American, Winnie Louie, potentially works to her advantage. Indeed, the (liberal) West's preoccupation with imparting individuality to the "native" empowers Weili to speak, albeit as "the Chinese woman." Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak remarks on her own experience of this native populism, an experience that can also be extended to Weili: "A hundred years ago it was impossible for me to speak, for the precise reason that makes it only too possible for me to speak in certain circles now" (Postcolonial 60). That the oppressed are considered epistemically advantaged regarding the condition of oppression adds weight to Weili's account of things: "Of course it's a true story" (201). These narrative conventions are seductive in their affect, convincing Tan's readers about the reliability of Weili's historical representation. Commenting on this type of effect, Spivak observes that "the narrative takes on its own impetus as it were, so that one begins to see reality as non-narrated. One begins to say that it's not a narrative, it's the way things are" (Postcolonial 19).
