The Kitchen God's Wife

Pearl has kept her own multiple sclerosis diagnosis secret from her mother Winnie for years, a small, private evasion that becomes the novel's frame for the far larger secret Winnie has been keeping her entire adult life: a first marriage to Wen Fu, a Nationalist air force officer whose charm curdles almost immediately into systematic cruelty, rape, infidelity, and control so total that several of Winnie's children by him die of illness and neglect she is given no power to prevent. Tan structures the novel as Winnie's long, unbroken telling to Pearl, mother and daughter finally trading secrets of comparable weight, and makes clear that withheld truth, not distance, is what has kept the two women strangers to each other for decades.

Winnie's escape from Wen Fu, aided by her sharp, pragmatic friend Helen and by Jimmy Louie, the American-Chinese soldier she eventually marries, unfolds against the actual collapse of wartime China, Japanese bombing raids, starvation, the fall of cities, so that her personal survival is never separable from the era's. Tan is careful never to let the historical backdrop excuse or explain Wen Fu individually; his cruelty is domestic and specific even while the country around the marriage is falling apart, which is exactly what makes Winnie's account of surviving both at once so hard-won.

The Chinese folk tale behind the title tells of a man who mistreated his wife, lost everything, and was, on dying, elevated by the Jade Emperor to godhood anyway, charged with reporting on every household's behavior despite having failed at his own, while the wife who forgave him goes unnamed and unrewarded. Winnie has spent her life quietly resenting the story's moral, that a cruel man gets sainted while the woman he wronged is forgotten, and Tan uses it as a direct commentary on Wen Fu's postwar respectability and on every reader who has ever excused a powerful man's private failures because of his public position, applause substituting for the accounting he never actually gave.