The Kitchen God's Wife
by Amy Tan
Buy on AmazonWinnie 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 terrible 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 that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949.
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"This is my bestseller! Amy Tan unleashed this western obsession, or interest in, Chinese women’s writing and it’s not the best book in the world, but it’s a classic story of not understanding your parents until it’s nearly too late. There is this woman married to a white American man and she has always thought her parents never loved her. She finds out that in Chinese culture you must never tell your children they are beautiful or praise them because the spirits might be listening and will come and take the child away. So they are always saying you could be better, you could do better because you never know what spirits are listening. In some ways it takes you to a completely alien world and in other ways it’s completely familiar because we all have mothers. The food in it is amazing too. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"
Diaspora · fivebooks.com