The Kitchen God's Wife
Winnie 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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What you might want to know about The Kitchen God's Wife
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Pearl Louie Brandt is a Chinese American speech therapist in San Francisco who has been hiding her multiple sclerosis from her mother Winnie. After a wedding and a funeral, Winnie sits her daughter down and tells the long story of her first marriage in 1937 China and the husband she fled.
No. The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) is a standalone, separate from Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989). Both share thematic concerns with mother-daughter relationships and Chinese American identity but feature different characters.
Yes, partly. The Kitchen God's Wife draws on Amy Tan's mother's life in pre-Communist China. The events are fictional but the historical and emotional reality reflects the author's family.
The Kitchen God's Wife was written by Amy Tan, published in 1991 by Thorndike Press.
The Kitchen God's Wife is 459 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Kitchen God's Wife takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
The Kitchen God's Wife is a standalone novel by Amy Tan, not part of a series.
The Kitchen God's Wife is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
