Although I have not read her book, listening to Shelagh Rogers interview her on The Next Chapter, I was struck by how similar Tan and Lui’s stories are. There is pain and abuse in both their families but also hope and love. In the novel ideas of luck, fate, and destiny are constantly juxtaposed against choice, self-determination, and free will.Įlaine Lui is a gossip columnist (LaineyLui) and reporter who has just published a funny memoir called: ‘Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When a Mother Knows Best, What’s a Daughter to Do? A Memoir (sort of)’. Tan has written a fiction, but much of what is in her novels she has gleaned from her own family.
It’s an immigration story really, with life in China being so very different from America in terms of family obligations and the status of women. The reader gains empathy for the typical cranky, harsh and ever interfering Chinese mother by revealing her terrible past and how all she every wanted was for her daughter to be happy and healthy. The story flashes back to abuses and secrets in Pearl’s mother’s life back in China.
‘The Joy Luck Club’ and ‘The Kitchen God’s Wife’ are about mother-daughter relationship and Chinese-American culture clash. But it was good, and I while I was reading it I ran across a very similar book that just came out by a Canadian author with so many parallels! If it wasn’t for book club, I would never have picked up a book decades old, by an author whose signature novel I had already read years ago (‘The Joy Luck Club’).
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