"The Kitchen God's Wife"by Amy Tan

Zhang, however privileged, is nevertheless unsatisfied, and when he satisfies his lust for Lady Li, his fortunes progressively decline, until he gives himself everyplace to his doom and prepares for death, only to be rescued by none some other than his ache-suffering wife Guo. Burning with shame at universe disc everyplaceed, he leaps into the fireplace to be burned to ash, the altruistic Guo's attempts to rescue him, despite everything she suffered because of his mischief, all for naught. She disappears from the story; he is rewarded with control over the fortune of everyone. The kitchen graven image resides in one's house, but he is non its patron. He is its watchdog and informer, with power over good and aguish luck, " equivalent a spy--FBI agent, CIA, Mafia, worse than IRS, that kind of person! And he does not give you commits, you give him things. All year long you have to show him respect" (Tan 61).

Like the kitchen god, Wen Fu insinuates himself into Winnie's family,-and analogous the kitchen god he finds shelter and comfort there. Also like the god, Wen Fu is a sexual adventurer and a dissolute who is never satisfied and who raise by turns rely on and abuse a solicitous wife. And when he assumes leadership of Winnie's family, supervene upon her father as head of his own home base, he acts more like an informer, insinuating himself into the family secrets and behaving like a tyrant, monitoring everyone's good behavior, peculiarly his wife's. Winnie clearly sees herself akin to th

e wife of the kitchen god, like all who propitiate the god xenophobic to withdraw from Wen Fu for fear of the consequences, just as members of the household are afraid to stop giving the god footling offerings for fear of retribution.

Thoroughly American and Protestant as they are, cliff and Phil see no significance in the symbolic properties of the close in of ancient Chinese superstitions. But for Winnie there are some(prenominal) significance and uncertainty, at least at the time the gift is given, when Winnie has not yet shared her life story with her daughter. It is as if Winnie is enacting a pious observance and acknowledgment of the god's power over luck.

One feels that Winnie gives fall the god and altar hoping that the god can monitor and check the sensibility of Wen Fu in Pearl that Winnie has always feared. But just as suddenly, Winnie removes the picture of the god: "This one, I take it . . . . This kind of luck, you don't want. Then you don't have to disturb" (Tan 62). Winnie's last statement seems ambiguous, and of course Pearl misunderstands her mother's gesture as just one more hurtful mother-daughter miscommunication. But the dread that Winnie wishes to redeem Pearl does not concern hurt feelings. Rather, she wishes to spare Pearl the insinuation of such a god into the household. Winnie subsequent describes how she repeatedly failed to satisfy the god or the husband and repeatedly experienced luck that went from bad to worse (Tan 297). She also reveals that Pearl's ostentation of inordinate temper from time to time made her disturbance that, so to speak, the sins of the father had been visited on the child: "I express to myself, Where does that temper come from? And then I thought, Ai-ya! Wen Fu!" (Tan 512).

everyplace the years that we've been married, we've learned to sidestep the subject of my family, my duty. It was once the biggest semen of our arguments . . . Phil used to I was drive by blind cultism to fear and guilt . . . Phil used to say that I was driven by b
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