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Theme in the Kitchen God's Wif

 

            
             Similar to Tan's first novel The Joy Luck Club, one of the themes in The Kitchen God's Wife addresses the cultural clash between a Chinese immigrant mother (Winnie) and her American-born daughter (Pearl). Tan continues from her previous novel in "exploring the effects of generation conflicts and culture clashes as well as the amalgam of occidentalism and orientalism that invades the relationships among first- and second-generation immigrants" (Wagner). The cultural clash between Chinese-born Winnie and American-born Pearl make their mother-daughter relationship "strained, uneasy, characterized by a rift that slowly is widening in a process that neither woman seems able to halt" (Huntley 82). Although they do love each other, the root of their distant relationship derives from the fact that they do not understand each other, and because of the lack of communication between them, they have kept deep secrets from each other. No longer having the desire to keep in these secrets, Winnie's good friend, Helen, encourages both Winnie and Pearl to confess their secrets to each other. With Helen acting as a bridge between Winnie and Pearl, it allows both women to confess to each other what they have kept from each other for so long, thus allowing them to finally understand each other and diminish the gap between them. .
             As an American-born daughter of a Chinese mother, Winnie Louie, and a Chinese-American father, Jimmy Louie, the opening narrator of the novel, Pearl, was .
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             raised in an oblivion of two worlds. At the beginning of the novel, Pearl makes it evident that she has a problematic relationship with her mother, Winnie Louie. Growing up in a bicultural world, Pearl feels more comfortable with the American culture than her own heritage, having an American husband and two American children. She has very little knowledge of the Chinese customs such as her lack of understanding the rituals at Auntie Du's Buddhist funeral.


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