The Kitchen God's Wife

The Kitchen God's Wife is the second novel by the Chinese-American writer Amy Tan, first published in 1991. It deals with the relationship between a mother and a daughter, and it draws heavily on the life of Tan's own mother.

The book alternates between two settings and two women. Pearl is a Californian woman in her forties with a life she has kept partly hidden from her mother, including a marriage she has never properly explained. Winnie is her mother, who left China for the United States to escape a traditional marriage and a war, and whose account of what she left behind is the body of the novel: a childhood in a wealthy household, an arranged marriage to a man who treated her badly, and the years of upheaval in which she found a way out. Tan tells the story in Winnie's voice, so the reader learns the history as her daughter does, in instalments that rearrange what Pearl thought she knew about her mother.

Tan's first novel, The Joy Luck Club, had been published two years earlier, and both books are concerned with the misunderstandings between immigrant mothers and their American daughters, and with the difficulty of explaining a life lived in another language.