The Kitchen God's Wife and The Bingo Palace

Mythology, Luck, and Fate in The Kitchen God's Wife and The Bingo Palace

In Amy Tan's novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, the author weaves Chinese mythology and beliefs through a woman's struggle to explain and come to terms with her harrowing past, to her American daughter, Pearl. Aside from the horror invoked by Winnie's tale of her life in Pre-Communist/Feudal China, the thing that struck me the most about this book was how often the themes of luck and fate crop up in the story. I often found that Winnie reminded me of the character Lipsha from Louise Erdrich's novel, The Bingo Palace in that both characters seemed to believe that their lives were controlled more by luck/fate than by their own will. While the similarities between the two books do exist, they are very different stories dealing with two cultures far removed from each other in location, beliefs and ways of life. I decided that for this paper, it would be interesting to look at how the ideas of mythology, luck and fate pertain to the culture of the Chinese and Native Americans in these two books. I would also like to look at how Asian Americans and Native Americans assimilate and change their cultural beliefs and practices into the larger "culture" of the United States.

The Oxford Dictionary defines fate as: "1 a power regarded as predetermining events unalterably. 2 a the future regarded as determined by such a power. b an individual's appointed lot. C the ultimate condition or end of a person or thing (that sealed our fate)". The aspect of the story that especially stood out for me was the way in which Winnie chalked up everything that happened to her, good and bad, to the state of her luck at the time. It seems as if Winnie believed that she was fated to have bad luck from beginning of her life because of her mother. She tells of her mother marrying into a family where she became the "double second wife" which means she replaced the first "second" wife who had died. Replacing a dead wife was believed to put a woman into a bad-luck position, so perhaps Winnie believed she had inherited her bad luck from her mother and was "doomed" from birth. Winnie even attributes her horrible marriage to Wen Fu as a result of her bad luck.