Tan, Amy - Penelope Fitzgerald (review date 11 July 1991)

Penelope Fitzgerald (review date 11 July 1991)

SOURCE: "Luck Dispensers," in London Review of Books, Vol. 13, No. 13, July 11, 1991, p. 19.

[In the following review, Fitzgerald states that it is the attitude of the older generation that distinguishes Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife.]

Amy Tan was born in San Francisco soon after her parents emigrated from Communist China. A few years ago she joined a Writers' Circle, which told her, as Writers' Circles always do, to write what she had seen herself. She wrote about what she had seen herself and what she hadn't—her own experience and her mother's. She produced a long, complex and seductive narrative, The Joy Luck Club, which was one of the best-sellers of 1989. The Joy Luck Club itself is a group of young wives, stuck in Kweilin during the Japanese invasion, who keep up their spirits by playing mah jong with paper money which has become worthless. All four of them escape to California,...

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