The Kitchen God’s Wife

July 20, 2013 / still a dreamer

Had you asked me if I were interested in reading the story of a Chinese woman growing up in China in the late 20’s through the end of World War II, now living in California, and her relationships with family, I probably would have said `no.’ Had you told me the author was Amy Tan, who wrote The Joy Luck Club, I would have immediately changed my answer.

I am so impressed with how Ms. Tan immediately pulls you into her story; it seems so simply written. I don’t know how she does it, but I am engrossed from the first page. Pearl, the American born daughter of Winnie Louie, who grew up in China, begins the tale in the first person. She is observing her mother’s and aunties’ behaviors, their reliance on custom and tradition, and its seeming irrelevance to current day life. She doesn’t really understand her mother and is critical of her negativity and superstitions. They’ve had a rift between them since the death of Jimmy, Pearl’s father, when she was fourteen.

What becomes apparent in the first few chapters is that there are many secrets being kept by both Winnie and Pearl. But even deeper secrets are kept by Winnie and longtime friend, Helen … secrets that are bound by fear, pain, dreadful memories, and the need to follow traditional Chinese customs. Believing she may be dying, Helen threatens to reveal the secrets kept for over 50 years and free herself of the burden. For Winnie, this cannot happen, and so, with current day family relationships established, the story switches to Winnie becoming the narrator and looking back at the past. She will be the one to at long last reveal the secrets, not Helen.

She begins her story when a child of six in China, when her beloved mother, and fifth wife to her father, disappears, and how Winnie’s upbringing falls to Old Aunt and New Aunt and their deeply traditional views. As in The Joy Luck Club, the story is not only about the characters, but about a culture and a country of which I suspect most of us know little. As Winnie tells her story, we learn about the critical qualities of politeness, respect and saving face, the role luck – or belief in it – plays in people’s lives, and the inability to escape a traditional marriage, no matter how abusive.

The unfolding of Winnie’s life, her dangerous marriage, the loss of her children, the toll taken by war, all are answering the questions that her daughter has about her mother and why she is the way she is. This would be a deeply moving story of one woman’s life and her survival against enormous odds in any culture, but in The Kitchen God’s Wife, we also learn about China and a span of time and series of events that changed the country and its residents forever.

Ms. Tan brings it all together in the final chapters, a satisfying conclusion, and one which had me go back and read Pearl’s chapters a second time. Highly recommended.

Dirt Cheap Book Alert!!

March 29, 2013March 29, 2013 / still a dreamer

Did that get your attention? If you, (and your kids), love to read, don’t miss the upcoming Hunterdon County Library Annual Book Sale!

It’s coming up this month on Saturday and Sunday April 20th and 21st at the National Guard Armory on Rt. 12 in Flemington. Check the library’s web site for location, directions and complete details.

Saturday, hardbound books are generally $2.00, paperbacks $1.00, and on Sunday, they’re half that. The main armory houses fiction, children’s books and YA, and the secondary building houses non-fiction. And it’s free as is the jitney transport back and forth from the county complex to the armory when their lot is full. Hard to beat if you love books. It is anticipated that there will be approximately 120,000 books for sale.

I understand that this event draws people from quite a distance, so even if you’re not “local,” come on down and take advantage of the wonder of books for what is truly a pittance.

A Small, Wonderful Movie – I Am

March 6, 2013March 7, 2013 / still a dreamer / 4 Comments

What would you want to say to the world if it became possible that you might soon die? That’s what movie director Tom Shadyac asked himself after he suffered a severe concussion in a bicycling accident. He was told the horrible after-effects could last for 2 years or for life. Or he could die. So he asked himself what he wanted to say in the event that should happen.

I’d never heard of Tom Shadyac, but recognized his movies when he discussed them in the beginning of this beautiful documentary. He directed Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Bruce Almighty, The Nutty Professor and several other similar minded films. He realized that where he’d been with humor and outrageous silliness was not where he wanted to go. He had two questions and wanted to make a documentary … What’s wrong with our world? and What can we do about it?

This short, (1 hour 17 min.), documentary moved me to tears at times, as Shadyac explored these questions through interviews with some of the greatest minds of our times – authors, scientists, religious leaders, poets, and others. He interviews or shows clips of Howard Zinn, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama and other notables, including his own father who founded St. Jude’s Research Hospital for Children with Danny Thomas. The thread of the documentary follows how mankind has lost its way in our quest for winning and competition, but shows how we are literally wired in our DNA for cooperation and compassion. He shares how intuitively the animal world works together – birds flock, fish shoal (see photo) – for the greater good, and how less technologically developed societies work cooperatively with one another. In American Indian tribes where sharing was the norm, hoarding was seen as a sickness, and the members of the tribe set out to heal this person.

Shadyac has gathered so many amazing clips of everything you can imagine to bring us along on his journey of inquiry – history, science, spiritual thought, the natural world. Especially moving was one short clip of something I’d never before seen except in a still … a world famous black and white photo of a slender Chinese man blocking the way of army tanks in the 1989 student protest in Tiananmen Square. In this clip, you watch him move repeatedly to block the tank each time it maneuvers. Mankind has reached out endlessly to stand up for or help others in need, in tragedies such as 9/11, Katrina, Haiti, or events such as civil rights marches and so many other instances. As he explored these issues, Shadyac came to conclusions about his own life of celebrity excess and changed that, too.

He came to realize that `What is wrong with this world?’ has an answer … I Am. But maybe I’m asking the wrong question, he thought. Perhaps I should also ask, `What is right with this world?’ Yup …. I Am.

Unless you are one of those people who believes whoever dies with the most toys wins – and I’m sure you would never have read this far if that were true – then I feel pretty confident that you will be inspired and moved by this film.

Reading Who We Know and Who We Don’t

February 11, 2013 / still a dreamer

There’s something very exciting about discovering an author we’ve never read before. Sometimes we are drawn to this author by personal recommendation, subject matter or from our simply having heard of him or her along the way and wanting to check them out. It’s also often exciting to return to an author we do know and read something fresh. Clearly, we can be surprised in either instance.

I picked up House Rules by Jodi Picoult at a friend’s book swap, a chance to try a new-to-me but very well-published author. House Rules is about a family which includes a single mom, a teenage son, Jacob, who has Asperger’s syndrome and his younger teenage brother, Theo. The father had walked out when Jacob was a toddler. He was unable to cope with the demands of a child whose symptoms were on the higher spectrum of autism, and who required enormous amounts of time and attention to continue to grow and function. Theo, who by necessity must often take back seat to Jacob, is longing for a more “normal” home and has begun to engage in dangerous behavior – breaking into people’s homes just to see what “normal” feels like. Jacob is obsessed with forensics and sometimes crashes local crime scenes, instructing the detectives on what they’re missing at the scene. When Jacob’s like-skills tutor turns up dead, he sets up the perfect crime scene to challenge the detectives, but then becomes the focus as her possible murderer.

This was really a very good read. At first, I was bothered by a little too much educating on the subject of Asperger’s, but as I read on, I realized the necessity of this baseline to truly understand Jacob’s behavior. I have some small knowledge of the subject, but Picoult’s extensive research brought a character to life who was worth a little schooling at the beginning of the book. So in House Rules, we have a family wrestling with the numerous complications of a child with Asperger’s, a murder mystery, a burgeoning love story and some great character development. I think anyone who has an Aspie child of any age in their family or works with one will appreciate this book best, but I wouldn’t limit the audience to that. It’s an engaging story on its own merit by an author with a good, clean style, a perpetually twisting plot, and an excellent grasp of her characters.

The I picked up Bleachers by John Grisham. I read a number of his legally-oriented novels quite some time ago, but the book by Grisham that really impressed me was A Painted House. It’s a story about a family in the Arkansas Delta who owns a cotton farm and hosts migrant workers in the summer for cotton picking. This particular summer, two dangerous men were among them, and life became deeply complicated for all, especially Luke, the seven year old farrner’s son. I found A Painted House to be a very powerful book that was exceptionally written and also refreshingly outside the legal genre in which Grisham usually writes. I wish I could say I was as excited about Bleachers. It was a fast read and centered around football players returning to the town of Messina because their coach was dying. The man’s brutality was experienced by the players in every year ‘s teams but because football was the life blood of the town, it was often overlooked or justified. Coach Rake was a hero to many, as were the high school Spartans, but his methods affected those around him in many ways. The premise of Bleachers is good. Maybe if I loved football, I would have liked it more, but I don’t think so. It just lacked something that A Painted House really had – a depth, conflict, that real make-you-want-to-see- what-happens-next quality. Not there for me in this book.

So I’ve picked up The Smoke Jumper by Nicholas Evans. He is the author of two books that I recommend highly, the acclaimed The Horse Whisperer and The Loop. about the return of a pack of wolves to a ranching community in Montana and the ensuing conflicts between a biologist who wants to save the nearly extinguished species and the ranchers who hate them. Evans is an outstanding writer, and I think he could write about football and mesmerize me. I don’t know anything about smoke jumping – those who descend into forest fires to put them out – but he already has me sucked in in the first chapter. In Evans’ case, I suspect he could use almost anything as the backdrop and still draw in the reader. I’m ready.