The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan (review)

170 Western American Literature intertwines reminders of recent U. S. support for “death squad democracy” with a narrative journey toward self-understanding. Self-defined as apolitical but hoping to be “rescued from my ordinary life,” Mary agrees to shelter José Luis, w hile he view s her as an escape from the guilt and ambivalence that shad­ ow him for leaving his country. Their subsequent love affair, his abrupt return to El Salvador, and his twenty-year “disappearance” from her life reveal both the tenuous creation of “bridges by which we transcended borders of culture, language, and history,” and their collapse amid the indelible imprints of differ­ ent national experiences. By showing us how storytelling can freely cross borders “without pass­ ports or permits,” Martinez leads us to the larger scope of her novel, suggested by its dedication “to the memory of the disappeared.” Echoing much contem ­ porary ethnic American fiction, M otherTongue meditates on the collective process of piecing together a story, whether personal or national, that is threat­ ened by erasure. As the central narrative voice, joined at times by José Luis and later by their son, Mary self-consciously re-members her story by gathering newspaper clippings, love letters, and journal entries. Interweaving past and present narration, the novel displays the wounding as w ell as healing proper­ ties of a story that ultimately must include “unspeakable” revelations about Mary’s childhood as w ell as José Luis’s experiences in El Salvador. Reminded that the “worst thing is not remembering,” Mary in turn reminds us that lan­ guage serves as a powerful weapon against those “loving power . . . more than life.” SU SAN BERNARDIN U niversity o f California, Santa Barbara The Hundred Secret Senses. By Amy Tan. (New York: Putnam’s, 1995. 358 pages, $24.95.) In her first two novels, The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen G od’ s Wife, Tan explored cross-cultural mother-daughter relationships in Chinese immigrant fam ilies. In this third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, Tan brings together two half-sisters, one Chinese and the other American, whose contrasting philosophies of life provide a microcosm ic tale of “East meets W est.” O livia and her ugly, older half-sister from her father’s previous marriage in China, Kwan, take turns to narrate the tale that begins with the arrival of Kwan in San Francisco in 1962, when Olivia was six. In their shared bedroom, Kwan reveals her secrets to Olivia, of being able to interact with ghosts, and of having lived in her previous life with Christian m issionaries in a small Chinese village. Olivia, now a thirty-eight-year-old commercial photographer, and her husband are breaking up; but fate and Kwan work together to take all three to China, where O livia realizes the validity of her sister’s fantastic stories and Reviews 171 learns the long-forgotten “vocabulary of the secret senses.” The Hundred Secret Senses can provide a field day for scholars of vari­ ous interests. The issues of cultural hybridity, displacement, binarism, and rep­ resentation would be interesting to post-colonial studies. As usual, Tan offers a challenge to humor studies in that the humor comes from cultural, linguistic clashes. The magic realism and the binary opposition between Olivia and Kwan, between Western pragmatism and Eastern mystic wisdom , should be on the menu for post-modern cultural studies. Some critics have criticized Tan for subscribing to the Western imperial perception of Asia, and this novel certain­ ly proves they are right. N onetheless, Tan deserves credit for writing readable and entertaining fiction about our biological language, a language we ignore in favor of logic. SEIWOONG OH R ider U niversity Yellow Woman and a Beauty o f the Spirit: Essays on N ative American Life Today. By L eslie Marmon Silko. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 205 pages, $23.00.) In this som etim es rambling, occasionally brilliant collection o f essays, Silko ranges from musings on the sensual power of Yellow Woman to a seem ­ ingly pointless reprinting of a letter she once mailed to a reader who wrote to notify her of several typos in the first edition of Sacred Water...