The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan - Book Report/Review Example

The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan Amy Tan was born on February 19, 1952 in Oakland, California of immigrant parents. Spending her early childhood in San Francisco Bay Area, Tan studied in Montreux, Switzerland and studied for her Masters Degree in Linguistics in San Jose University (luminarium.org). Hence, Tan has had a perfectly western upbringing and education yet she has not been able to shrug off her Chinese identity. Despite having written in all the leading American literary magazines, like The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar and National Geographic and her novels been best-sellers and recipient of a number of awards including The National Book Award and the L.A. Times Book Award for her first book, The Joy Luck Club, Tan has not been considered as a mainstream American writer (luminarium, barclayagency.com). Instead, she has been acclaimed as the Asian American role model by community organizations despite her claim that her creations are not social statements but simply literature that talks about human connectedness (Salon, 1995). Perhaps in her sub-consciousness, Tan finds her Chinese identity too powerful to be discarded even if she tries to. Instead, she weaves the Oriental spiritual ideas as well as the symbols and character traits from China in her books that are mainly set in America. Olivia, the protagonist of her novel, The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), is Tan’s alter ego, trying to discard her Chinese identity and assimilate with the mainstream American culture but finally reconciling to her social identity that hinges on finding her life’s meaning through spirituality. Like Olivia, Tan is a Chinese-American and suffers from the conflict of this dual identity. Yet, she knows that neither she nor Olivia can never discard their Chinese identity completely. To make Olivia recognize this, Tan uses Chinese symbols and ideas that draw Olivia towards China. She harps on animal instincts and symbols from Chinese lives, tempered with a western view of these, that Olivia finds interesting. In the novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, Olivia is born of an American mother and Chinese father. At the age of six, she comes to know of her so-long undisclosed Chinese sister. To add to her woes, her father’s death-bed wish is to get his elder daughter, Kwan, over to America. After the father’s death, the 18-year old Kwan joins the reluctant American step-family and begins on an intense relationship with them, particularly with the much-younger Olivia, whom she calls “Libby-ah”, almost like the nation of “Muammar Qaddafi”. Kwan does all to please her baby sister, Olivia, who has little to reciprocate. On the other hand, Olivia is embarrassed over her half-sister’s mis-pronunciations, superstitions, endless queries, immense optimism in life and claim to possess “yin” eyes, with which she can see the ghosts. The two half-sisters grow up with the tension between them unresolved. The novel, written in first person through the voice of the 30-year old photographer, Olivia, who is still searching for a meaningful life, begins with these lines, "My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco. 'Libby-ah,' she'll say to me. 'Guess who I see yesterday, you guess.' And I don't have to guess that she's talking about someone dead." (Tan, 1995, p3) The relationship between the half-sisters grows increasingly complex, with Olivia suffering from guilt for treating Kwan badly yet not hesitating to be sarcastic over her ghost stories or to send her to an asylum. The novel is a reflection not only of human bonding and relationships but also a tussle between cultures and the conflict between Orientalism and Occidentalism, between optimism and skepticism (Tan, Amy, The Hundred Secret Senses, Putnam, 1995). Kwan, on the other hand, is always loyal to Olivia and keeps talking of characters from her previous life –warlords, unhappy lovers, Miss Nelly Banner (who Kwan thinks Olivia is a reincarnation of) and the half-breed, Johnson (who, according to Kwan, is reincarnated to Simon, Olivia’s husband with whom she is having some difficult times) and Miss Moo (Miss Banner’s loyal maid who Kwan thinks she is). Kwan’s stories of her previous life are set in the 1860s during the Taiping Revolution, the upheavals ending the relationship between Miss Banner and Johnson. Kwan’s “secret senses” – “Memory, seeing, hearing, feeling, all come together, then you know something true in your heart"(Tan, p102) - allows her to see the people that she loved even though they are no longer alive. In her previous life, Kwan claims she lived with Miss Banner, part of a team of American missionaries who had come to China to join the Taiping Rebellion, led by Hong Xiuquan in 1851, that aimed to establish the Christian Heavenly Kingdom, taiping tianguo. Kwan continuously provides Olivia with marital advice since she is sanguine that the love between Miss Banner and Johnson, which remained unfulfilled as they had to disperse and flee from Changmian when the Manchu armies came to prosecute the Christians in 1864, has been reborn in the relationship between Olivia and Simon and hence their marriage cannot be dissolved under any circumstances (Lee, Ken-fang, Cultural translation and the exorcist: a reading of Kingston's and Tan's ghost stories, Melius, Summer 2004). Over the years, though, Olivia grows increasingly dependent on Kwan despite her disbelief of all of Kwan’s stories. By the end of the novel, however, Olivia reconciles with Kwan’s stories, as she and Kwan accompanies Simon to China on a business trip and the three of them visit the village of Kwan’s childhood. Olivia gains spiritual redemption and realizes that "the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true." Thus, Olivia accepts the essence of Chinese spirituality and even the “secret senses” that allows for limitless time that Kwan had been talking about all this while. Olivia finds peace from her disturbances and recognizes that an individual’s life is nothing but a mere branch of a giant tree that is spiritual life. The idyllic quietness and distance from the consumerist rat race of San Francisco makes her to realize the endlessness of spiritual life (Tan, Amy, The Hundred Secret Senses, Putnam, 1995). Since ages, westerners have looked eastward to find spirituality. Even in the modern times, the western mind, imbued in practicality, has had a love-hate relationship with the haziness of eastern spirituality. Particularly in the postmodern times, when consumerism has homogenized urban cultures and assimilation of modern and traditional cultures has resulted in a unique polyglot approach to life, the urban intellect often harks back the savage traditions of indigenous cultures in order to add the metaphysical to the physical aspects of life (Torgovnick, 1990). Amy Tan, in The Hundred Secret Senses, has done the same. The disturbed, undecided human mind finds release from the chaos of modern life through animal senses and instincts, invoked though the extra-sensory, essentialist soul. Tan uses her ethnicity to bring peace in the disturbed multicultural lives of modern America, when race is no longer a primary concern (Ma, Sheng-mei, "Chinese and Dogs" in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive a la New Age, Melius, Spring 2001, p1). Ma (2001) finds Tan’s attempt at exorcising her ethnicity targeted not at the Chinese community but the New Age white readers, who have an immense capacity to commodify ethnicity. In Tan’s novel, Olivia and Simon Bishop are the quintessential San Francisco urban young folks, who are steeped in consumerism yet searching for a meaning in their lives. Olivia even deciphers the cultures of the successive generations from the colors of paint on the house that they buy: "a yuppie skin of Chardonnay-colored latex ... followed by flaky crusts of the preceding decades--eighties money green, seventies psychedelic orange, sixties hippie black, fifties baby pastels" (119). Here, the house-hunting spree that Olivia and Simon have to engage in symbolizes the consumerist culture of America. Olivia yearns to be all-American, as is evident from her indecision over the possible surname that she could use after her divorce. Both “Laguni”, that of her step-father’s, and “Yee”, that of her father’s have a touch of ethnicity – one Italilan name for orphans and the other Chinese. She would have preferred to discard the name of Bishop, that of her husband’s, but decides to keep it for the Caucasian sound. Yet, she decides to name her new-born daughter, “Li” after Kwan, symbolising her acceptance of her Chinese identity (Ma, Sheng-mei, "Chinese and Dogs" in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive a la New Age, Melius, Spring 2001, p7). In the novel, there are vivid descriptions of the lives of modern Americans, including their house-hunting sprees and avalanches that threaten their lives. This 20th century American life is quite distinct from the 19th century Chinese life. Yet, Tan weaves the two together in order to integrate oriental ideas and concepts within the western framework, as Hanegraaff (1996) found the typical New Age western mind doing. The idyllic picture postcard-like setting of Kwan’s dreamland is used to contrast the chaotic San Francisco life. The Bishop’s “previous life” is also replete with all the western notions of Orientalism – American missionaries, Chinese bandits, Hakkas of the Taiping Rebellion by the Christian convert, Hong Xiuan. The Christian missionary zeal is contrasted effectively with the Buddhist reincarnation theory (Ma, Sheng-mei, "Chinese and Dogs" in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive a la New Age, Melius, Spring 2001). Amy Tan, however, is less enthused by the missionary element of the Taiping Rebellion than by the decisive break that it brought in China by ending many of the traditional elements of the culture. Although Olivia ultimately prefers to accept her Chinese identity, she does so with some moderation by accepting the post-Taiping Rebellion of the period. As Wagner (1982) notes, the Taiping Rebellion was "the most important rebellion of the nineteenth century ... with its decisive break with many traditional ideas such as footbinding, Confucianism, and its idea of selective adoption of Western technology and institutions" (Wagner, 1982, p1-2). Hong Xiuquan was influenced by revivalism in "England and Scotland, the United States, Germany, and Sweden in the first decades of the last century" (Wagner, 1982, p 11). The conflict between the Hakka ("guest people"), most of Hong’s followers being Hakkanese and Punti ("local Cantonese") leads to the Taiping Rebellion, eventually resulting in the "Hakka identity through history" (Wagner, Rudolf G. Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion. (China Research Monograph 25.) Berkeley: U of California P, 1982, p29). Essentially, Christian theology is incompatible with Buddhist reincarnation theory. But New Age thought typically stems from an attempt to mix the two. The New Age, which grew in the soul-searching 1960s, developed into the turbulent 1970s and finally to the self-oriented professionals of the 1980s and 1990s. Tan attempts to break the barriers of generations through Olivia, a 1980s professional, finding meaning to her life through the 1960s New Age mantra of soul-search (Ma, Sheng-mei, "Chinese and Dogs" in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive a la New Age, Melius, Spring 2001, p12). In the final analysis, the use of Chinese symbols and ideas in The Hundred Secret Senses must be understood in the context of the American-ness of the author and the readers. The protagonist eventually rediscovers her ethnicity that had been lying hidden under her western self. In China, Olivia "feel[s] as if the membrane separating the two halves of my life has finally been shed" (Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses, Putnam, 1995, p205). Kwan is the epitome of the oriental with mystical power. But, instead of using indigenous animals and figures as symbols, Tan uses modern scientific elements: ghosts generate “sparks”, becoming "a cyclone of static, dancing around the room." Kwan is the loyal Chinese who struggled to please the western mind, despite the lack of linguistic or scientific ability. Similarly, Miss Moo, "felt a twist in my stomach, a burning in my chest, an ache in my bones" (p 174), when Miss Banner eloped with General Cape, abandoning Johnson, the awkward language that is quite like Kwan’s, the reincarnate, is a semblance of the western stereotype of the orientals. Thus, Tan’s use of Chinese symbols in the novel breaks the barrier between the west and the east, by which both Olivia and the readers can relate to the Oriental culture more effectively (Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses, Putnam, 1995). Works Cited http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/amytan/ Salon, The Spirit Within: Interview with Amy Tan, 12 November, 1995, http://www.salon.com/12nov1995/feature/tan.html http://www.barclayagency.com/tan.html Tan, Amy, The Hundred Secret Senses, Putnam, 1995 Lee, Ken-fang, Cultural translation and the exorcist: a reading of Kingston's and Tan's ghost stories, Melius, Summer 2004 Hanegraaff, Wouter J. New Age Religion and Western Culture.' Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. New York: E. J. Brill, 1996. Wagner, Rudolf G. Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion. (China Research Monograph 25.) Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Ma, Sheng-mei, "Chinese and Dogs" in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive a la New Age, Melius, Spring 2001 Read More