"Chinese and Dogs" in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive a la New Age.

New Age

Marianna Torgovnick's Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (1990) takes the pulse of the contemporary world in such a way that it sheds light on Amy Tan:

   [A]n essential fact of urban life in the last decades of the twentieth
   century: its polyglot, syncretic nature, its hodgepodge of the indigenous
   and imported, the native and the foreign. In the deflationary era of
   postmodernism, the primitive often frankly loses any particular identity
   and even its sense of being "out there"; it merges into a generalized,
   marketable thing--a grab-bag primitive in which urban and rural, modern and
   traditional Africa and South America and Asia and the Middle East merge
   into a common locale called the third world which exports garments and
   accessories, music, ideologies, and styles for Western, and especially
   urban Western, consumption. (37)

Reified and atomized in economies of advanced technology, the "Western" self feels drained, in need of recharging or healing in a spiritual sense, for which purpose the "primitive" third-world cultures are deployed. Simultaneously marked by its bestial savagery and spiritual transcendence, the primitive other is made to coalesce the physical with the metaphysical. In The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), imbued with such an ethos, the ethnic other's faculties of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, as well as the capacity to feel, are intensified by fusions with animal senses and instincts in order to, paradoxically, invoke the hidden, essentialist, and extra-sensory human soul. Tan's version of primitivism views rationality as an obstacle to the union of the body and the mind. To make sense of the chaotic, damaged modern life, Tan routinely bypasses reason and descends to basic sensations, which, however, never take leave of the realm of nonsense entirely. Into this strange equation, Amy Tan interjects a third variable: ethnicity. Writing in the post-civil rights era, influenced by the multicultural milieu of the United States, Tan realigns the animalistic and the spiritual with the ethnic. The Chinese ancestry of her protagonists in Secret allows them to access the magical realm h la New Age, to be reborn as whole and wholesome human beings.

Tan's ethnicizing of the primitive contributes significantly to her success among white, middle-class, "mainstream" readers living in the climate of the New Age. As Torgovnick remarks in Primitive Passions (1997), "the New Age seems to be everywhere but continues to elude definition" (172). Resembling its hotbed of late capitalism, the New Age remains barely perceptible because of its omnivorous appetite of absorbing and commodifying alien cultural elements. That the New Age escapes precise definition should not, however, discourage us from contextualizing a writer like Amy Tan in the New Age. Indeed, it is only through such a close reading of specific cultural practices that one comes to discern what has alarmingly been naturalized as a mode of life.

In consonance with consumerist social reality, Tan features San Francisco yuppies with New Age preoccupations with the self. Tan's breezy style is at its best as she depicts the protagonists, the Bishops, "busy" with their advertising business. Furthermore, the precise real estate lingoes of the Bishops during house-hunting make possible the reader's identification with the protagonists through the shared frustrations of an urban lifestyle. Interior decoration proves to be Olivia Bishop's forte as well. She expertly deciphers the layers of paint she removes from the wall of her newly-purchased co-op: "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). Olivia is the homeowner of, so to speak, the social history of the United States, a history which constructs the American identity.

With respect to the multicultural nature of this capitalist society, the mixed-blood Bishops embody the cultural hybridization of a minority like Asian Americans. Tan's fascination with interracial characters predates Secret, for instance, Lena St. Clair in The Joy Luck Club (1989), and Jimmy Louie and his granddaughters, Tessa and Cleo, in The Kitchen God's Wife (1991). In Secret, the multiracial lineage crystalizes in Olivia's search for a proper last name in the eve of her divorce. She does not wish to revert back to her stepfather's name of Laguni, a fabricated Italian name for orphans. Nor does she want "Yee," the name and identity Olivia's father usurps in order to come to the U.S. "Bishop" is a name she intends to rid herself of but retains in the end. The ethnic impulse, nevertheless, is preserved as she names her new-born baby "Li" after her late half-sister Kwan. Arguably, one can read in this obsessive whitening of characters throughout Tan's career a reflection of her assimilationism.

The portrayal of the yuppie's here and now entails, strangely, a New Age overreaching into the exotic/ethnic, or the "Chinese and dogs," as if the self would remain unfulfilled unless garbed in primitive attire. It is important to note that the effort is not to efface the self but to embellish it. Wouter J. Hanegraaff has long asserted that the New Age revisionism is a grab-bag where "Oriental ideas and concepts have, almost without exception, been adopted only insofar as they could be assimilated into already-existing western frameworks" (517). Hanegraaff is echoed by Torgovnick, who finds New Agers to invariably put diverse rituals and symbols from other cultures "in the service of a thoroughly modern world view that takes the self as a thing to be owned, cultivated, and coddled--the veritable hub of the universe" (Primitive Passions 176), oblivious to the erasure of self in Buddhism and many other traditions.

Accordingly, Tan integrates 1990s realism with Orientalist discourse. Tan's vivid, richly-textured description of the lifestyle of the professional class, of their house-hunting saga, and even of the avalanche which threatens to demolish their life contrasts sharply with the fuzziness of Changmian, China. The idyllic preindustrial countryside exists for the express purpose of touristic impressions and narcissistic wish-fulfillment. The Bishops' "former life" or previous incarnation at Changmian during the Taiping rebellion is similarly packaged in a set of tropes to ease the Western reader's entry into the Orient. American missionaries, Chinese bandits, and the Hakkas of the Taiping Rebellion led by the Christian convert Hong Xiuquan in the year of "Yi-ba-liu-si" (1864) are arrayed to manage the alienness. And it is here that Tan's kinship with the New Age ethos is blatantly exposed: she kneads together cultural elements as mutually exclusive as Christian linearity and Buddhist cyclic reincarnation, or the 1990s yuppies and the 1860s Hakkas, to advance her plot.

Tan sets part of her story at the time of the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) during the Ching dynasty, a turmoil which exacted 30 million lives and, according to Rudolf G. Wagner, 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" (1-2). Wagner attributes the cause for this "best documented rebellion in Chinese imperial history" to "the friendly contact sought by many missionaries and by the Taipings themselves," resulting in "an usually large, if far from complete, body of original Taiping documents" (2). The Taiping uprising is best documented for Westerners like Amy Tan, whose interest is aroused no less by the missionary mediation.

Moreover, the leader, Hong Xiuquan, was clearly influenced by the revivalist tradition of "England and Scotland, the United States, Germany, and Sweden in the first decades of the last century" (Wagner 11). The Taiping Rebellion was guided by a vision obtained in Hong's illness; in a state of delirious ecstasy, he revealed that he was the younger brother of Jesus, and son of God, mandated to eradicate the devils of Manchus and Confucianism. Much of this history is extracted by Tan, whose tale unfolds in the environs of the Thistle Mountain (Zijing Shan), the Taiping stronghold in Guangxi (41).

In a similar vein, Tan borrows from the historical Hakka and the Buddhist notion of reincarnation. Hong Xiuquan and most of his followers are Hakkanese. The feuding between the Hakka ("guest people") and Punti ("local Cantonese") leads to the eruption of the Taiping Rebellion, which serves to construct "Hakka identity through history" (29). Hakka's Christian belief, however fragmentary in Hong's interpretation, assuredly contradicts the motif of reincarnation in Secret. Progressing on a linear course toward heaven or eternal damnation, Christian theology is incompatible with the cyclic framework of Buddhism.

The heavy psychoanalytic bent of the New Age no doubt encourages Tan to view reincarnation in the Jungian sense as the accumulated result of karma or "psychic heredity." Tan's emplotment of karma at times betrays the casual attitude verging on unwitting mockery that New Agers take toward other traditions. The evil General Cape repays his debt to Miss Banner, Olivia's former self, by becoming Olivia's pet dog, hence neutralizing evil in a pseudo-Buddhist way. On the other hand, karma compels the interracial and cross-cultural Yiban ("Half-man") to be reborn as the mixed-race Simon Bishop. The adopted Elza instinctively reacts to Auschwitz because of her allegedly Polish Jewish ancestry. At the heart of Tan's arrogance in the cosmic reshuffling of history and religion lies her affinity to the New Age movement.

Closely related to the 1960s counterculture, the New Age obsession with the self reflects the disillusionment with the sixties utopian vision, which "turn[ed] into the narcissitic Me Generation of the 1970s and the ambitious, self-involved young professionals of the 1980s ... [Despite the apparent differences, they are children of the sixties in] the search for self-fulfilment in the here and now" (Dickstein 18). The title of Stephen A. Kent's essay crystalizes the evolution nicely: "Slogan Chanters to Mantra Chanters: A Deviance Analysis of Youth Religious Conversion in the Early 1970s." Tan in the 1990s continues the legacy of focusing narrowly on self-realization, even at the expense of coupling Chinese with dogs.

"Chinese and Dogs"

The celebration of Chinese-ness in Tan must be traced back to the American-ness of the author and her readers. The embrace of ethnic origin presupposes a source culture eager to be embraced, or one that is malleable enough for the author's fancy. This supposition leads Tan to conclude all three of her novels on the same note: the rediscovery of Chinese-ness beneath the protagonist's American veneer. Jing-mei June Woo's "Chinese genes" are felt to be activiated once her feet land on Chinese soil at the end of The Joy Luck Club. In The Kitchen God's Wife, Pearl's apprehension that she might be the daughter of the sadistic, demonic Wen Fu is dispelled by her mother who weighs traditional Chinese principles of yin and yang over "genetics, blood type, paternity tests" (511), procedures that mark modern Western science. Secret likewise reveals the mixed-race Olivia coming to terms with her former life as a missionary in China. Beholding the beautiful landscape of Changmian, China, Olivia "feel[s] as if the membrane separating the two halves of my life has finally been shed" (205). For such a fantastic, potentially unflattering formula to strike a chord with "mainstream" American readers and create what Sau-ling Cynthia Wong calls the "Sugar Sisterhood" and the "Amy Tan Phenomenon," one suspects that Tan somehow validates the melting pot, the salad bowl, or a number of ethnocentric theories of American identity. Indeed, Tan's vision of multicultural America comes with trappings of Orientalism, upgraded by New Age chic, presented by hip San Francisco yuppies.

Tan's success hinges on her ability to revive Orientalist tropes as if she rejects them. To illustrate, one turns to the loaded phrase of "Chinese and dogs" in the context of nineteenth-century colonies like Hong Kong and foreign concessions. Imperialist history is enacted in Bruce Lee's The Chinese Connection (1972) when the sign outside a public park in Shanghai bars "Chinese and dogs" from entering. An outraged Lee then leaps into the air and kicks the sign into smithereens. The historical humiliation appears to metamorphose into an ethnic hubris in Tan since, initially at least, only "Chinese and dogs" gain entry into her New Age mystical fallacy. Following the modernist primitivism in the West, Tan celebrates the exotic Chinese other in the image of animals with supernatural instincts. Because the protagonists, Olivia and Simon Bishop, are both Amerasians, Western readers, by a strange but long-established Orientalist logic, could deduce that the noble savage is part of themselves as well. However, by no means is this part considered the core of Western identity. In fact, that tie with primitivism can be shed like a piece of clothing, like the New Age gum Yanni's shifting sets of the Taj Mahal and the Forbidden City in a single telecast performance.

By exploiting the thin line between the incomprehensible and the irrational, between the inspired and the insane, between the profound and the pathetic, between "secret senses" and nonsense, Tan is able to hold in double vision the comic Chinese sidekick Kwan, Olivia's half-sister. At once a seer with "yin eyes" (3) and a specimen of superstitious gibberish, Kwan at one point of the novel attempts to explain "secret senses" to Olivia:

      "Ah! I already tell you so many time! You don't listen? Secret sense not
   really secret. We just call secret because everyone has, only forgotten.
   Same kind of sense like ant feet, elephant trunk, dog nose, cat whisker,
   whale ear, bat wing, clam shell, snake tongue, little hair on flower. Many
   things, but mix up together."

      "You mean instinct."

      "Stink? Maybe sometimes stinky--a"

   "Not stink, instinct. It's a kind of knowledge you're born with. Like ...
   well, like Bubba, the way he digs in the dirt."

      "Yes! Why you let dog do that! This not sense, just nonsense, mess up
   your flower pot!"

      "I was just making a--ah, forget it. What's a secret sense?"

      "How I can say? Memory, seeing, hearing, feeling, all come together,
   then you know something true in your heart." (102)

Although endowed with mystical power, Kwan comes with the age-old baggage of Orientalism, evidenced in her pidgin English and her ludicrous ideas.

Through Kwan, Tan bestows the human body with mysterious power. To draw from the resources available to all, Kwan tells the Secret that is the Body that is the Soul: the inner spirit accessed through human physical sensations equated with the animal's senses. The elaboration of the various animals' keenest sensory organs intends to bring out the magical nature of the secret sense. The choice of animal senses, however, exposes the author's scientific knowledge rather than Kwan's preindustrial training. Whereas "ant feet," "elephant trunk," "dog nose," "cat whisker," "bat wing," and "snake tongue" may be metaphors for mental sharpness in a number of old civilizations, "little hair on flower," "clam shell," and "whale ear," are pieces of information most likely accrued by students of modern science. It is fairly difficult to envision a Kwan sitting through PBS's Nature or Nova to obtain scientific knowledge. At least, the novel does not depict such scenes.

Nevertheless, the refrain of animal senses proceeds in pidgin English, entirely without the proper possessive unit, hence achieving a nonsensical quality to it, one that recalls Charlie Chan's aphorisms. Despite Kwan's seemingly random speech pattern, Tan uses pidgin English with great precision and calculation, illustrated by the word play on "stink" and "instinct" Further borrowing from Orientalist practices emerges in Olivia's frustration with Kwan's explanation of secret senses, a frustration that echoes the reader's inability to understand Kwan. Olivia's "I was just making a--ah, forget it" eerily resembles the concluding line of Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974): "Forget it, Jake! It's Chinatown!". Chinatown comes to exemplify an evil and unjust world, totally beyond human comprehension; the private detective played by Jack Nicholson is therefore urged to forgo the pursuit of criminals amidst or outside Chinatown.

The deliberate pidginization of Kwan's dialogue comes into sharp focus when, half a dozen pages later, Tan has Olivia retell the same animal kinship with secret senses. During Kwan's seance with Simon's late girlfriend, Elza, Olivia believes that she in fact feels Elza's spirit:

      [Elza] wasn't like the ghosts I saw in my childhood. She was a billion
   sparks containing every thought and emotion she'd ever had. She was a
   cyclone of static, dancing around the room, pleading with Simon to hear
   her. I knew all this with my one hundred secret senses. With a snake's
   tongue, I felt the heat of her desire to be seen. With the wing of a bat, I
   knew where she fluttered, hovering near Simon, avoiding me. With my tingly
   skin, I felt every tear she wept as a lightning bolt against my heart. With
   the single hair of a flower, I felt her tremble, as she waited for Simon to
   hear her. Except I was the one who heard her--not with my ears but with the
   tingly spot on top of my brain, where you know something is true but still
   you don't want to believe it. (107)

A strategic retreat from Kwan's exclusively animal imageries, Olivia marshals New Age electromagnetic, biochemical terminologies. The ghost becomes gyrating "sparks," "a cyclone of static, dancing around the room." Olivia's pseudo-scientific language dimishes the distance of the protagonist from the middle-class reader, whom Kwan's jabbering serves only to alienate. Even when the same kind of elemental, primordial references to animal senses are raised, they are accomplished through parallelism and in perfect English, with the proper grammatical structure restored: "a snake's tongue," "the wing of a bat," "my tingly skin," and "the single hair of a flower." Olivia's "translation" of Kwan's remarks is crucial to link the ethnic other with the modern reader. The reinterpretation helps sustain the tension between Oriental stupidity and mystery.

Granted, this shift from pidgin to standard English seems justified by the two speakers' varying proficiencies in the English language. And Tan has indeed matured stylistically in Secret by eschewing the artificial divisions between four pairs of mothers and daughters in Joy and the privileging of the mother's Chinese tales in Kitchen. In her third novel, Tan has learned to do three different voices exceptionally well and, moreover, to interweave them seamlessly: the hip, fluent English of the American-born Bishops; the simple, stilted English taken to be literal translation of Kwan's stories in Chinese; and Kwan's pidgin which mangles English for comical effect. Yet, to attribute Kwan's pidgin to her non-native-speaker status obfuscates the crux of the problem: the novelist's white gaze at Kwan.

Tan inscribes Kwan with a linguistic exoticism that could only stem from an outsider's ears, a fact painfully clear if one compares Kwan's English with Louis Chu's language in Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961). Representing the ghettoized community in post-war Chinatown, Chu develops a vulgar, abusive, and vivid language that befits disgruntled bachelors. The Chinese men endlessly exchange insults, such as "many-mouthed bird, go sell your ass"; "you dead boy"; "shut up your mouth [not simply `shut up']"; "wow your mother"; "where are you going to die?". Marlon K. Hom in his review of the novel commends Chu for translating "the Chinese speech faithfully into lively English" and for "retain[ing] the source language's original figurative and picturesque idiomatic expression." Chu accomplishes this because he takes an insider's position vis-a-vis his characters' dialogues, eschewing "the literal translation of Chinese speech into the servile, stilted English" or a transliteration of "Chinese sounds" followed by "appended English explanations" (98). However, the subtleties of Chu's conversations, for example, "shut up your mouth," would only be captured by a bilingual reader. To an English-speaking reader, Chu's language seems far less inviting than Kwan's fortune cookie "spitch," to borrow from Frank Chin's phrase in The Year of the Dragon.

In addition to meshing together the three Englishes (fluent, stilted, and pidgin), Tan even attends to the possibility of a fourth linguistic scenario: the failure of Olivia's English in China. On the airplane to China, Olivia, paranoic about crashes, does not know how to order, in Chinese, "gin and tonic" to calm her nerves. And Kwan seems to take special delight in Olivia's difficulty. Olivia once again comes up short when she tries to win over a cow herder who, having heard her tense and lengthy explanation, replies "in perfectly enunciated English, ... Assholes" (294). That cow herder turns out to be another Asian American tourist.(1) Tan exhibits with this episode her grasp of the changing demographics of Asian Americans and the forces of globalization. In view of her meticulous depiction of the multiplicity of Asian American subjectivity, it becomes even more disconcerting to see how Tan clings to nineteenth-century stereotypes of the Orient and the Oriental, albeit with a New Age twist.

Put bluntly, Kwan the Chinese "familiar" is a dog, serving doggedly the Chinese-American master, Olivia. Kwan's "doggedness" comes through in the determined pursuit of Olivia through reincarnations, in the loyalty to and solicitations of Olivia, despite utter humiliation, and in the obtuseness one is forced to conclude from her bad English and superstitions. Ever since her debut in the narrative, Kwan is in fact accompanied by animals and insects. Upon her arrival in the United States, Kwan offers Olivia a gift of grasshopper, which sends Olivia bawling in the airport. Tan adopts the microscopic, anatomical description of the cricket to demonstrate the alienation and instinctive rejection Olivia feels toward Kwan, her newly-arrived Chinese past. A common plaything for Chinese children, the grasshopper is defamiliarized as "a six-legged monster, fresh-grass green, with saw-blade jaws, bulging eyes, and whips for eyebrows" (10). Once again, the first thing Kwan undertakes upon return to China is to release a snow owl. The strategy of defamiliarization continues to function in that the owl is originally destined for the Chinese dining table, a barbaric practice to the affluent first world. Not just Kwan but all Chinese are animal-related. Miss Banner, Olivia's previous incarnation, calls her Hakka companion, Kwan's former self, "Miss Moo," after the sound of a cow.

The proximity to animals highlights the keen senses of the Chinese and sinophile characters. Miss Moo "felt a twist in my stomach, a burning in my chest, an ache in my bones" (174), in the wake of Miss Banner's elopement with General Cape and hence abandonment of her friends. The elopement may well be brought about by, Miss Moo regrets, her own praying for Miss Banner's happiness, a terrible irony which "shriveled my [Miss Moo's] scalp" (63). The searing human feelings of these characters are often narrated in awkward English to achieve an Orientalist effect, to defamiliarize universal emotions as exotic, somehow deeper, ones. Describing Miss Banner's misfortune, Miss Moo says that "she grew many kinds of sadness in her heart" (47), an unidiomatic and somewhat poetic expression that suggests at once foreignness and aestheticism. Note that Miss Moo's refrains of the body, be it "stomach," "chest," "bones," "scalp," or "heart," bring forth the physical coordinate in the New Age attempt at spiritual healing. Tan uses these deep pains in sensory terms as springboards for extra-sensory or trans-material leaps across the "karmic circle" (91).

The call of the primordial/spiritual is so strong that even the interracial yuppie Olivia cannot ignore it. In other words, Olivia's body "doggedly" feels the pull of her former life in China, just as her Americanized mind dismisses it. Whenever traumatic events in her life flash through the story, Olivia resorts to pidgin identical to Miss Moo's or Kwan's: the memory of electroshock treatments administered on Kwan "hurt my [Olivia's] teeth" (16). Olivia's dreams based on her violent death at the hands of the Ching dynasty soldiers are saturated with sensory impressions: "I've tasted cold ash falling"; "I've seen a thousand spears flashing like flames"; "I've touched the tiny grains of a stone wall"; "I've smelled my own musky fear"; and so forth. Such impressionistic snippets echo other intense moments in Olivia's life, such as the witnessing of Elza's ghost and the book's finale in the valley of the soul when Olivia smells the "dank, fusty odor ... an olfactory version of deja vu--deja senti ... like the way animals know" (310).

Before the knowing arrives, however, un-knowing, or the unlearning of rationality, has to occur. In exotic China, presumably their place of origin, Olivia and, to a lesser degree, Simon abandon control and become the Chinese other which is, in Tan's logic, the "essence" of the self. The key moment for this identity transformation comes while Olivia photographs the almost ritualistic killing of a chicken for a feast welcoming her and other American guests (264). Olivia acts simultaneously as an ethonographer documenting some primitive initiation rite and as an accomplice "shooting" the chicken whose blood is slowly being drained. Unlike Simon who passes judgment ("That was fucking barbaric. I don't know how you could keep shooting" [264]), Olivia submits herself to China, "where I have no control, where everything is unpredictable, totally insane" (261), leading her "instincts [to] take over" for photography. Tan, however, tries to deflate this sublime instant in the same way that Kwan's prophecy sounds also like idiocy. When Olivia inquires after the procedure of the killing, the old woman responds that she prolongs the chicken's death throes "for your photos" (265).

Subsequently, Olivia and Simon join in the uncivilized and hence the supra-civilized as they follow the lead of Kwan "at a half-crouch" to squat around to partake the chicken dinner (266). With such postures increasingly found only in the third world, they plunge deeper into the land of oblivion by consuming the local brew, "pickle-mouse wine.... Very famous in Guilin."(2) At the bottom of the wine bottle lurks "something gray. With a tail." In response, the Bishops' brains tell them to "retch," but they burst out "laughing" instead (268). Guilin itself does not produce any world-renowned liquor, whereas the province of Guizhou adjacent to Guilin geographically and close in pronunciation boasts of the wine of mao-t'ai. Mao-t'ai, of course, bears no resemblance at all to the sensational "pickle-mouse." It is fairly difficult to conceive of the Chinese, including the Hakkanese who are alleged to inhabit Changmian, naming their wine after the mouse, a pest as much detested in China as it is in the West. Even though the local characters may have concocted the name to poke fun at the Bishops, the ultimate creator of the phrase is Amy Tan. Revealingly, Tan's brand of spirits is christened in accordance with her New Age primitivism. With the function of "brain[s]" or reason suspended, a revolting sight turns into the threshold of an epiphany.

In the same breath as the mis-naming of wine, Tan misinterprets the site of the story as well. The fabricated site of changmian is taken to pun, in mandarin, both "sing silk" and "long sleep." Equally poetic, both translations of the village name accentuate the gist of the novel. The protagonist Olivia's past life and the buried mementoes in Changmian are to be excavated in this present life by means of her secret senses, windows to one's soul. The two halves of the self are separated and linked, metaphorically, by a long hibernation in the image of Hakka's "never-ending" folk songs like silky threads. However, "mian" means "cotton" rather than "silk" (275). It may not simply be Tan's inadequate understanding of the Chinese language which results in this error. Tan is likely to be romanticizing the Orient in the stock images of silk, jade, porcelain, and so forth, whereas cotton readily evokes the American South and slavery, associations entirely inappropriate in the context. Granted that "silky" is more romantic than "cotton-like," granted that "pickle-mouse" is more revolting than the meaningless mao-t'ai, Tan's consistent mis-management of the Chinese language and culture is calculated to bring forth a fictional universe at once aesthetic and abominable, at once uplifting and degrading, in the exact Orientalist formula.

Initiated by ritual killing and sharing, of Bacchus-like intoxication, this dislocation of the Bishops' reasoning faculty is helped along by the renaming of objects and places. Willfully and unabashedly, Tan manipulates the representation of the other for her own ends as in the whole elaborate scheme of the Bishops' home-coming across continents and reincarnations. Put another way, the Bishops' previous lives as unrequited lovers in mid-nineteenth century China serves principally to silhouette their present crisis in marriage and to provide the means for a happy resolution. As such, the ceremony of wine and food concludes on a marriage bed. The inebriated couple makes love on a traditional marriage bed, after months of separation. Tan's New Age appeal lies ultimately in such facile usage of the primitive other. A marital dilemma or identity crisis with which modern readers readily identify is resolved by a revisiting of some magical fountain of youth, which blends animalistic, spiritual, and ethnic components.

The New Age obsession with healing never fails to loom behind the trope of China. Each and every one of Tan's female characters suffers from one illness or another. The Chinese matrons are often so strong-willed and "negative-thinking" (Kitchen 152; as opposed' to the New Age precursor of "Positive Thinking") that they are taken to be mentally unstable, their malaise deriving from excessive repression of the past. The Chinese-American daughters are likewise caught in the emotional quandary of loving and hating their mothers. Tan's women are constantly plagued by the loss of their children, siblings, or parents. Specifically in Kitchen, the protagonist Pearl is afflicted with multiple sclerosis, Aunt Helen with a brain tumor, and Pearl's mother with too much pain and abuse from her first husband.

More appallingly, dog-like Chinese companions often have to be sacrificed in this spiritual convalescence for Chinese Americans. At the end of Secret, Kwan vanishes into Changmian's labyrinth of caves in exchange for, in a manner of speaking, Simon's return. The bittersweet, melodramatic reunion of the Bishops entails Kwan's disappearance. Of course, the melodramatic plot culminates in the birth of the Bishops' Samantha Li, who is given Kwan's last name in part because she is supposed to be Kwan's reincarnation. As James Moy diagnoses, "only through its [Asia's] death, or representational self-effacement, does Asia become real for Western audiences" (356). "Real" in the sense of "functional" or an irreplaceable ingredient in the Orientalist discourse, Kwan is preceded by Giocomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly and, in Tan's Joy, by Suyuan Woo, Jing-mei June Woo's mother, who dies to make possible the emotional return to China of the American-born June. To a lesser extent, Grand Auntie Du in Kitchen dies in the opening chapter to pave the way for the protagonists' disclosures of their secrets. Tan's melodrama of ethnicity hinges on the coexistence of the tragic demise of the Chinese characters and the rebirth of the Chinese-American ones. One cannot help recalling the episode in Tan's Kitchen revolving around the Shanghai prostitute Min. Min performs masochistic illusions of being tortured to death for the entertainment of mostly foreign clientele at Shanghai's Great World in the French concession. While the author purports to criticize foreign encroachment of China via Min's tom limbs, it is ironic that Tan's imagination invariably involves the death of Chinese sidekicks for the recovery or self-discovery of Chinese American protagonists.

In closing, I find it hard to resist a silly word play: "dog" spelled backwards becomes "god."(3) To Amy Tan, "Chinese dogs" and "Chinese gods" are one and the same, dogs deified, gods mongrelized. With both qualities instilled into "Chinese-ness," Tan's true motive is the construction of the American self which engineers and marionettes New Age ethnicity and primitivism. By rendering the Chinese simultaneously animalistic and divine, Tan in effect becomes an invisible creator, whose creatures reenact the Orientalist fantasies of her massive "mainstream" following.(4)

Notes

(1.) Amy Tan feels that what she takes to be the cow herder can be, in San Francisco, "a doctoral student, a university lecturer, a depressed poet-activist" (293), hence highlighting the complexity of the Asian and Asian American differences. What appears to be a native of the rural Changmian in China turns out to be a fellow Asian American.

(2.) The liquor or "local brew" introduced to the Bishops by the two Chinese women reminds one of the witches' brew in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

(3.) Both James Joyce in Finnegans Wake and Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot give variations of this word game.

(4.) This article originally appeared as chapter 6 of Ma's The Deathly Embrace.

Works Cited

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Chu, Louis. Eat a Bowl of Tea. 1961. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990.

Constable, Nicole. Christian Souls and Chinese Spirits: A Hakka Community in Hong Kong. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Dickstein, Morris. "After Utopia: The 1960s Today." Sights on the Sixties. Ed. Barbara L. Tischler. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992. 13-23.

Hanegraaff, Wouter J. New Age Religion and Western Culture.' Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. New York: E. J. Brill, 1996.

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Sheng-mei Ma is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University, specializing in Asian American/Asian Diaspora studies and genocide studies. His Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998) was published by the State University of New York Press. The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) was completed under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for 1997-98. He is currently completing a book manuscript, "yEAST: Cannibalizing Orient in American Culture."