  Reviews
Audiofile
Amy Tan is as delightful to
listen to as she is to read. She creates magic in this story of two sisters:
Olivia, totally American and pragmatic, and Kwan, Chinese and mystical, who
converses more easily with the dead than with the living. Tan's contrasting
American and Chinese accents bring both personalities vividly to life and
provide enchanting images of alternately conflicting and blending cultures. She
needs no special effects to engage the listener's hundred secret senses. B.L.W.
ŠAudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
, September 15, 1995
Tan, a critical and commercial favorite, returns to
the fiction scene after a four-year absence with a risky, ambitious novel that
tackles themes of loyalty, connectedness, and what it means to be a family. When
Olivia Yee's half-sister, Kwan, arrives from China, Olivia's life is irrevocably
changed. For one thing, Kwan has yin eyes--she can see ghosts. Every night as
they were growing up, Kwan told Olivia bedtime stories about the same group of
yin people: a woman named Banner, a man named Cape, a one-eyed bandit girl, and
a half-and-half man. But, for Olivia, Kwan is also a perpetual source of
embarrassment due to her endless questions, fractured English, and boundless
optimism. When Olivia separates from her husband, Simon, Kwan schemes to get
them back together, and the three take a trip to China to visit the village
where Kwan grew up and to learn the secret of their connection to the yin
people. Tan's fantastical novel is both mesmerizing and awkward. She is
obviously betting that readers will find the ancient and modern worlds she draws
here equally fascinating, but Kwan steals every scene she appears in, and her
magnetic ghost stories completely overpower Olivia's more modern tale of a
broken relationship. It's no contest, for who can resist the lure of a good
old-fashioned ghost story? Joanne Wilkinson
CopyrightŠ 1995,
American Library Association. All rights reserved
Asia Pacific Review Amy Tan weaves a rich tapestry using the threads of two different story lines
-- one set in contemporary San Francisco, the other set in southern China during
the latter years of the Taiping Rebellion -- in The Hundred Secret
Senses. This newest contribution from the author of The Joy Luck Club
and The Kitchen God's Wife is both an affirmation of the power of the
human soul and an invitation to learn, along with the narrator, Olivia, about
one of the most fascinating transitional periods in modern Chinese history and
about Chinese wisdom regarding the spiritual world.
Olivia was six years old when her nearly adult half sister, Kwan, came from
China to join the family in San Francisco. Confiding in Olivia, Kwan tells of
her "yin eyes" that enable her to communicate with the ghosts of the dead. While
Kwan shows nothing but a sometimes pitiful abundance of love and affection for
her younger sibling, Olivia is most often irritated and angered by Kwan's wacky
stunts, ghost talk, mispronunciations of English words (including Olivia's own
name), and invasions of her privacy.
The increasingly complex relationship between the sisters provides much of
the book's critical tension. Olivia's feelings of guilt toward Kwan, a result of
having once tattled on her for her ghost visions -- thus sending Kwan to a
mental institution -- do not prevent Olivia from continuing to treat her poorly.
However irked she is by Kwan, as Olivia grows up, she becomes increasingly
dependent upon Kwan as a guide into a spiritual world far removed from the
experiences of her own American upbringing.
Kwan's "secret senses" allow her to remember a past life in which she was a
young woman of the Hakka minority living in southern China in the 1850s. In that
life, she resided with a group of American missionaries who had arrived to help
establish the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. (This heavenly kingdom, or
taiping tianguo, was founded in 1851 by Hong Xiuquan in an attempt to
overthrow the Qing dynasty with a Christian-based rulership. Hong's movement
became known as the Taiping Rebellion.) The foreign characters are an
entertaining bunch, yet they are not as well-crafted as some of Tan's personas
from this and other novels. Their flight from Changmian when Manchu armies
arrive in persecution of "the God Worshippers" in 1864 is, however, gripping and
compassionate.
The secret senses, those related to our primary instincts, are described by
Kwan as "memory, seeing, hearing, feeling, all come together, then you know
something true in your heart. Like one sense, I don't know how say, maybe sense
of tingle. You know this: Tingly bones mean rain coming, refreshen mind. Tingly
skin on arms, something scaring you, close you up, still pop out lots a goose
bump."
Kwan teaches Olivia how to use her own secret senses in order resolve her
life difficulties-particularly those concerning her relationship with her
soon-to-be-ex-husband, Simon. Kwan leads Olivia and Simon to China as part of
their spiritual redemption. Olivia learns 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." She discovers that the
ability to conjure one's secret senses to communicate with the Yin World allows
one to realize the limitless sense of time. This essential tenet of Chinese
philosophy, in which an individual existence becomes a mere stem on the giant
tree of life, in turn allows Olivia to find inner peace with her activities in
this mortal lifetime.
Detroit News In her third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, Amy Tan deviates from the
mother-daughter relationship so poignantly explored in The Joy Luck Club and The
Kitchen's God Wife to focus on the lives of half-sisters, American-born Olivia
and Chinese-immigrant Kwan.
As in her earlier works, Tan weaves the distinct voices of the two characters
into a tapestry of pathos and humor, exploring their complicated relationship as
well as cultural conflicts against a backdrop of ghosts, reincarnation and Old
World superstitions.
The novel opens with not quite 4-year-old Olivia Yee learning she is not her
daddy's only little girl. To her horror, her father's death-bed request is that
a daughter he left behind in his native China (from an undisclosed first
marriage) be brought to America.
Two years after her father's death, the now 18-year-old Kwan arrives in the
United States and enters the reluctant arms of her American stepfamily. It is
more than age that separates the two sisters. The puckish Kwan embraces her new
family, particularly Olivia.
But the brooding Olivia is mortified by her Chinese half-sister, and baffled
by her unfailing loyalty and devotion: "She's like an orphan cat, kneading on my
heart. She's been this way all my life, peeling my oranges, buying me candy,
admiring my report cards and telling me how smart I was, smarter than she could
ever be. Yet I've done nothing to endear myself to her."
Kwan is one of Tan's most memorable characters, "a tiny dynamo, barely 5 feet
tall, a miniature bull in a china shop." She wears a purple checked jacket over
turquoise pants, decorates her home with garage-sale finds and has a penchant
for buying an array of TV-advertised gadgets from Ginsu knives to slicers and
dicers.
She is a sharp contrast to Olivia, whose name she pronounces Libby-ah, "like
the nation of Muammar Qaddhafi." Olivia is analytical, prone to dark moods and
after 17 years of marriage, still living in the shadow of her husband's dead
fiance.
Kwan's most distinctive characteristic is her yin eyes, which give her the
ability to see the dead. She tells her ghost stories only to Olivia, who
dismisses her as crazed. But it is through Kwan's eyes that we gain insight into
the rich, complex history of the half-sisters' heritage. In what initially seems
like a separate plot running through the novel, Tan takes us into Kwan's other
life as a domestic in the Ghost Merchant House of missionaries in 19th-century
China. Ultimately, the past and present come together when Olivia and her
estranged husband Simon travel to China on a business assignment -- with Kwan in
tow.
In Changmian, Kwan's home village, Olivia finally reconciles her relationship
with Kwan and her past, and learns to believe in ghosts and the hundred secret
senses that keep the past alive. This is storytelling at its most lyrical.
Michele Fecht is a Northville free-lance writer.
Copyright 1995, The Detroit News
USA Today WASHINGTON - After The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife
brought her literary stardom, Amy Tan turned to writing about China's Boxer
Rebellion. Besides being fascinated with the conflict, she wanted to prove "that
I could do something with more of a political theme to it.''
But there's no mention of the turn-of-the-century uprising in her third
novel, The Hundred Secret Senses.
"I realized I can't write themes,'' says Tan, 43, here on a book tour. "I
have to tell a story, and the story has to find me.''
In Senses, about half sisters and the dead spirits one of them sees,
Tan probes personal and family connections, responsibility and loyalty.
As she pondered the circumstances that link people - and when they don't seem
to be mere chance - coincidences made her research fall into place. "If I wanted
something having to do with limestone formations in Guilin (China), that night I
would be seated next to a stranger, and when I asked him what he did, he was a
geologist.''
Tan shelved the project when a close friend became deathly ill. And "the
whole story pulled together. As a result of my going off to take care of my
friend . . . what I found was the heart of my book. Today my friend is fine; she
is the miracle case.''
Coincidences and connections may keep playing a role in her work but perhaps
not as much as they have in her life. "The coincidence of three people in my
family having brain tumors - my father, my brother and my mother (who has a
benign one) - you just say, well, that'd never work in fiction.''
By Tracey Wong Briggs, USA TODAY
Book Description
"THE WISEST AND MOST
CAPTIVATING NOVEL TAN HAS WRITTEN."--The Boston Sunday Globe
"TRULY MAGICAL . . . UNFORGETTABLE . . . The first-person narrator is Olivia
Laguni, and her unrelenting nemesis from childhood on is her half-sister, Kwan
Li. . . . It is Kwan's haunting predictions, her implementation of the secret
senses, and her linking of the present with the past that cause this novel to
shimmer with meaning--and to leave it in the readers mind when the book has long
been finished."--The San Diego Tribune
"HER MOST POLISHED WORK . . . Tan is a wonderful storyteller, and the story's
many strands--Olivia's childhood, her courtship and marriage, Kwan's ghost
stories and village tales--propel the work to its climactic but bittersweet
end." --USA Today
"TAN HAS ONCE MORE PRODUCED A NOVEL WONDERFULLY LIKE A HOLOGRAM: turn it this
way and find Chinese-Americans shopping and arguing in San Francisco; turn it
that way and the Chinese of Changmian village in 1864 are fleeing into the hills
to hide from the rampaging Manchus. . . . THE HUNDRED SECRET SENSES doesn't
simply return to a world but burrows more deeply into it, following new trails
to fresh revelations.
--Newsweek
Synopsis
Chinese-American
Olivia Laguni has a battle of wills with her half-sister and lifelong nemesis,
Kwan Li, whose haunting predictions and implementation of the secret senses link
their family's struggles to the challenges of their ancestors. Reprint.
Synopsis
Amy Tan's latest
effort unfolds a series of family secrets that questions the connection between
fate, beliefs, and hopes, memory and imagination, and the natural gifts of our
hundred secret senses. Years after her Chinese half-sister assails her with
ghost stories set in the mysterious world of Yin, a young woman finds herself in
China, looking for a way to reconcile the ghosts of her past with the dreams of
her future.
From the Publisher
I hadn't read an Amy
Tan book since Kitchen God's Wife and it was refreshing to see that she just
gets better and better with her storytelling! This book was a lot more
authentic. Kwan Li, Olivia's stepsister was such an intriguing character who had
much more depth as you got to know her. In fact, she had so much depth that I
feel like I missed somethings by reading this book only once. Kwan's ability to
link the present with the past in a believable fashion was an example of Amy
Tan's talent.
Buy this book. |
