Piercing the heart: A journey into Amy Tan’s books

This Week’s Winner:

Dashell C. Yancha currently works as a foreign affairs researcher in one of the leading research institutes in the country. She is also part of the editorial board of the Children’s Rights Monitor, the official publication of the Children’s Legal Rights and Development Center, where she has been a volunteer since 2005.

When it comes to stories that pierce the heart, nobody comes close to Amy Tan. Her stories are woven with both realism and magic, such that reading her becomes a mysteriously haunting journey unto itself. It isn’t reading per se; it is a glorious communication with the soul. The lines are not merely woven words, they are nourishment for an enervated spirit.

Page after page, I was literally transported to the time when the Japanese invaded China or when the Chinese of the Changmian Village fled the invading Manchus. In my sleeping state, I literally dreamt of babies dying during the war and heard the screaming Chinese sirens warning the people of another Japanese bomb strike. I got acquainted with not just five, but seven, emotional senses: joy, anger, fear, love, hate, desire and sorrow. I poignantly felt the sacrifices that a wife has to make for her family and how one can tiptoe and cross the lines that demarcate revenge from vindication and vindication from self-redemption.

The following are my most treasured lines from Amy Tan’s three most-beloved books: The Hundred Secret Senses, The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. I have since buried these lines in my secret heart and have guarded them closely against the rampaging tempests of my life’s quotidian ways.

The Hundred Secret Senses

This book taught me the value of awareness and attentiveness to the seemingly dull details of life. It made me realize that it is by being aware and wakeful to the silent moments of our lives that we are able to tap into our "hundred secret senses." One memorable line in the book is uttered by the character Olivia, who asks her sister Kwan, "What’s a secret sense?" Kwan replies in faltering English: "How can I say? Memory, seeing, hearing, feeling, all come together; then you know something true in your heart." For indeed, only when we consciously experience each moment of our lives – all of its sights, sounds, tastes and smells – can we truly experience what it is to be alive. It is in using and tapping all of our innermost potential can we come to fully understand God’s great plan for us.

There is one other line that has stayed with me. This was stated in Olivia’s soliloquy: "I’ve come to know that the heart has a will of its own, no matter what you wish, no matter how often you pull out the roots of your worst fears… like ivy, they creep back, latching on to the chambers in your heart, leeching out the safety of your soul. Then slithering through your veins and out of your pores." These poetically orchestrated lines did wonders to my aesthetic-hungry soul. After a day’s work, these lines doused my lethargic imagination and made me trust my own heart a little more deeply.

The Joy Luck Club

I silently cried while reading this book. Silently – because the tears never fell. My tears almost always defied gravity and managed to stay locked in my lachrymal glands. Maybe because the pain that I felt also defied physical existence, as it is more of an emotional mourning.

This book wove four heart-tugging stories into one meaningful poetic prose. Amy Tan interlinked the lives of four Chinese women who fled a war-ravaged China to seek greener pastures in blossoming America. Yet, beyond this façade of a plot lies one universal theme: the immortal bond that ties a mother to her daughter. Deeper into this theme is a seemingly feminist-inspired message about a woman’s inner strength and her eternal struggle for recognition. I will never, for the life of me, forget these lines: "I had on a beautiful dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me… I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parent’s wishes, but I would never forget myself." These lines, beautifully written, will forever leave their imprint on my soul. The lines about "never forgetting myself" is one of the most powerful affirmations that I can ever give myself.

It is so amazing that Amy Tan, who comes from such a different cultural background, can write about something that pierces any cultural barrier. This has further reinforced my belief that to end human wars, we should all be reading the same heart-tugging books. Perhaps, only then, can we truly understand one another.

The Kitchen God’s Wife

I think that this book is, by far, Amy Tan’s most endearing work. It has subtly tackled the issue of domestic violence and the travails that a woman faces in a patriarchal society. The following lines from the book reinforce this contention: "And perhaps this was wrong for me, to blame another woman for my own miseries. But that was how I was raised – never to criticize men or the society they ruled… I could blame only other women who were more afraid than I."

The book is about Winnie, who, having experienced the worst of circumstances, discovers an immense well-spring of strength from inside her which she used as a catalyst to impel her to rise above and beyond her circumstances. It is an enduring story of hope and hoping still – even when there no longer remains any reason to. The following lines struck me as introspectively intriguing: " Look at my face now. I was a young woman then. I had no more hope left, no trust, no innocence. There were many, many times when I almost killed myself, when I hated myself so much because finally I could not. So I ask you: What do you see? What is still there? Why did I want to live so much?"

Every day, I try to answer the last line. And every day, I always get a different answer.

The mark of a truly good book is when it ceases to be a book and starts becoming a beacon, guiding one’s view of the world, of others, and of oneself. This book need not even be ostentatiously life-changing or grandiosely affecting. It need not use high-sounding words or involve intricate plots. It only has to communicate the writer’s own hopes and dreams to the reader – in the simplest way possible. I found all these things in Amy Tan’s three novels.

What made Amy Tan’s books especially memorable for me is that they carried lines that communicated with my soul, prose that pierced my heart and poetic soliloquys that enlivened my spirit. After an exacting day in the office and after surviving Manila traffic, it is such a blessing to find myself tucked in bed with a book that miraculously makes me look forward to yet another day.