This proposal examines Amy Tan's roman-a-clef novel The Kitchen God's Wife and how it both constructed and deconstructed the genre of Chinese American female roman-a-clefs. The author will analyze how Tan used more realistic fiction about patriarchal oppression and imperial rape to depict her mother's story. While The Kitchen God's Wife and Adeline Yen Mah's Chinese Cinderella were successful in the late 20th century, the genre declined after 2000 and was replaced by nonfiction autobiographies like Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The author will apply historical, biographical, gender, and sociological criticism to Tan's novel, Chua's book, and

1. Kitchen God’s Wife: (De)construction of
the Roman-A-Clef
MRP Proposal, by Airlie Maria Heung
May, 2015
Supervisor: Prof. Gordon Slethaug
Reader: Prof. Veronica Austen
Overview:
“A real picture of any human being is interesting in itself, and it is especially interesting when
we can follow the play of other personalities upon that human being and perhaps get a picture
of a group of people and of the influence on them of the period in which they lived.”
― The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt
As the first lady pointed out, there is an apparent value of biographies and how they
depict the people of their time. This is particularly true for Amy Tan’s work which is often
categorized as a semi-autobiography. As she moves from her debut novel Joy Luck Club in 1989
into her second novel The Kitchen God’s Wife in 1991, Tan reduces her fictitious elements and
brings us a more authentic story that can be argued as a roman-a-clef of Daisy Tan’s story.
However, The Kitchen God’s Wife and the novels that followed were not as well received as Joy
Luck Club, and though similar works of the roman-clef genre like Adeline Yen Mah’s Chinese
Cinderella did surface around 1999, the genre has not been well sustained into the twenty-first
century.
Hence, my working thesis is that, despite the success of Maxime Hong Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior and Amy Tan’s own Joy Luck Club’s patched-up quilt of stories, the roman-a-
clef nature of Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife has both helped to construct and deconstruct
that genre for Chinese American Writers. The Kitchen God’s Wife was one of the pioneers of
Chinese American female writers who wrote roman-a-clefs. Following her footsteps, Adeline
Yen Mah wrote Chinese Cinderella. But after the millennium, no work of equal representation
of the Chinese American females has been written as a roman-a-clef. The closet authentic
representation of the Chinese American sisterhood, the real wounds and scars as well as
triumph at the end has slowly disappeared. What has emerged has been a new genre of
nonfiction autobiographies such as Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that proudly
starts with their parents having lived the American dream, and how they parented their
children too strictly, and chronicle their success in the end.

2. Method:
I will be applying a combination of historical, biographical, gender and sociological
criticism, looking for an explanation for the decline of Chinese American female roman-a-clefs
preceding the millennium. This project will focus on Tan’s Kitchen God’s Wife, examining her
more realistic fiction on the patriarchal and imperial rape and investigating how society as a
whole, readers and writers received it. I will be referencing critics on Amy Tan including Bella
Adams and and King-kok Cheung for her analysis of Maxime Hong Kingston.
I will also look at Chua’s autobiography Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and how she
controversially chronicles her own strict upbringing that shaped her parenting style, her co-
parenting with her Jewish husband as well as her relationship with her mother-in-law. I will
focus on how her work was received by fellow women readers. I will be referencing critics of
the autobiographical genres including Sidonie Smith.
I will be applying M.M. Bakhtin’s dialogismwithin the three fore-mentioned writers and how
their works create a compelling and relevant dialogue for contemporary Chinese readers and
writers.
Timeline:
Aug 21st:
Detailed outline of MRP and extended annotated bibliography
Sept 21st:
Summary of the rough draft of the paper with suggestions for revision and further research
Nov 26st: s
Final Paper submission
Bibliography:
Adams, Bella. Contemporary World Writers: Amy Tan. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Print.
Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic of Imagination. Trans. Emerson, Caryl. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981. Print.
Cheung, King-kok. “Provocative Silence: The Woman Warrior and China Men”. Articulate
Silences. New York: Cornell UP, 1993. Print.
Cheung, King-kok. Reflections of Teaching Literature by Women of Color. Pennsylvania: Pacific
Ancient and Modern Association, 1990. 19-23. Print.

3. Choy, Wayson. The Jade Peony. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., 1995. Print.
Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: Penguin Group, 2011. Print.
Fludernik, Monika. “Imagined Communities as Imaginary Homelands: The South Asian Diaspora
in Fiction” Diaspora and Multiculturalism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Print.
Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography. USA: The Association of American
University Presses, 1987. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Print
Tan, Amy. The Kitchen God’s Wife. New York: G.P. Putman’s Sons, 1991. Print.