Mothering modes: analyzing mother roles in novels by twentieth-century United States women writers

Chapter 3 
 
Mothering Understood in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife
and Christina García’s Dreaming in Cuban 
Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife and Christina García’s Dreaming in Cuban 
are texts that seem literally and culturally worlds apart in their subject matter since they 
present portraits of mothers and daughters from Chinese and Cuban heritage cultures, yet 
they speak volumes in their connections since they reveal the experiences of 
“hyphenated” 
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women. These women are considered hyphenated both culturally and 
figuratively: culturally, in that most of them are either Chinese(-)American or
Cuban(-)American women, and figuratively, in that they all struggle with the war of 
living between homelands, fighting to integrate themselves in an emotionally healthy 
way. In these works, the present in the United States is constantly being shaped by the 
old and new worlds of their cultural homelands (China and Cuba), including the deadly 
and disheartening aspects of war itself.
In this chapter, illness and death are catalysts that lead to confrontations between 
mothers and daughters and then to some understanding of the mother’s struggle in rearing 
her children. In The Kitchen God’s Wife, Winnie Louie and Pearl Brandt are forced into 
sharing their secrets and emotions due to the threats of Helen Kwong and her daughter 
Mary, who are friends of the Louie family. Helen threatens to reveal that Pearl has 
multiple sclerosis and the truth about Pearl’s paternity. In Dreaming in Cuban, her sister 
Felicia’s untimely death motivates Lourdes del Pino to pack up her daughter Pilar, return 
to her native Cuba, and come face-to-face with her estranged mother Celia after so many 
years. The mother-daughter relationships discussed in this chapter reach a greater level 

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of success than those examined in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, “Mothering Understood in 
Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife and Christina García’s Dreaming in Cuban,” I argue 
that these novels show how oppressive circumstances, such as the mothers’ childhoods, 
abusive behavior, father-daughter bonds, and cultural barriers, can create the need for 
inner strength, secret sharing, therapeutic story-telling, and support networks as coping 
strategies for the mother characters. Although the mother characters in this chapter 
mother under some of the same oppressive circumstances as those in Chapters 1 and 2, 
the outcomes are more positive, but certainly not completely successful. For instance, the 
circumstances of abusive behavior in Chapter 1 and the mother’s negative childhood 
experience in Chapters 1 and 2 are also examined in Chapter 3.
However, almost all of the daughters are able to find a certain understanding of 
their mother’s rearing of her children. In Dreaming in Cuban, even when the daughter is 
not able to totally forgive her mother for her mothering mistakes, she is still left with a 
way to understand the circumstances under which the mothering takes place by 
evaluating her mother’s past. In The Kitchen God’s Wife, mother and daughter actually 
find common ground after they break down barriers and the mother tells her own story. 
Possible reasons for these more successful relationships may be the more intense 
connections between granddaughters and the grandmothers (even though the 
grandmother has serious problems in the relationship with her own daughter), a more 
genuine interest in mothers and daughters communicating some understanding of the 
past; and a real effort to explain the mother’s motives and actions through secret sharing 
and storytelling. 

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The oppressive circumstances under which these mother characters rear their 
children include the mother’s negative childhood experience, which is significantly 
marked by her being abandoned by her own mother and the repercussions that this has on 
her emotional state throughout her life. The act of abandonment is even carried over to 
the next generations in Dreaming in Cuban due to the mental illness that is caused by the 
act itself. Some circumstances involve other forms of emotional, sexual, and physical 
abuse that the mother experiences primarily due to her husband and/or his family. Other 
oppressive circumstances involve the father-daughter bond and communication barriers. 
The father-daughter bond becomes can oppressive circumstance in instances where the 
daughter prefers the father to the mother because tensions exist in the mother-daughter 
relationship. Communication barriers may include language, cultural, sociopolitical, 
and/or assimilative differences. 
The issue of communication barriers in parent-child relationships is probably not 
rare in any society. However, it has a higher level of importance when discussed in 
connection with immigrant mothers and their American (U.S.) daughters. The question of 
hyphenation does, consequently, remain very intricately connected to the issue of 
assimilation, a highly debated topic in most ethnic immigrant communities in the United 
States, especially for those whose native language is other than English. Conservative 
Hispanic (her chosen term) leader Linda Chavez
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dispels the “dirty word” status of 
assimilation in Out of the Barrio by describing assimilation as having been “far more 
gentle a process, by which people from outside the community gradually became part of 
the community itself. Some groups were accepted more reluctantly than others” (161).
Chavez also admits that loss is a part of the process however, but considers the benefits 

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worth the losses. For Tan’s and García’s characters, this issue is much more complicated 
than Chavez suggests, especially for its women and within their relationships as mothers 
and daughters. Of course mother-daughter relationships, by nature and circumstances, 
are usually the subject of emotional spirals with high and low points. Adrienne Rich 
writes: “Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the 
flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one which has lain in amniotic 
bliss inside the other, one which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are 
there for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement” (226). Rich’s 
scenario is nowhere more evident than in these texts by Tan and García. In fact, the 
issues of ethnicity and assimilation make for further complication of the relationships 
themselves. It is crucially important to understand mothering as a complex job on which 
certain circumstances may have detrimental effects. Tan’s and García’s mothers deal with 
prevailing circumstances which may cause either permanent or long-lasting breakdowns 
in communication efforts between mothers and daughters, without effective coping 
strategies to balance the burden of rearing their daughters. 
The mothers, at some points in the works, acknowledge that the deficiency in 
communication which they experience with their daughters does not only hinge upon 
their daughters’ inabilities to understand them, or unwillingness to listen to them. Their 
own silences and secrets weigh heavily on these communication gaps. The non-
communication between the mothers and their daughters in The Kitchen God’s Wife and