The Hundred Secret Senses

by Amy Tan

Overview

The Hundred Secret Senses is an exultant novel about China and America, love and loyalty, the identities we invent and the true selves we discover along the way. Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese, but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes."

Even as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendor, squalor, and violence of Manchu China. And out of the friction between her narrators, Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly, sadly, hilariously, with searing and vivid prose.

"Truly magical...unforgettable...this novel...shimmer[s] with meaning."--San Diego Tribune

"The Hundred Secret Senses doesn't simply return to a world but burrows more deeply into it, following new trails to fresh revelations."--Newsweek

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101202944
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/17/1995
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	1,056
File size:	929 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen Goda (TM)s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesettera (TM)s Daughter, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, and two childrena (TM)s books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which has now been adapted as a PBS production. Tan was also a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club, and her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.

Hometown:

San Francisco, California and New York, New York

Date of Birth:

February 19, 1952

Place of Birth:

Oakland, California

Education:

B.A., San Jose State University, 1973; M.A., 1974

What People are Saying About This

Michiko Katukani

Ms. Tan has . . . injected a large dose of supernatural whimsy into her story in an effort to explore the connections between the generations. The results are decidedly mixed: a contemporary tale of familial love and resentment, nimbly evoked in Ms. Tan's guileless prose, and unfortunately overlaid by another, more sensational tale of reincarnation that undermines the reader's trust. . . -- The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

Tan has once more produced a novel somewhat 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

Tan's novel of the conflicts between two very different Chinese American sisters spent 12 weeks on PW's bestseller list. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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

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

The wisest and most captivating novel Tan has written.

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.

San Diego Tribune