SOMETIMES charm alone and an even semi likable narrator can steer a weak, undemanding narrative safely through a credibility gap. Chinese American writer Amy Tan's third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses (Flamingo £15.99 in UK), is certainly her least convincing book to date and frequently comes close to falling into the "feel good" category.
Whereas her previous best selling, slightly "cutesy" books, The Joy Luck Club (1989) and The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), drew, strongly on the theme of mothers and daughters, particularly the cross cultural tensions between Chinese immigrant mothers and, their American daughters, this time China seems at a great distance. Tan has already explored; the difficulties of sustaining one's native culture while trying to assimilate oneself into a new society. Many of her characters are caught between two cultures; the Chinese want to be American, while the Americans are worried that they are not American enough because of the pull of a country they have never visited.
While Tan's previous, more coherent stories are lively and colourful, they never quite achieve the sharp comedy of the more obviously American toned The Hundred Secret Senses. It is an opportunistic comedy, with easy gags based on baffled reactions to a foreign culture, as when a Chinese character asks: "Who this Popeye Sailor Man? Why one eye gone? He bandit?"
Olivia Yee, the snappy, smart talking narrator, is the daughter of a Chinese father and an Idaho mother, and is content to describe herself as "American mixed grill a bit of everything, white, fatty and fried". For much of her life Olivia's main problem has been her half sister Kwan whose existence was a complete secret until shortly before the death of Olivia's, father. Soon after being told "Daddy's left us", the little girl is, informed by her well intentioned chaotic and unreliable mother that "she was going to bring Daddy's other little girl from China to live in our house". From the outset it is apparent that Olivia's preoccupations are more territorial than cultural.
When the other "little" girl finally arrives almost two years later, the newcomer is 18 and "short and chubby, not exactly the starving waif Mom had pictured or the glamorous teenage sister I had in mind. She was dressed in drab grey pyjamas, and her broad brown, face was flanked by two thick braids". While Kwan is immediately recognised by Olivia's mother as "a handy baby sister, willing, able, and free", to her resentful, younger half sister, Kwan is an embarrassment, with her naive questions - such as the one quoted above - and is considered so dumb "that all the neighbourhood kids thought she came from Mars". Yet with adult hindsight, Olivia concedes that it is Kwan, the "ghost talker", given to communicating with the dead, who took care of her. "I should have been grateful to Kwan. I could always depend on her. She liked nothing better than to be by my side. But instead, most of the time, I resented her for taking my mother's place."
Most interesting of all for the reader is the fact that it is through Kwan that the obviously all American Olivia begins to feel Chinese, albeit reluctantly: "She pushed her Chinese secrets into my brain and changed how I thought about the world. Soon I was even having nightmares in Chinese."
This is the kind of narrative that requires a conversational ease of tone that Tan, an entertaining if, stylistically limited writer, simply fails to achieve. Throughout the novel the reader is aware of a weak story, and the serious lack of an editor's attention. Very quickly, too quickly, the story moves from Olivia's childhood memories to some thirty years later when Olivia is more preoccupied by her failing, childless marriage than by the also married Kwan's small irritations.
"My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes", Olivia announces in the opening sentence, and continues: "She sees those who have died, and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco." The narrative is spilt between Olivia coming to terms with her own life and Kwan's excursions into the past, during which she assumes some of her previous identities. The theme of the dead pursuing the living cleverly crosses cultures when the dead lover of Olivia's husband Simon enters the narrative. Meanwhile good old Kwan attempts to save Olivia's doomed marriage by bringing the couple off to China. The highlight of the trip is when the trio witness a bus crash in which the person Kwan is planning to visit is killed.
As the narrative begins to fall apart, weakened by the improbable excursions into the past, the quality of Tan's prose improves in the vividly described scenes of village life, the best sequences in a weak book. While one never loses sympathy for the lovable, good hearted Kwan, she is not enough to salvage a limping narrative. By the end of this bulky but slight novel, we are left neither laughing nor crying, merely yawning with indifference.
