ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601120091
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY MARIAN COURTNEY
THE HUNDRED SECRET SENSES. By Amy Tan. Putnam. $24.95.
In her latest novel Amy Tan tackles reincarnation, family devotion and the merging of heterogeneous cultures. "The Hundred Secret Senses" raises the possibility that the past, present and future are intertwinedQpresent circumstances are influenced by how you lived a former life, and your next life will be affected by what you do today. Since your family is connected to you through the past, familial love transcends time and space.
Tan's book centers around a pair of sisters with the same Chinese father. The oldest grows up with her Chinese mother; the younger has an American mother. Olivia is not quite 6 years old when she discovers that she has an 18-year-old half sister, Kwan, living in China, who then comes to America to live with Olivia and her family. Having drawn a picture in her mind of a regal, elegant Chinese woman, Olivia is shocked when meeting the squat, boisterous Kwan, who turns out to be more an embarrassment and nuisance to her little sister than an asset. The perennially enthusiastic Kwan loves her "new" sister, but her feelings are not shared by Olivia. Not only is her older sister not what she expects, but her arrival gives Olivia's mother the opportunity to foist her upbringing on Kwan, enabling her surviving parent to step out of Olivia's life except as a shadowy stranger, and Olivia resents Kwan for the displacement.
When Kwan tells Olivia in confidence that she has "yin eyes" and can see and speak with the dead, Olivia uses that secret to extract revenge on Kwan for taking her mother's place. She breaks her promise of silence and tells her mother. The consequences of this disclosure might well have crushed most people, but not the irrepressible Kwan. She harbors no ill feelings towards Olivia for her betrayal, which further fuels Olivia's guilt. She becomes even more irritated with the older sister whose unconditional devotion continues into adulthood, even though she never does anything to deserve it.
When Olivia's 17-year marriage crumbles, an ironic twist of fate results in her and her estranged husband making a trip with Kwan to her remote home village in Southern China, Changmian. There Kwan reunites with her old friends and family, some of whom are now yin people.
Parallel to this story unfolds another of Kwan's past life as a one-eyed servant who worked for Western missionaries in Changmian in the 1860s. In this life she was friends with an American woman, and the tie between them is echoed in the present through the two sisters.
Over the years, Olivia half-heartedly tolerates Kwan's ramblings about reincarnation and conversing with spirits, without ever believing it. But as events in China unfold, her older sister's stories start to take on a modicum of validity. After unexpected tragedy strikes during the Changmian trip, Olivia finds irrefutable evidence that Kwan was right all along.
Tan describes Changmian as a place of such remote and ethereal beauty that if the surreal exists, it surely would here. Her use of dialog vividly portrays Kwan, allowing readers to both get to know and empathize with her. That Kwan does not come across as sappy is testament to Tan's writing skills. Despite Kwan's giving nature, Tan refrains from making her saintly, which would have given the book a maudlin tone.
Whether your beliefs mirror those put forth in "The Hundred Secret Senses" or not, Tan's cleverly crafted and provocative novel will surely wrestle with your imagination.
Marian Courney lives in Charlottesville
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: headshot of Amy Tanby CNB