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The Hundred Secret Senses:
Fiction and Reality
2012
In Amy Tans novel, titled The Hundred Secret Senses, we can read a
fictional story and assume with ease that it is a truth-based one. This is
achieved through the unique style of the author and her ability to join
fiction and reality into a realistic narrative, which will be the central
topic in the following work.
In Tans story, what we could consider incredible, magic, surreal stories
spring up from the characters everyday life. (www.google.com). As a
result, the reader starts wondering what is true and what a product of
the characters imagination. Through the entire story reality and
fantasy, history and fiction change places and the dividing line gets
more and more vague until it eventually disappears. For example, at the
beginning of the work, Olivia, the main character is told ghost stories by
her sister Kwan. At her six years of age, she not only believes Kwans
words, but is also able to see those yin people that her older sister talks
about. So that one day, when playing with a doll, a ghost girl appears to
Olivia, and worried that shed take the Barbie home with her, she said
to the ghost: Thats enough. Give her back.
However, the reader eventually realizes that this magic world is only
available to Olivias child eyes because as soon as she reaches
adolescence she does not allow herself to believe Kwans stories as she
used to anymore, as literal truth. (14). As an example of this, on the
second chapter, Tan narrates Olivias thoughts now as a grown-up: For
most of my childhood, I thought everyone remembered dreams as other
lives. Kwan did. After she came home from the psychiatric ward, she
told me bedtime stories about them, yin people () When I went to
college and could finally escape from Kwans world, it was already too
late. She had planted her imagination into mine. (28) In this passage
we can observe Olivias word choice changing from literal truth to
imagination when referring to her sisters stories.
As the novel evolves, and we find Olivia, Simon (her ex-husband) and
Kwan in Changmian, China, we notice through the narration that Olivia
gradually comes to accept Kwans version of reality. Thus, while at the
beginning of the novel the Chinese magic and the Western realistic
episodes are separated, these end up merging in the last chapters:
I gaze at the mountains and realize why Changmian
seems so familiar. Its the setting for Kwans stories,
the ones that filter into my dreams. There they are: the
archways, the cassia trees, the high walls of the Ghost
Merchants House, the hills leading to Thistle Mountain.
And being here, I feel as if the membrane separating
the two halves of my life has finally been shed. (205)
The turning point where fiction and reality confront and at the same
merge occurs when Olivia begins accepting Kwan's fictional world. Kwan
tells Olivia Du Lilis sad story, about her adopted daughters death and
how her sorrow was so deep that she had to believe she had become
her own daughter in order to cope with the pain caused by her loss. At
this point Olivias confusion reaches its height:
I stare at Kwan. I stare at Big Ma. I think about what Du
Lili has said. Who and what am I supposed to believe?
All the possibilities whirl through my brain, and I feel I
am in one of those dreams where the threads of logic
between sentences keep disintegrating. Maybe Du Lili
is younger than Kwan. Maybe shes seventy-eight.
Maybe Big Mas ghost is in here. Maybe she isnt. All
these things are true and false, yin and yang. What
does it matter? (246)
Reference list:
Tan, A. The Hundred Secret Senses. First Vintage Contemporaries
Edition. 1998
Amy
Tan.
Wikipedia
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free
encyclopedia.