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I.S.A.R.M.

Profesorado en Ingls

Historia y Literatura
Norteamericana
The Hundred Secret Senses:
Fiction and Reality

Student: Virginia Acosta Yacante


Date: August 6th
Teacher: Ana Carolina de Giacomi

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)

What is more, although Kwans is a strange world, we find in it logic and


rational conditions, which is another way Amy Tan achieves her realistic
style. For instance, Kwan distinguishes between superstition and real
Yin stories, as when she says its just superstition when talking about
the legend of a peak called Young Girls Wish, by which a slave girl
escapes to meet her lover and they turn into a phoenix that flies away.
Nevertheless, she does believe in another story about the same peaks
name. It tells about stupid girls who wanted to fly but fell to the
ground instead and turned into stone, forming the boulders at the
bottom of the peak, which for Kwan has more credibility. (194)
Summing up, as The Hundred Secret Senses oscillates notably between
fantasy and reality and between superstition and fact, thanks to Amy
Tans ability. That is why, to my point of view, The Hundred Secret
Senses is not an invitation to escape from reality and submerge into
fantasy but to read both as the two sides of the same story.

Reference list:
Tan, A. The Hundred Secret Senses. First Vintage Contemporaries
Edition. 1998
Amy

Tan.

Wikipedia

the

free

encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmyTan August 29. 2012.


Tiping

Revolution.

Wikipedia

the

free

encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TipingRevolution August 15. 2012.

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