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.
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