The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan

She calls herself "a lonely tyke" (8), and silences her frustrated hope for cheat "by telling myself that in that respect was nothing inside those hopes anyway" (8). Therefore, when Kwan comes a coherent, as ofttimes as Olivia resists and is embarrassed by Kwan, at that place is still roughlything inside her which responds to the mishap of a special land behind the surface appearances of American life and the denial of love from her mother. Similarly, her distrust of her husband is in part rooted in her distrust of her mother's wavering love.

Therefore, the sopranoities stand up in Olivia's life and in her character. She lives between many sets of dual worlds--the Chinese and the American, the internal and the external, the surface and the mysterious. It leave take the rouse to China, to her roots, to resolve these contradictions.

2. The book says that heathenish models are overwhelmingly properly in shaping how one understands what is real, true and obvious. To Kwan, raised in China under the influence of traditional models, the special realm of ghosts and intuition is commonplace. To Olivia, raised in modern America with its violence on surface appearances and the material world, what is real is what is seen, what is sold and bought. Yes, Olivia is amenable to Kwan's ghost stories and sees ghosts herself, she is susceptible not because of cultural promoters but because of psyche factors. In other words, as power

3. Simon certainly learned in China to be more accepting of counter-paradigms, but his softening is nothing compared to the transformation Olivia undergoes. She learns that there is not only another world, a world of reincarnation and ghosts, but that she is very much immersed in it and has been for a long time: "I was Miss Banner," she says to her missing or stillborn sister Kwan, "and you were Nunumu, and forever you'll be loyal and so will I" (389). She has learned that her true ally was the sister of whom she had been so long ashamed. Later Olivia says, questioned by Simon about the meaning of some mysterious statement at Big Ma's funeral, "I don't know. I don't want to know what anything means anymore" (394).

ful as cultural models are, there is nevertheless a extraordinaryly individual factor which can override or undermine that cultural force. For Olivia, it was in part her alienation as a Chinese-American (no matter how much she was Americanized), but even more importantly it was the lack of love from her mother, a lack which causes her to distrust her husband, and perhaps was also the main reason she went to China with Kwan.

tam tests the limits of this reader's ability to accept unique views of reality when she apparently in all seriousness has Kwan posit the entire reincarnation scenario with Olivia and her husband being reincarnated lovers. To make matters harder to swallow, Tam has Olivia accept this scenario and find happiness and a brand novel philosophy of life suddenly, perhaps forgetting the earlier warning that " similarly much happiness always overflows into tears of sorrow" (69). possibly an even better and more applicable warming would be, " in addition much belief always overflows into doubt."

Also, Kwan and Olivia change together and wrench closer, or, Olivia grows closer to Kwan, because Kwan seems to have understood all along the family relationship they share. Kwan's "job" in the book is to awaken Olivia to the deeper reality transcendental beneath the surface reality, an
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