The Hundred Secret Senses
by Amy Tan
Finished on 26 July 2007. Filed under Chinese Culture, Supernatural.
Olivia Yee is only five years old when Kwan, her seventeen-year-old half-sister from China, comes to live with the family and turns her world upside down. She is bombarded day and night with Kwan's stories from the world of Yin—romantic tales of ghosts who were once bandit maidens, strange accounts of missionaries and mercenaries from another world. Olivia wants to lead a normal American life.
For the next thirty years, Olivia unhappily endures visits from Kwan and her ghosts, who appear in the living world to offer advice on everything from restaurants to Olivia's failed marriage. But just when Olivia cannot bear it any more, the revelations of a tragic, hundred-year-old family secret give her the opportunity to reconcile these ghosts from the past with the dreams of her future...
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After-Thoughts
As with all the Amy Tan stories I've read to-date, the book did not manage to capture my interest in some of the earlier parts. Though, a couple more chapters in, I became fully engaged.
It was unique in its structure with Olivia telling her story from the first-person point of view and every now and then it would be Kwan's turn to tell her own story from her first-person point of view. Basically, there were two storytellers, weaving each of their stories together into this binded book. More interestingly, Olivia tells her story in the present context whilst Kwan represents the past. The idea was that the past was actively affecting the present, which made it more exciting near the end when secrets and mysteries began to unravel.
While promoting the traditional Chinese Buddhist idea of reincarnation and the "Yin Yang" worlds, the story also encapsulates Christian ideas from the Western world. So other than the past intertwining with the present, it also created room for the co-existence of spiritual ideas coming from two different cultures. Another third dimension allowed for living human-beings and ghosts to be bonded through the "hundred secret senses", which is mainly what the story was about.
... the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true... And believing in ghosts—that's believing that love never dies. If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.
- The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan
It was not a very happy and perfect cliche ending, which in a way is good, being unexpected. But I personally thought it could've had a nicer way to end itself because I don't like seeing nice people die with unexplained deaths. It brought great volumes of tears to my eyes. As with other books I've read from Amy Tan, the conclusion was drawn more abruptly than I thought would be reasonable, leaving certain things in the dark forever. But I think she did so with the intention to convey her point of view that some things in life just cannot be explained and some secrets may never meet the light. It brings a dilemma for me, knowing it's a good point but leaves me with that little minute amount of non-fulfillment.
