"Chinese and Dogs" in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive a la New Age

Abstract

New Age Marianna Torgovnick's Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (1990) takes pulse of contemporary world in such way that it sheds light on Amy Tan: [A]n essential fact of urban life in last decades of twentieth century: its polyglot, syncretic nature, its hodgepodge of indigenous and imported, native and foreign. In deflationary era of postmodernism, often frankly loses any particular identity and even its sense of being out there; it merges into generalized, marketable thing--a grab-bag in which urban and rural, modern and traditional Africa and South America and Asia and Middle East merge into common locale called third world which exports garments and accessories, music, ideologies, and styles for Western, and especially urban Western, consumption. (37) Reified and atomized in economies of advanced technology, Western self feels drained, in need of recharging or healing in spiritual sense, for which purpose primitive third-world cultures are deployed. Simultaneously marked by its bestial savagery and spiritual transcendence, other is made to coalesce physical with metaphysical. In The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), imbued with such an ethos, ethnic other's faculties of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, as well as capacity to feel, are intensified by fusions with animal senses and instincts in order to, paradoxically, invoke hidden, essentialist, and extra-sensory human soul. Tan's version of primitivism views rationality as an obstacle to union of body and mind. To make sense of chaotic, damaged modern life, Tan routinely bypasses reason and descends to basic sensations, which, however, never take leave of realm of nonsense entirely. Into this strange equation, Amy Tan interjects third variable: ethnicity. Writing in post-civil rights era, influenced by multicultural milieu of United States, Tan realigns animalistic and spiritual with ethnic. The Chinese ancestry of her protagonists in Secret allows them to access magical realm h la New Age, to be reborn as whole and wholesome human beings. Tan's ethnicizing of contributes significantly to her success among white, middle-class, mainstream readers living in climate of New Age. As Torgovnick remarks in Primitive Passions (1997), the New Age seems to be everywhere but continues to elude (172). Resembling its hotbed of late capitalism, New Age remains barely perceptible because of its omnivorous appetite of absorbing and commodifying alien cultural elements. That New Age escapes precise definition should not, however, discourage us from contextualizing writer like Amy Tan in New Age. Indeed, it is only through such close reading of specific cultural practices that one comes to discern what has alarmingly been naturalized as mode of life. In consonance with consumerist social reality, Tan features San Francisco yuppies with New Age preoccupations with self. Tan's breezy style is at its best as she depicts protagonists, Bishops, busy with their advertising business. Furthermore, precise real estate lingoes of Bishops during house-hunting make possible reader's identification with protagonists through shared frustrations of an urban lifestyle. Interior decoration proves to be Olivia Bishop's forte as well. She expertly deciphers layers of paint she removes from wall of her newly-purchased co-op: a yuppie skin of Chardonnay-colored latex ... followed by flaky crusts of preceding decades--eighties money green, seventies psychedelic orange, sixties hippie black, fifties baby pastels (119). Olivia is homeowner of, so to speak, social history of United States, history which constructs American identity. …