The Valley of Amazement

The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan tantalizes all the senses as it immerses one into a world both one wants to inhabit and one wants to run away from. Tan creates characters that are at once likable and unlikable. The Valley of Amazement explores the intricate complexity that makes up human beings. Tan had me cheering for a character one minute and wishing ill on the character the next and then back to cheering even while sometimes feeling guilty about my own reactions. I read The Valley of Amazement slowly, a little bit at a time, taking in what I could and sometimes avoiding what I knew instinctively was coming even while hoping it wasn't. Tan kept me engrossed in the story even at times when I didn't like where it was going. or when show more one character or the other made decisions that made no sense, at least to me. Every night when I picked up The Valley of Amazement I felt transported to a time, place, and experience that would never be my own yet I felt a connection in the way that reminded me the world is filled with people whose experiences I can only witness and that there are those who can only witness my life experiences. show less

I might have finished slogging through this had I not had several other library books which were becoming due. Then again, this isn't really my cup of tea, my being an elderly, repressed Calvinist and all. I made it through 36% of the book, or 336 pp.

So, we have a young American girl in China (Shanghai). Her mother, also American, runs the fanciest "house of pleasure" in Shanghai, the only one that caters both to rich Chinese and also to rich foreigners. From time to time, she, the mother that is, can get the two sets together for business chats. At other times the two sets hang out with their own set for partying. Then of course, there are first-class "courtesans" to woo and on which to lavish riches, some of which (the riches, that show more is) are "shared" with the mother.

Well, at some point, the mother goes off to America to reunite with her husband and the son who was taken from her at his birth. Somehow, the girl, Violet, gets kidnapped on the way to the boat and ends up in a different "pleasure palace". Well, after 300 pages of reading about life in Chinese "pleasure palaces" back a hundred years ago, I cried uncle. There are certain types of human depravity that do not attract me. This is one: rich old men using young girls as toys. Of course, we just elected a President who is no better than his Chinese peers from a century ago. Perhaps that has helped stigmatize the whole charade for me. Or perhaps it's just because I am, as I've said above, a repressed, elderly Calvinist. Whatever, I'm done.

I've read several other Amy Tan books and liked them well enough. I read her because I want a Chinese perspective so as better to understand the cultural context in which my son-in-law might have grown up. He is fully American, but his parents grew up in China. Anyway, I decided that whatever insight I might have received from this book wasn't worth wading through all the smut. show less

It is very apparent that Tan did a huge amount of research before writing this novel. Her writing is very fluid and strong, so why than did I only rate this book a three? When I first started reading this I was enthralled, reading about the lives of the concubine, the houses that provided pleasure but also a place were business was discussed and deals were made. Found it fascinating that the madame of the place was a white woman, who had a young daughter.

Fast forward and politics rears its ugly head, previous players are no longer the ruling players and love makes a fool of an otherwise wise woman. This is when it began to get monotonous for me. The training of a young virgin, the intimate details all became too much, I no longer cared show more to read constantly about the ways to please a man. Details were repeated and I had a hard time reading the explicit details on the deflowering of a young girl, and it was more than one girl.

In truth the book was about a hundred pages too long for me, but while I felt bad for these young woman, I really did not like any of these characters. This is how the book was for me, many from the reviews do not feel that way. So read this for a look into a little known culture, well researched but just know that in places it gets repetitive and very explicit. show less

I loved The Joy Luck Club| and The Kitchen God's Wife and was very excited to find this book at a library sale.

Since I always seem to start out with the negatives, I want to say that there was a lot here that I loved. As with the other two books of Tan's that I've read, there's a fantastic cast of well-structured characters, some of them almost mythical in their story lines (like Madam Li and Perpetual). The world building is beautifully thorough as well: though I know next to nothing about early-twentieth-century Shanghai, I felt as though I could clearly envision the worlds that Lulu and Violent walked through. (Granted, my few childhood years in Singapore probably give me more of a leg up in the mind's eye than most people get.)

Part show more of what I loved about the previous two Amy Tan novels I've read was the interaction between different generations of women from different cultures. The cover copy of this book promised "two women's intertwined fates" and "spanning more than forty years and two continents", but we only had Violet's point of view for the first 432 pages! An occasional side trip for a story from a secondary character's perspective did help keep from bogging down--Magic Gourd's whole chapter, "Etiquette for Beauties of the Boudoir," was a definite highlight. I was a bit sad that after over 500 pages, we didn't get this kind of dedication to Flora's story--just a few pages of monologue that didn't feel as real as anyone else's.

My chief complaint, though, was how bleak the book was overall. Children with good lives hated their parents. Day-to-day life, which might have offered chance for everyday humor or simple pleasures, was skipped over quickly. We didn't learn much about how Violet adjusted to her fate, what her lessons were like, how she felt about taking different men as lovers.

I almost gave up around the middle, but I held out for the things I loved in Tan's other writing--and sure enough, they appeared. At Violet's bleakest moment, she forges a new bond and finally makes a desperate plan to escape--something I'd been waiting for since the beginning. Her experience with other women, her coming into her own, her finally starting to reach out to others made the rest of the upper-side-of-average book worth it.

From an editorial standpoint, I do wish we could have had more of the Minturn women interwoven with the others. I'm heavily biased toward the structure of The Joy Luck Club--it was one of the first books I read that wasn't a straight-to-the-end narrative. While I don't think the suspense would have held as neatly with Lulu's story appearing sooner, I do think it would help resolve some of the disconnect between the love she expresses for her daughter in her section and the great dearth of it that Violet reports. Surely some of Lulu's gestures would have come across even the most petulant child's self-centeredness? And why would Lulu give her daughter amber, the symbol of her hatred for her own mother?

I'm glad I got to read Amy Tan's latest book, and I look forward to chipping away at her previous novels as well...but I'll be leaving this book at the office for someone else to enjoy rather than keeping it in my hoard. show less

This book was a marathon and I couldn't help feeling that cutting 200 pages would have improved it vastly. The whole story thread about Prosperity could have easily been cut and it would have made the book stronger and less tedious. Typical Tan story-line about mothers and daughters who love each other fiercely, but have trouble expressing their love conventionally. With the advent of each generation, the new mother comes to a miraculous revelation of how much her mother really loved her and all is forgiven. Maybe Tan has finally milked this genre dry? Will Flora spin off into the next Tan book?

If this novel has a flaw, it's that it's too long, but I'd be hard pressed to say where it could be cut down. The Valley of Amazement is a mother-daughter tale, but one that spreads across generations in early 20th-century China. Violet is the half-Chinese, half-American daughter of an American courtesan in Shanghai who is separated from her mother and forced to become a courtesan herself. As fortunes and governments rise and fall, Violet achieves the greatest success a courtesan can image - a loving protector who wants to marry her. Only then to suffer the loss of her protector and separation from her own daughter. Violet, her mother, and her daughter all struggle to find their own way, to define their identities, and to be reunited show more with each other. Overall, this was a good read and one that immerses the reader in Chinese history at a pivotal point. show less

With her first novel in eight years, Amy Tan returns to the theme that she does so well: mothers and daughters. Spanning four generations and two continents, The Valley of Amazement tells us the story of Lucia (Lulu), her daughter Violet, Violet’s daughter Flora, and Magic Gourd, the courtesan who stood in as surrogate mother to Violet after her mother left her in Shanghai.

Conflicts with her mother and father lead Lulu to become sexually active at a young age and at a time when this was not permissible to women. When she falls in love with a visiting Chinese artist, she runs away from home and follows him to Shanghai. But she ends up having to make her own way, with Violet a toddler and her infant son kidnapped by the artist’s show more family. With few paths open to a woman in China at the time, Lulu chooses to establish a courtesan house, which becomes renowned for accepting both Western and Chinese clients and for providing business advice. She becomes wealthy, but doesn’t realize what growing up in a brothel, however high class, is doing to her daughter, who feels the business- and her missing brother- mean more to Lulu than Violet does, just as Lulu had felt her mother’s passion for science mean more to her than Lulu did.

The story is written from more than one point of view; Violet, Magic Gourd, and Lulu all take a turn speaking. All have hard lives; the men in their lives are, for the most part, uncaring as to the needs of the women, treating them as objects that will be dealt with only when convenient- or even keeping them as outright slaves. Taking place in the dawn of the 20th century, the story is set against the political and social changes that took place in China.

I loved this book and couldn’t put it down. The details of the lives of these women made them come alive; what they wore, what they were expected to do, how they felt. I have to admit I had a hard time liking Violet at first; she comes off as a spoiled brat in some ways, but when you figure that she was being left on her own so much of the time, with only her cat as a friend, it’s hard to expect her to be otherwise. And she very quickly learned how hard life could be later. I was disappointed in ‘Saving Fish From Drowning’ but I’m very happy to see that Tan has returned with a great story. show less