Mythology, luck and destiny in The Kitchen God's Wife and the Bingo PalaceIn Amy Tan's novel, The Kitchen God's Wife cuisine, the author weaves Chinese mythology and beliefs through a woman's struggle to explain and accept her heartbreaking past, to her American daughter, Pearl. Aside from the horror evoked by Winnie's account of her life in pre-communist/feudal China, what struck me most about this book is how often the themes of luck and fate recur in the history. I often found that Winnie reminded me of the character Lipsha from Louise Erdrich's novel The Bingo Palace, in that both characters seemed to believe that their lives were controlled more by luck/fate than by their own will. Although the similarities between the two books exist, they are very different stories dealing with two cultures very far apart in terms of location, beliefs and lifestyles. I decided that for this article it would be interesting to examine how the ideas of mythology, luck, and destiny relate to the culture of the Chinese and Native Americans in these two books. I would also like to examine how Asian Americans and Native Americans assimilate and transform their cultural beliefs and practices into the broader “culture” of the United States. The Oxford Dictionary defines destiny as: “1 a power considered to predetermine events in an unalterable manner. » has the future considered to be determined by such power. b the fate assigned to an individual C the condition or ultimate end of a person or thing (which sealed our fate)". The aspect of the story that particularly struck me was the way in which Winnie blamed everything that happened to her, good and bad, on her luck at that time. It seems that Winnie believed that she was destined to have bad luck from the beginning of her life because of her mother. She recounts that her mother married into a family where she became the "double second wife", meaning that she replaced the first "second" wife who had died. Replacing a deceased wife was thought to put a woman in. a position of bad luck, so maybe Winnie thought she inherited her bad luck from her mother and was "doomed" from birth Winnie even blames her horrible marriage on Wen Fu because of her bad luck...