Mythology, luck and destiny in God's Wife in the Kitchen and the Bingo Palace In Amy Tan's novel, God's Wife in the Kitchen, the author weaves Chinese mythology and beliefs through one woman's struggle to explain and come to terms with her harrowing past, to her American daughter, Pearl. Aside from the horror evoked by Winnie's account of her life in pre-communist/feudal China, the thing that struck me most about this book was how often themes of luck and destiny emerge in the story. 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/destiny than by their own will. While there are similarities between the two books, they are very different stories dealing with two cultures that are very far from each other in location, beliefs and ways of life. I decided that for this article it would be interesting to see how the ideas of mythology, luck, and fate relate to the culture of the Chinese and Native Americans in these two books. I would also look at how Asian Americans and Native Americans assimilate and transform their cultural beliefs and practices into the larger “culture” of the United States. The Oxford Dictionary defines destiny as: "1 a power regarded as the unalterable predetermining of events. 2 a the future regarded as determined by that power. b the fate assigned to an individual. C the ultimate condition or end of a person or thing (that marked our destiny)". The aspect of the story that particularly struck me was the way Winnie attributed everything that happened to her, good and bad, to her state of luck at the 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 tells of her mother marrying into a family where she became the "double second wife", that is, she replaced the first "second" wife who had died. Replacing a dead wife was believed to put the woman in an unfortunate position, so perhaps Winnie believed she inherited bad luck from her mother and was "doomed" from birth. Winnie even attributes her horrible marriage to Wen Fu to her bad luck.