In her enormously popular first novel, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan took up the relations of immigrant Chinese mothers and their assimilated daughters, shifting her story back and forth from pre-World War II China to modern-day San Francisco, alternating the voices of the mothers with the voices of their daughters.
For her second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, she explored the relations of immigrant Chinese mothers and their assimilated daughters, shifting her story back and forth from pre-World War II China to modern-day San Francisco, alternating the voices of the mothers with the voices of their daughters.
And now, in The Bonesetter's Daughter, Amy Tan has decided to investigate the relations of immigrant Chinese mothers and their assimilated daughters, shifting her story back and forth from pre-World War II China to modern-day San Francisco, alternating the voices of the mothers with the voices of their daughters.
The central character in The Bonesetter's Daughter is Ruth Young, a woman in her late forties who makes a living as a ghostwriter in San Francisco. The books she doctors -- she thinks of herself as a "book doctor" -- are of the self-empowering, inspirational, New Age kind. But Ruth heeds not the wise advice she dispenses in her books. Unable to assert herself, she is caught between the selfishness of her lover and the querulousness of her aging mother, LuLing, who has become even harder to manage with the onset of Alzheimer's.
But then one evening, while clearing out the piles of paper in her mother's house, Ruth comes across a manuscript -- an account, in Chinese, of LuLing's memories of childhood in China. As Ruth begins to read the manuscript, the novel shifts to LuLing's voice. Ruth learns that, as a child, her mother had a nursemaid called Precious Auntie to whom she felt a strong bond. But in her teenage years, LuLing discovered that she was actually the illegitimate daughter of this nursemaid. These traumatic family revelations are set against a backdrop of the 1940s: the excavation of Peking man, the Japanese invasion, and the rise of Chinese nationalism and communism.
Precious Auntie is an angry creature, whose unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide by setting herself on fire has left her face so badly disfigured that her mouth has melted away and she cannot speak. Once Precious Auntie again attempts to kill herself (this time succeeding), LuLing flees to America, leaving her tragic life and memories behind -- at which point the novel returns to the present, with Ruth's story and point of view taken up again.
Tan has always used this device of moving back and forth between the separate stories of mother and daughter; she has admitted, in fact, that she wrote The Joy Luck Club as a series of short stories. But in The Bonesetter's Daughter, the device leaves the character of LuLing oddly disconnected: a fleshed-out Chinese girl and a pasteboard immigrant mother. Tan has insisted that The Bonesetter's Daughter is more deeply autobiographical than her earlier work -- which has unfortunate implications, for it means that the all-American Tan views with sympathy and imagination her mother's hard life in China, and views with no sympathy and imagination her mother's hard life in the United States.
The transformation of the loving, resourceful young woman in China into the "difficult, oppressive, odd" mother in America is something Tan doesn't fully explain, perhaps because, from a literary point of view, it admits of no explanation. But readers are nonetheless supposed to intuit the cause of the change: It is America and what America does to the immigrant mothers who don't assimilate and what it does to their daughters who do assimilate. In The Bonesetter's Daughter, there's something deeply revealing about the casual assumptions made in popular American fiction these days.
As in most of Tan's work, the immigrant mother serves primarily as the butt of the novel's humor, her poor English and strong accent, thrift, and cultural awkwardness mined for easy laughs. "To LuLing, cloth was classified as 'cost too much,' 'too slippery,' 'scratchy skin,' and 'last long time.' And there were only two kinds of trees: 'shady' and 'drop leaf all time.' Her mother couldn't even say Ruth's name right. It used to mortify Ruth when she shouted for her up and down the block. 'Lootie, Lootie!' Why had her mother chosen a name with sounds she couldn't pronounce?"
The great irony is that since her first novel, Tan has been praised for her deeply understood and deeply felt portrayals of Chinese mothers and daughters. Reviewers almost universally single out this aspect of her stories to rave about. But the truth is that Tan's understanding of her mother as a struggling immigrant in this country was never more than superficial, and it was always very far from compassionate. In the author's latest novel, Tan's mother comes off just as badly as she did in the first.
Suzanne D'Mello is a writer in Los Angeles.