The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan. Putnam: 355 pages. $25.95.
“The Bonesetter’s Daughter” is a classic Amy Tan archeology of buried family stories. As in “The Hundred Secret Senses,” Tan contemplates the feminine Chinese-American experience, illuminating the present with the light of history. And as she did in “The Joy Luck Club,” and “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” Tan’s focuses the central conflict on the complicated relationship between a Chinese mother and her Chinese-American daughter, the resolution of which brings spiritual gifts: truth, clarity, and self-knowledge.
In this fourth novel, Tan grants her seeker yet another spiritual gift: truer purpose in writing. This time, she writes about what it means to be a writer—about writing as a necessity and a duty, about the strength needed to discover and tell deep truths.
To set beating the heart of her tale, Tan opens with an excerpt from the autobiography of LuLing, a woman desperately trying to remember the morning her mother wrote their family name on a piece of paper. “These things I know are true,” Luling begins. She remembers the event, but not the name, and cries out to her deceased mother: “Are you still mad at me? Don’t you recognize me? I am LuLing, your daughter.”
In an abrupt shift, Tan then tosses the reader into the bustling life of LuLing’s daughter, Ruth: a modern woman whose occupation is ghostwriter for New Age spiritualists and pop psychologists. Ruth is the present-time character of the novel, and the third member of this triad of mother, daughter, and ghost. She struggles with oppressive dailyness--working, managing conflicts with her live-in boyfriend, refereeing his two teenage daughters, and taking yoga classes. Her mother has given Ruth her autobiography, many pages, written in Chinese. But Ruth has no time for the painstaking translation it would require.
As the novel progresses, Ruth becomes acutely aware of her mother’s Alzheimer’s: “Her mother often forgot to lock the front door. She left food to defrost on the counter until it became rancid. She turned on the cold water and left it running for days, waiting for it to become hot.” Ruth decides to move in with her mother, the difficulty of which is compounded by the sense that Ruth is re-living her adolescence: having conflicts with her mother, sleeping in her old room. She even finds her own diary where she left it years ago, on top of a cupboard, a message to herself from the past. In her new urgency to understand her mother, Ruth finds an able translater for her mother’s autobiography, which contains accounts of both her mother and her grandmother’s lives.
The story of Ruth’s grandmother goes like this: Earlier in the last century, in a Chinese Village called Xian Xin—Immortal Heart—there lived a girl who was independent, beautiful, outspoken, insightful, and intelligent. She was the bonesetter’s daughter, and his only family member, as the rest of the family had perished tragically from “an intestine-draining disease.” Since she was his only family member, the bonesetter indulged her by not binding her feet, by allowing her to wander freely, and by training her in arts forbidden to girls, like reading and writing, calligraphy, and setting bones. But her freedom and dignity also made life in Immortal Heart unsafe, and it is her rejection of a suitor that begins the tragic turn.
After a failed suicide attempt, the bonesetter’s daughter is robbed of her voice. Her beauty is ruined and her ability to speak destroyed, leaving her with only “gasps and wheezes, the snorts of a ragged wind.” “Precious Auntie” (the name we know her by, since her real name has been lost), communicates with her daughter using their private sign language. When she wishes to communicate with others, she does so through LuLing.
Precious Auntie communicates to young LuLing the importance of knowing where the family bones are kept. According to Precious Auntie, the bones of their ancestors have been laid to rest in local caves, and she wants to return these bones, some of which she has been using for healing purposes. If they don’t return them, she reasons, more bad luck will be visited upon their family.
As Precious Auntie struggles to fulfill her ancestral duties, archeologists discover the bounty of fossils deep within Immortal Heart’s caves. Wanting fast money, villagers join in, removing bones from once-sacred resting places. The discovery of Peking Man is both archeological victory and death knell for the traditions that guide Precious Auntie’s life.
As a way of preserving for her daughter a testament to the silenced truth of her life and beliefs, Precious Auntie writes her life story and gives it to LuLing.
After Precious Auntie’s death, fire and economic ruin haunt her survivors and war completes the tragic cycle, strewing about the world a family that lived on ancestral land for centuries. The writing of the Bonesetter’s daughter is eventually lost, and for this reason, the reader won’t become fully acquainted with her story until about halfway through the book, because, like so many family stories, it lies buried under secrets and silence, and, like Peking Man, must be re-membered.
Tan creates an intricate web of archeology, bonesetting, healing, calligraphy, inkmaking, writing, and translation. This symbolic interconnectedness surrounds Ruth’s quest to understand her mother and grandmother, and to discover her own identity and voice.
For Tan, writers are archeologists, disintering and reassembling the stories of silenced voices. Tan uses Peking Man as a metaphor for the truth, the oldest story. To some inhabitants of Immortal Heart, like Precious Auntie, bones are more than the dead, more than history; they are messages, oracles, curses, answers. In that sense, a writer is also a seer who can translate the past. Like the bonesetter who uses ancient bones as a cure for the broken bones of the living, a writer has both the power to heal, and to set the truth right.
For Tan’s characters, a calligrapher is a thoughtful writer for whom words and their design are the same thing. One cannot write off the top of one’s head; one must be deeply prepared, in the proper frame of mind, with the proper tools at hand. Says LuLing’s uncle: “You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modern ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of the brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn.” “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” is the story of Ruth’s emergence as an artist. When she understands herself at a deep level (through knowing her past) and no longer ghostwrites the “pond scum” of trivial psychological advice, she is prepared to write deeply and meaningfully, with Precious Auntie’s photograph at her desk.
Through this novel, Tan seems to be reflecting on her own purpose in writing. In her introduction, Tan writes that she learned her mother’s real name, as well as the name of her grandmother, on the day her mother died. While writing her mother’s obituary, Tan realized that there was still much she did not know about her. Soon afterwards she began rewriting the novel she had been working on for five years, which is inspired by her own experiences with family secrets kept by one generation from the next. Tan credits her mother and grandmother as ghostwriters: “The heart of this story belongs to my grandmother, its voice to my mother.”
“The Bonesetter’s Daughter” is Amy Tan’s most poetic work, in terms of language, image, and depth. She complicates the search for family stories and their truths and shows how time, culture, and history erode our past, which is a sacred heirloom. As she has done before, Tan encourages women to set the bones of their own family histories so that they might both heal themselves and tell their own stories.
Flaws in an otherwise engaging read are made minor by the story’s rewards. Readers may not be concerned that Tan has not changed her general focus much, and they may not mind the novel’s shape, either--LuLing’s Alzheimer’s disease presents such a large problem for Ruth that the novel nearly evolves into another story which takes much wrap-up time to resolve neatly.
And it’s true that Tan’s message has been repeated so much by her that it borders on admonition. But it bears repeating: “Do not forget, or risk losing all.”
Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.