The Bonesetter’s Daughter

By Amy Tan

G.P. Putnam’s Sons

400 pages $25.95

ISBN 0399146431

In her fourth novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Amy Tan returns to what has become her subject matter—the guilt-ridden relationship between a first-generation, Chinese-American daughter and her immigrant mother. In past books, such as the Joy Luck Club, Tan took on several mother-daughter pairs, and wound up skimping on some relationships and investing the real riches of her storytelling talent in just a handful of mothers and daughters. The Bonesetter’s Daughter is less uneven because Tan has chosen to focus on just one of these emotionally taxing relationships. We don’t just get “gobbets of sob-stuff” (as J. Dover Wilson once described Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus). We get a full meal of it, with many courses.

Those familiar with Tan’s work will immediately recognize the characters of Ruth Young and her mother LuLing from previous sketches: Ruth lives with her longtime boyfriend Art and his two daughters from a previous marriage, and ghostwrites self-help books for a living; LuLing, Ruth’s mother, submits her daughter to suicidal threats and overall melodrama to secure her daughter’s attention and obedience while doling out her maternal love via a steady stream of criticism. The Bonesetter’s Daughter is written in three parts. The first and last framing sections, which take place in San Francisco, closely follow Ruth’s reaction to the onset of LuLing’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s. Ruth’s mother’s dementia force Ruth to dismantle her heretofore satisfactory sense of self, and and the pressure of her mother’s encroaching death slowly organizes her otherwise disordered emotional life. Ruth has put off reading a packet of pages, which her mother wrote and gave her five years before, when her mother first felt her memory beginning to erode, because she has been overwhelmed with work and is, moreover, daunted by the effort needed to translate Chinese calligraphy. However, when LuLing’s disease threatens to swallow up the only living repository of the past, however, Ruth scrambles to find a translator for her mother’s story. At the same time, the Alzheimer’s makes LuLing spit out fragments of her past, which contradict the little Ruth has been told about her family’s history and tease Ruth into wanting to know the whole, undoctored truth.

The middle section—which we get a taste of in the unofficial prologue to the book—turns to LuLing’s first-person account of her extraordinary childhood and life story, which begins in the scrubby, mountainous regions of China’s outback. This section is where Tan truly begins to spin her tale, and spin the reader into the web of it; it charts LuLing’s relationship with her nursemaid, Precious Auntie, the unusually educated and headstrong daughter of a famous bonesetter, who uses dragon bones found in the cave of a nearby mountain to heal general ailments and broken bones. The novel opens with LuLing’s memory of being in the care of Precious Auntie one Chinese winter morning. Precious Auntie, remains tongueless and mutilated, her face and throat half-burnt and soldered by a fire accident we later learn was not an accident at all. Precious Auntie’s muteness foregrounds the uncanny physical closeness between her and what the reader believes is her ward. The sensuous details of their secret bond lack authorial pushiness and seem effortlessly conceived by the silence between the two characters:

“She poured face-washing water into the teapot’s chamber, and when it was cooked, she started our day. She scrubbed my face and ears. She parted my hair and combed my bangs. She wet down any strands that stuck out like spider legs. Then she gathered the long part of my hair into two bundles and braided them. She banded the top with red ribbon, the bottom with green. I wagged my head so that my braids swung like the happy ears of palace dogs. And Precious Auntie sniffed the air as if, she too, were a dog wondering, What’s that good smell? That sniff was how she said my nickname, Doggie . That was how she talked.”

LuLing has the privilege and burden of being the only one in the family compound who can translate Precious Auntie’s pictures, hand gestures, “dancing eyebrows,” gasps and wheezes—“snorts of a ragged wind”—for the speaking world. Translation, along with the critical acts of reading and writing, announce themselves as themes of paramount importance in the Bonesetter’s Daughter. (After all, LuLing is the first daughter of a prominent inkmaking family and lives in an “ink palace.”) Just as LuLing must translate for Precious Auntie, Ruth must translate for LuLing. Ruth not only translates English for LuLing, but is also forced to translate the ghost of Precious Auntie, and become a literal ghostwriter. Both LuLing and Ruth, out of laziness and fear of rocking the boat, or one might say an instinct for self-preservation—at times fail to translate, or translate for, their elders, or completely mistranslate to get what they want. There are several parallels, like this one, between the overarching contemporary story of Ruth, and the story of LuLing, which are drawn and tied neatly to give the novel a sense of plot. LuLing also receives a packet of writing, which when finally read, reveals the emotionally inevitable and moving plot twist that Precious Auntie is LuLing’s biological mother. That Precious Auntie’s death could have been averted had LuLing read her mother’s words more promptly, however, seems an awfully contrived way to generate plot. Tan asks the reader to construe mere procrastination as betrayal, a sin to be expiated so as not to incur the curse of ancestral ghosts. The tension between Ruth and LuLing also escalates needlessly at the beginning of the book because Ruth fails to read her mother’s memoirs right away.

As LuLing tells the story of her mother, much is made of the ancestral curse that the Precious Auntie’s father, the bonesetter, incurred when he started using human bones, instead of dragon bones, to treat his patients. The bones of the dead corpse must remain together (the skull with the body, etc.) to insure the peacefulness of its afterlife and not stir up the wrath of its ghost. Western archeologists only exacerbate the problem of proper and permanent burial when they begin to excavate the bones of Peking Man in the same cave and offer villagers big bucks for human bones. The bones of the villagers’ ancestors have miraculous healing powers: the past heals the present. But the ancestors’ remains cannot simply be used as a salve; they must be given proper respect. Ruth and Luling must assume responsibility for reading and translating their mothers’ pasts; they must return the scattered bones, the fragments cast out by LuLing’s dementia, to the corpse and give it a proper burial. Tan’s novel hinges upon the fact that they cannot put the bones back quickly enough to duck the karmic blow of an ancestral curse.

Ruth’s sections, which occupy two-thirds of the book, are as banal as LuLing’s memoirs are enchanting and mythic. Ruth is beset by mild domestic malaise and a deep-abiding suspicion that she belongs to no one. Her smugness leaves the reader feeling as detached from her as she feels from herself. Her crisis, however common, makes for a dramatically inert character. Add to this her annoyingly “wise” husband and pathetic job, both of which submerge her in a bath of pyschobabble that deadens the spirit by making it too explicit, and you’ve got a pretty boring character. By the end of the novel, Ruth has ensconced her mother in a dreamy assisted-living facility, inspired a marriage proposal from her longtime-boyfriend, and driven out the ghost in ghostwriter by pursuing her past. She begins writing for herself, so that the reader is unsure whether the entire novel is a product of Ruth’s newfound identity. All of the bones are set in place. Nonetheless, is real happiness achieved by merely righting oneself with the past?

In interviews, Amy Tan makes no qualms about drawing from her autobiography to create characters, and Ruth is no exception. Tan started out as a technical writer and her mother died in 1999 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. Tan never apologizes for using her own experiences in her fiction, but one cannot help notice that the farther the she gets from what she knows and the deeper she travels into the wilds of Chinese history, the more engaged her imagination and writing become. It is a truism of writing workshops that one should write about what one knows. But as Peter Ho Davies’ fictional creative writing teacher writes in “What You Know,” (a short story which recently appeared in Harpers’), that write-what-you-know rule is not a rule for writers; “they’re rules for people who are trying to be writers but won’t ever make it.” Leaning on the invisible for material, rather than the environment and circumstance at hand seems like a more difficult endeavor for a writer. But it is obvious that Tan thrives on this type of storytelling. I only wish she had done so for the entire novel.

Tanya Larkin is a Poet and Writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Click on the link to email Tanya: tanyalarkin@hotmail.com.