Mothers, Daughters, Ghosts: Amy Tan is Back and Better Than Ever

Amy Tan has always written novels which stop short just this side of autobiography. Books like The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife have documented Chinese-American family life with such detail, such sincerity that it feels like we’re having lunch with Tan and, over green tea and fortune cookies, she confides all the secrets in her ancestor’s closet.

That’s why The Bonesetter’s Daughter is such a surprise. I would have thought there were no more memories Tan could plumb, no more funny-true tales of mothers and daughters for her to serve up like a steaming Chinese buffet. Turns out I was wrong.

The Bonesetter’s Daughter is Tan’s most intensely personal book to date and it is, by far, the best of her novels.

In a Feb. 26 The New York Times article, Tan confided that she struggled with the novel about a 45-year-old woman who uncovers secrets about her mother’s past just as the older woman is succumbing to Alzheimer’s. In the midst of writing The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Tan’s own mother died. Just like the book’s character Ruth, Tan learned that her mother had a different birth name, previous marriages, ghosts in the closet. I realized there was still much that I did not know about my mother, Tan wrote in the Times. Though I had written three novels informed by her life, she remained a source of revelation and surprise. Tan had been working on a novel for five years, but felt like the story was going nowhere—until these surprising revelations from her mother steered her in a new direction. She concludes the article by writing, And so I rewrote, remembering what scared me: the ghost, the threats, the curse. I wrote of wrong birth dates, secret marriages, the changing place one has in a family, the names that were nearly forgotten. I wrote of pain that reaches from the past, how it can grab you, how it can also heal itself like a broken bone. And with the help of my ghostwriters, I found in memory and imagination what I had lost in grief.

The result is a shimmering, humorous, heart-wrenching, rewarding novel that has all the grace of Chinese calligraphy inked across the page. I mean, what else can you expect from a novel whose first chapter begins with this tantalizing sentence: For the past eight years, always starting on August twelfth, Ruth Young lost her voice.

Ruth—daughter of LuLing and live-in lover to Art, a linguistics consultant—rather enjoys these annual periods of silence; they give her a time to retreat and contemplate her life. Lately, it seems, her life has been getting more and more emotionally-complicated: Art is becoming more demanding, her job as a ghostwriter for authors of self-help books is unrewarding, and her mother…well, her mother is starting to act kooky—forgetting important appointments, wandering away from her San Francisco apartment wearing only a housecoat and slippers, babbling in broken English about her long-dead childhood nursemaid Precious Auntie.

At one point, Art asks Ruth, “What makes you happiest? Are you doing what you want to do?” Ruth laughs nervously and replies, “That’s what I edit for others, that intimate-soul stuff. I can describe how to find happiness in ten chapters, but I still don’t know what it is.”

When a doctor tells Ruth that her mother is most likely showing signs of dementia, she realizes that, much as she hates the idea, a nursing home might be the best answer for the frail, scatterbrained woman. But then Ruth discovers a packet of yellowed papers, inscribed with row after row of Chinese calligraphy. It’s a narrative that begins with the sentence, “These are the things I know are true.” It’s a journal of memories LuLing had committed to paper years earlier, then hidden away, along with a small photograph of the woman she said was her mother.

Determined to explore her mother’s past before Alzheimer’s shreds every last memory from her brain, Ruth has a Chinese linguist translate the journal.

This is when The Bonesetter’s Daughter really becomes absorbing. One of Tan’s trademarks has always been to seamlessly blend past and present, twining generations into looped circles. Here, a large portion of the 353 pages is devoted to LuLing’s story in which the mysterious Precious Auntie plays a prominent role. It’s a tale of love, sacrifice and tragedy which, in anyone else’s hands might have come off soapy and sloppy; but Tan is the mistress of memory—she effortlessly weaves her words into an heirloom tapestry that is completely beautiful and fulfilling. In fact, when we finally have to leave LuLing and re-enter Ruth’s world, I was sorry to let go of that thread of the story.

The world of early-20th century China is vivid and intricately told as LuLing, the daughter of an inkmaker, lives in a small village near the spot where archeologists have unearthed ancient bones which they dub Peking Man. The bones, mystical and highly revered by the local Chinese, will later play a crucial role in the lives of LuLing and Ruth.

Like the fine art of writing with ink, Tan is a careful writer, taking her time to make each stroke of the pen just so. I could do no better than to let Tan herself (through LuLing’s voice) describe the process:

I was remembering how [Precious Auntie] taught me that everything, even ink, had a purpose and a meaning: Good ink cannot be the quick kind, ready to pour out of a bottle. 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 your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves and mosquito spawn. But when you push an inkstick along an insktone, you take the first step to cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and you ask yourself, What are my intentions? What is in my heart that matches my mind?

With The Bonesetter’s Daughter, one of our best contemporary novelists has taken five years to cleanse herself and produce a deeply personal book. Ruth may lose her voice annually, but Tan readers can rejoice that the author has once again found hers…and boy, does she ever sing in this novel!