TEXT B No matter what you write,
your mother will always believe it’s about her. So said author Ann Beattie
a few years ago at a book talk in Connecticut. You could write about a family of
dogs living on Mars, Beattie went on, and your mother will be convinced that she
is the mother dog. (And who are we kidding, she probably is. )
Amy Tan is a writer who has fully embraced this concept. Her first novel,
The Joy Luck Club, plumbed the gulf between American daughters and their Chinese
mothers. Now, after the death of her own mother, Tan has returned to these
themes with a renewed poignancy and lyricism in The Bonesetters
Daughter. In recent magazine interviews and the novel’s
foreword, she makes it clear how much she has drawn from her own life. Like her
heroine, Ruth, Tan experienced yearly bouts of psychosomatic laryngitis--unable
to speak for days at a time. And like Ruth, Tan didn’t learn her mothers’ real
name until just before she died. Ruth is a ghost write—a job
she’s been training for since she started editing her mother’s English as a
girl. "Ruth had always been forced to serve as Luling’s mouthpiece," the
narrator writes. "By the time she was ten, Ruth was the English-speaking ’Mrs.
Luling Young’ on the telephone, the one who made appointments for the doctor,
who wrote letters to the bank." As in her previous books, Tan
captures the humiliated embarrassment of the assimilated child (as well as a
parent’s terror that her American girl is rejecting her home culture, and by
extension, herself). "Her mother couldn’t even say Ruth’s name right. It used to
mortify Ruth when she shouted for her up and clown the block. ’Lootie! Lootie! ’
Why had her mother chosen a name with sounds she couldn’t pronounce"
But the writing turns out to be more than a figure of speech. In a ritual
she has dreaded since she was a child, Luling has used Ruth as a medium, making
her scribble in sand messages from a nursemaid, the bonesetter’s daughter of the
title, who killed herself in China when her mother was a girl.
Tan powerfully evokes the pain mothers and daughters cause one another,
seemingly effortlessly, but redemption is always lurking a chapter
away. The novel begins with the pages Luling has frantically
written to capture her memories before Alzheimer’s strips them away. Ruth, not
fluent in Mandarin, gave up trying to read them years before, but once Luling’s
disease is diagnosed, they provide a way for her to reunite with her
mother. "(The doctor) said the disease had probably started
’years ago’... Maybe there was a reason her mother had been so difficult when
Ruth was growing up, why she had talked about curses and threats to kill
herself." The Bonesetter’s Daughter shifts all the way into
magical realism in one section, with not entirely believable results. Also,
Tan’s generally fine writing occasionally veers into the over-wrought: "She
sensed her mother’s life was at stake and the answer was in her hands, had been
there all along." Far more effective are Luling’s experiences
before and after the Japanese invasion of China and the sections where Ruth
tries to care for her mother. Here again, Tan has drawn from experience,
sharply detailing a child’s fear in the face of a parent’s growing
helplessness. For Luling and Ruth, Alzheimer’s .acts like a
"truth serum", allowing a lifetime of lies to fall away. In fact, Luling’s
narrative to her daughter begins: "These are the things I know are
true." Finding emotional healing in the face of disease has
launched a thousand Movies of the Week, but in the hands of a writer as generous
as Tan, it’s a Subject that still resonates as an antidote to grief. The comment made by the author of this passage on Tan’s writing tends to be______.