Bonesetter's Daughter

Amazon.com's Best of 2001
At the beginning of Amy Tan's fourth novel, two packets of papers written in Chinese calligraphy fall into the hands of Ruth Young. One bundle is titled Things I Know Are True and the other, Things I Must Not Forget. The author? That would be the protagonist's mother, LuLing, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In these documents the elderly matriarch, born in China in 1916, has set down a record of her birth and family history, determined to keep the facts from vanishing as her mind deteriorates.

A San Francisco career woman who makes her living by ghostwriting self-help books, Ruth has little idea of her mother's past or true identity. What's more, their relationship has tended to be an angry one. Still, Ruth recognizes the onset of LuLing's decline--along with her own remorse over past rancor--and hires a translator to decipher the packets. She also resolves to "ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do."

Framed at either end by Ruth's chapters, the central portion of The Bonesetter's Daughter takes place in China in the remote, mountainous region where anthropologists discovered Peking Man in the 1920s. Here superstition and tradition rule over a succession of tiny villages. And here LuLing grows up under the watchful eye of her hideously scarred nursemaid, Precious Auntie. As she makes clear, it's not an enviable setting: I noticed the ripe stench of a pig pasture, the pockmarked land dug up by dragon-bone dream-seekers, the holes in the walls, the mud by the wells, the dustiness of the unpaved roads. I saw how all the women we passed, young and old, had the same bland face, sleepy eyes that were mirrors of their sleepy minds. Nor is rural isolation the worst of it. LuLing's family, a clan of ink makers, believes itself cursed by its connection to a local doctor, who cooks up his potions and remedies from human bones. And indeed, a great deal of bad luck befalls the narrator and her sister GaoLing before they can finally engineer their escape from China. Along the way, familial squabbles erupt around every corner, particularly among mothers, daughters, and sisters. And as she did in her earlier The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses these conflicts to explore the intricate dynamic that exists between first-generation Americans and their immigrant elders. --Victoria Jenkins


From Publishers Weekly
Tan's empathetic insight into the complex relationship of Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters is again displayed in her latest extraordinary, multi-layered tale. Now suffering from Alzheimer's, Lu Ling's references to the past are confusing and contradictory particularly her desperate attempts to communicate with her deceased Precious Auntie, who was her nursemaid and Ruth worries about her mother's health. But when Ruth translates Lu Ling's lengthy journal, she learns that her mother was once a strong-willed, courageous girl who overcame a background of family secrets and lies, persevered despite romantic heartbreak and survived tremendous hardships and suffering in war-torn China. Tan deftly handles narrative duties as Ruth, the exasperated but loving daughter, while Chen is perfect as the quick-speaking, accented Lu Ling. Lu Ling's first-person diary is particularly suited to audio: we hear the young girl directly reveal her secret hopes and dreams, and watch her grow from a naive innocent to a sharp-eyed survivor. Simultaneous release with the Putnam hardcover (Forecasts, Dec. 4). Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Best-selling author Tan will not disappoint her readers with her most recent work. As with The Joy Luck Club (1989), Tan's narration represents the perspectives of both the Chinese-born mother and the American-born daughter. Ruth, a successful freelance ghostwriter, has lived for nine years with her partner and his two daughters. She is the only child of LuLing, who was widowed shortly after Ruth was born. Now in her mid-forties, Ruth begins to examine her feelings toward her mother, her relationship with her partner, and her career. In the midst of her emotional confusion, she rediscovers her mother's handwritten story of her life in China. After arranging for a translation, Ruth learns some long-hidden truths about her family, which help her to appreciate her mother better. Tan explores the conflicts faced by many women who seek independence while caring for partners, children, and family. She writes with compassion about the tension between immigrant parents and American-born children caused by differences in language and cultural upbringing. This is another fine novel by an important American author. Recommended for all libraries.-DRebecca Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., IA Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Washington Post-Book World, February 11, 2001
In the end, it's the novel's depth of feeling that resonates and lingers. Tan writes with real soul.


From AudioFile
Amy Tan's fiction is built upon pairs, dualities, and contrasts: daughters and mothers, native and immigrant, American and Chinese, present and past--a rich interplay of themes, narrative forms, and voices that is perfectly matched in this reading. The two readers' voices and performing styles together express the richness and range of characters, settings, and situations that the novel encompasses. Tan contributes the necessary authorial command and lack of affectedness to the historical passages, while Chen has the stamina and flexibility to deliver the extended dialogues on which the novel so much depends, slipping easily back and forth between immigrant Chinese and California girl voices. The book's slow first half, with its seemingly endless succession of Alzheimer's symptoms, merely prepares the way for the wondrous, masterful unfolding of the historical narrative that dominates the novel's second half, set in China after the fall of the emperors, in the last century. Tan's richly detailed story of ink-making and bone doctors, and a woman who must choose between two suitors, is storytelling in its oldest and truest form--a tale of mothers and daughters, wives and widows, a story of generations past rediscovered, and its lessons learned, in the generation present. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
The same fascination with mother-daughter relationships that made Tan's debut novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), so captivating drives her newest, an even more polished and provocative work. Compulsively readable and beautifully structured around three richly metaphorical themes--bones, ghosts, and ink--this novel tells the stories of three generations of women, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century in a small Chinese village, where the bonesetter, a skilled healer, defies tradition and teaches his daughter everything he knows. Intelligent and willful, she vehemently rejects the marriage proposal of the vulgar coffinmaker, who curses her, thus setting in motion a tragic sequence of events that continues to unfold a century later in San Francisco, where a Chinese American woman finally reads the memoir her mother wrote for her. Although Ruth's a ghostwriter for New Agey self-help books, the advice she formulates hasn't helped her achieve genuine intimacy with her live-in boyfriend or cope with her argumentative mother, who has long been haunted by the ghost of a woman she calls Precious Auntie. Widowed since Ruth was a toddler, China-born and -raised calligraphy artist Luling still speaks stilted English in spite of decades of California life, and now she appears to be afflicted with Alzheimer's. As Ruth moves back home to care for Luling, she is assailed by memories of her own difficult childhood, then discovers that Precious Auntie, the bonesetter's daughter, is actually her grandmother. As Tan tells the spellbinding stories of these three strong, self-sacrificing women in this lucent novel of deep feelings and gentle humor, she weaves in stripes of vivid Chinese history, including the discovery of Peking Man, ponders what's bred in the bone, and celebrates the preservation of family history as an act of love and a conduit for forgiveness. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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Splendid . . . [W]hat marvelous characters she gives us . . . Tan's decision to tie up all the loose ends . . . does not mar the real ending, for which Tan's superb storytelling has amply prepared us.Read all 11 "From The Critics" >


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