Amy Tan: The bonesetter's daughter

By GILBERT WONG

To Amy Tan's dismay it is now possible to obtain the Cliff Note's edition of her first book The Joy Luck Club. Those easy-to-read precis of plot, theme and character development are the lazy student's favourite fudge guide. They also signpost her fame. Her works are set texts for university study.

Tan has said, and who would blame her, that she doesn't want to be the subject of undergraduate essays, she wants only to tell her stories. Her latest novel is a welcome return to the simple, but compelling narrative that marked her first success.

Her fourth novel has strong similarities with her first, in that it is a tale of mothers and daughters, though in this case the focus is on Ruth Young and her mother Luling.

Ruth lives in San Francisco, with a white American, Art, and his two daughters from a previous relationship. Their love is weighed down with all the baggage we have come to expect from blended families: previous wives, confused children and uneasy encounters with former in-laws.

Luling is not a doting mother, she is demanding, querulous and prone to emotional blackmail. Ruth suspects she is suffering from the onset of dementia.

Tan creates a situation many will recognise - Ruth is a typical victim of the sandwich generation, tugged at one end by children and the other by ageing parents, unsure and dissatisfied with her own life. A recurrent theme for Tan has been the need to speak the history of Chinese women, who in traditional society are often known only by their familial roles, great auntie or grandmother, rather than their own names, even by their own children.

Luling's infirmity forces Ruth to spend increasing amounts of time caring for her mother. She finds a sheaf of papers, written in her mother's hand. They start, "These are the thing I must not forget," a poignant beginning to a memoir penned by someone who fears she is losing her mind.

Engaging a translator, Ruth begins to find the truth behind her mother's history. When the novel takes up Luling's story in the chapter Heart, it steps into another reality, travelling back to a China where, until the Second World War, families lived for generations in the same village. Her story of illegitimacy, betrayal and lost love is an adult morality play that takes the novel over as the story of Luling's mother, known as Precious Auntie, unfolds.

The daughter of a bonesetter, a traditional healer, she and her sister Gaoling join a family who make inkstones for calligraphy. Tragedy leaves Precious Auntie a young widow, dependent upon her sister's new family for shelter. More suffering follows, as does a subplot involving the archaeological dig for the early human Peking Man.

Tan sets up a series of satisfying emotional mirrors: the bonesetter's tale, the search for Peking Man and the relationships of the sisters Gaoling and Luling. That Ruth, a writer of self-help texts, is largely unable to sort her own psychological and emotional muddles only reinforces the strong series of ironic parallels that help to bind the multiple narratives.

This is a satisfying novel that adds further nuances to Tan's exploration of mother-daughter relationships. The big question is whether such an assured writer should move on to other subject matter.

HarperCollins

$39.95


* Gilbert Wong is the Herald's books editor.

* Amy Tan will be a guest at the Auckland Writers' Festival next month.