Words and bones.

Though generations may come and go and even our bones may eventually turn to dust, words can last forever. This is the message that Amy Tan delivers straight to heart with her fourth novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

The premise of the plot may sound familiar to those who have read The Joy Luck Club or The Kitchen God’s Wife, also by Tan. The book examines mother-daughter relationships, especially through the gap created by cultural differences within an immigrant family from China. However, the similarities end there.
The mood for The Bonesetter’s Daughter is set by the prologue entitled “Truth”, with the opening line of “these are the things I know are true”. In this prologue, a woman named LuLing speaks in a nostalgic tone about her nanny whom she calls “Precious Auntie”, a woman who had half of her face burned off by fire, under circumstances of which we are not told. LuLing remembers how Precious Auntie implored her not to forget their family name. However, we see that LuLing has forgotten it many years later and that the contents of her trunk of favourite things had been reduced to dust, a moving symbol of the entropy of memory.

Part one of the novel is crisply and refreshingly told through the voice of Ruth Young, an accomplished modern woman in San Francisco, the daughter of LuLing. She, in a bit of delicious irony, is a ghostwriter for self-help novels. One day she is handed a stack of papers by her English-challenged mother, who says that it is “[her] story, begin little-girl time”. Ruth, busy and harried, puts finding a translator so she could understand the papers at the bottom of her to-do list. A reader can well relate to this burial of truly important things by the frantic shovel of modern life.
The rest of part one alternates between Ruth’s telling of stories of her past, to Ruth’s dealing with LuLing’s growing problems. These two periods of time provide an interesting contrast; Ruth recounts how her childhood was ruled by a demanding and superstitious mother, but the adult Ruth finds that the roles have reversed; she must take care of LuLing, whose memory is degrading at an alarming rate. The climax of this section of the book finds Ruth and LuLing at the doctor’s office, and the terrible truth is revealed— LuLing is diagnosed with dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s disease.

At this point, Ruth desperately tries to find out as much as she can about the mother she never really knew, before it is too late. Ruth searches LuLing’s home and finds another stack of papers under a floorboard, this time beginning with the words “these are the things I should not forget”. Ruth finally gets the papers translated, and part two of the novel consists of the contents of the second stack of LuLing’s writing.

The major themes of the book have already been exposed and explored at this point of the story. The heart of the novel lies in the idea of words, names and tales. Many of these things go missing in different ways throughout the book, be it through Ruth’s laryngitis, LuLing’s inability to speak proper English or Precious Auntie’s inability to speak at all. However, the written word withstands the test of time. Through it, important secrets can finally be revealed and relationships can be made stronger than blood, as strong as bone.

The second part of The Bonesetter’s Daughter is the most interesting, told through the eyes of LuLing as a girl, telling the story of her life from China to America, and there is a story within this story as well, that of Precious Auntie and the circumstances of her disfigurement and death. This part of the novel, as opposed to the first part’s concise and modern style, is told thoughtfully and nostalgically, slowly painting bright pictures with dust-filled brushes. The fact that LuLing’s story is told like our parents would tell their stories to us makes it an even more poignant tale.

Part three, the final part of the novel told once more through Ruth’s eyes, may seem a tad overdone. However, despite the transformation of Ruth’s husband into an all-too-perfect figure and the simplistic solution to the problem of LuLing’s care, it is nonetheless the emotional climax of the book. It is here where the words that shouldn’t be spoken and where the words that should have been spoken but haven’t all come out into the open. Some problems are left unsolved, but in a heart-rending way— many of them are simply forgotten. Once again, only the written word can withstand the test of time.

One of Amy Tan’s greatest strengths lies in the vividness of her characters. Rather than paint characters in broad brushstrokes from the inside out, she paints them with small brushstrokes from the outside in, using a character’s personal habits and quirks in speaking and presentation to reveal more about their character. Ruth’s eccentricity of listing all of her daily tasks on her ten fingers gives the reader a sense of the simple-yet-organized character of Ruth, and LuLing’s same habit but instead with Chinese-style digital counting hints at her refusal to conform to American traditions. Tan constructs her plots in the same outside-in way. This style keeps her reader’s attention to the very end; one is never bogged down in her light prose, heavy as her subject matter may be.

Though the transition from present-day San Francisco to early 20th century China and earlier may seem jarring at first, the reader soon realizes another point is being made. The comparison between the respective childhoods of Ruth, LuLing and Precious Auntie makes one realize that the differences between the three are only at the surface, and all of their stories have the core themes of parental command, misfortune and exploration in common.

Is this comparison, so important to the novel, made to reveal how little our society has changed in respect to its treatment of women, or is Tan trying to show how the written word is able to bring all memories to the same level of recollection? Looking at both the main theme of The Bonesetter’s Daughter and the common theme of feminism through all of Amy Tan’s work, it can be said that it is a bit of both.

Our words may be all that are left of us in the end, but Tan did not use these different bones to create a dinosaur of a novel. The Bonesetter’s Daughter is a book with flesh-and-blood characters and it is definitely a novel with heart.