Amy Tan has become a best-selling American writer because she knows and describes modern American life exceptionally well while at the same time keeping her Chinese heritage firmly in view.
The effect of this is that she is educating her readers in what it's like to be Chinese, but beginning entirely with the readers' own known world and viewpoint. This puts her at a considerable advantage over the many first-generation Chinese immigrants to the US who write books about the China they knew in their youth, but who present China almost entirely from a Chinese viewpoint.
Tan's new novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, is organized in three sections. In Part One we meet Ruth Young, a woman living in modern San Francisco and working as an "improver" of self-help books, someone whose name appears on the title page after the words "as told to" or simply "with." The book she is currently working on is entitled "Internet Spirituality" and is the 35th such work she has helped write in this manner. She lives with Art, a man she met at her health club and who has part-custody of two daughters by his former wife, Miriam.
Ruth's aging mother, LuLing, lives nearby. Born in China, the mother has never fully adjusted to American life. Moreover, Ruth is now afraid LuLing's mental capacities may be weakening. During a Moon Festival dinner in a local Chinese restaurant, where Ruth is annoyed because Art has insisted on bringing Miriam along, LuLing passes round a necklace which she claims is a priceless Chinese heirloom. Ruth, however, knows that it's a cheap present she bought back for her mother from a holiday in Tahiti. She decides to take LuLing in for a check-up.
The diagnosis is dementia, and before long LuLing is wandering around the neighborhood in bedroom slippers and filling her freezer with carefully-wrapped items of garbage.
After a number of flashbacks to Ruth's childhood -- visits to hippies in Haight-Ashbury, difficult relations with boys, a secret diary that her mother finds and reads -- the first section concludes. Art has gone on vacation to Hawaii alone, while Ruth, fired from her job editing "Internet Spirituality," is approaching a state of quiet desperation.
Part Two is set in pre-revolutionary China and is narrated by the young LuLing. She was born in 1915, in a village on the edge of a ravine. In this ravine was a cave containing a mass of bones, traditionally considered to be the remains of dragons and ground down by the local apothecaries to make a high-priced medication. One day, however, scientists arrive and quickly declare the bones to be human and at least a million years old. This, they declare, is Peking Man, and the numerous bits of bone the oldest human remains ever found in China.
The news is a mixed blessing for the villagers. Though substantial rewards are offered for any bone fragments, the idea that all their lives they have been consuming the powdered remains of ancestors is troubling indeed, with repercussions that they can hardly fathom.
Prominent in this story is Precious Auntie, a fiercely independent woman who in actual fact turns out to be LuLing's mother. When she is first mentioned she features only as a gnarled figure with a twisted face following serious burns. Her father was a locally famous bonesetter, and it's Precious Auntie who consequently emerges as the person to whom the book's title refers.
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