Sun, Jul 08, 2001 page18

• Immigrants to a different time

  The best-selling author Amy Tan writes the voices of her grandmother adn mother in a tale of family and history that spans the last century and two continents

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  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.

  Events now come thick and fast. There's a fire, the Japanese invade China, Precious Auntie kills herself, and a ghost-catcher puts her spirit into a jar which he seals for, he claims, "many lifetimes."

  LuLing is then taken to an orphanage run by American missionaries. There she marries one of the scientists involved in the excavations, but soon he is killed fighting the Japanese. The pages describing their brief days of love are the most moving in the entire book.

  Eventually LuLing manages to get to Hong Kong where she lives in dreadful conditions in the Kowloon Walled City, works as a maid, then finally gets a place in steerage to San Francisco, with a visa as personal assistant to one of the sick American missionaries.

  Two important things can be deduced about this book from a brief prefatory note by the author. One is that it was difficult to write -- she thanks a writing teacher who, as editor, "resurrected this book during those days when I was scared to turn the pages" and kept her going through "times we can now acknowledge as dire." The other is that it is very extensively autobiographical. "The heart of this story belongs to my grandmother," Tan writes, "its voice to my mother."

  The book's considerable strength lies in its detail. Contemporary California and China 60 years ago could hardly be more different, but Amy Tan nonetheless manages to get under the skin of each. By treating California first she hooks her American readership by vividly, and often amusingly, describing a world they already know well. Then, in turning to the foreign world of China, she clearly hopes to carry them with her there too.

  In both settings she focuses on the details of everyday life that matter most to people -- what they eat for breakfast, how they look on the opposite sex, what they wear, what their houses are like, how they get their water supply. She shows no partisanship, and inhabits many worlds -- past and present, West and East -- without a glimmer of condescension, or any hint of preference.

  The brief final section involves further revelations, but is essentially a serene resolution of earlier misunderstandings and difficulties. The inevitable result of this is that LuLing, a character who seems like a crotchety and difficult old woman at the book's opening, becomes an entirely credible, and even heroic, figure by the end. This was clearly Tan's aim in writing the book, and equally clearly she succeeds.

  Publication Notes:
  

  The Bonesetter's daughter
  

  By Amy Tan
  

  308 pages
  

  Flamingo
  
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