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 A mother's past is the key to understanding and healing for her daughter.  my Tan's new novel opens with an intriguing dedication: "On the last day that my mother spent on earth, I learned her real name, as well as that of my grandmother. This book is dedicated to them."  Like all of Tan's fiction, The Bonesetter's Daughter sprang from seeds of Tan's family heritage. Her mother's turbulent life in China has fed Tan's imagination to create four dramatic and emotionally engaging novels, which have helped countless readers connect with the Chinese-American experience.
Yet Tan herself balks at the label of Asian-American writer. "I don't see myself writing about culture and the immigrant experience," she tells one interviewer. "That's just part of the tapestry." Though the East-West dichotomy colors her stories with a vivid historical and cultural context, Tan explores the connections between individuals and families rather than continents and cultures. Like Tan's other novels, The Bonesetter's Daughter focuses on the relationship between mother and daughter, with the mother's past as a key to understanding and healing in the present. The reader travels between the two perspectives with two distant but interconnected stories: from present-day San Francisco to precommunist China. The novel opens with a portion of a manuscript written by the mother, LuLing, recalling with clarity the details of the long-ago winter morning when her nursemaid Precious Auntie revealed her family name and told LuLing to remember it. Precious Auntie, who had become disfigured and mute after a tragic suicide attempt, could only speak in gestures, grimaces, and groans, yet LuLing understood every unspoken word. Decades later, LuLing searches her memory for this family name because, as she later discovered, Precious Auntie was her real mother: "Precious Auntie, what is our name? I always meant to claim it as my own. Come help me remember. I'm not a little girl anymore. I'm not afraid of ghosts. Are you still mad at me? Don't you recognize me? I am LuLing, your daughter." An abrupt change of scene brings us to present-day San Francisco and LuLing's forty-something daughter Ruth, who mysteriously loses her voice for one week each year. Her muteness is a metaphor for the passive role she has assumed in her relationship with her partner Art and his two teenaged daughters, who take her endless caregiving for granted. Ironically, Ruth ghostwrites self-help books yet remains woefully unaware of her own inner life. Though she has made a profession of speaking for others, she is unable to ask for her own needs or even articulate them. Her silence also suggests the secrecy that has fractured her relationship with her mother. Though Ruth and LuLing both long for understanding and reconciliation, they are held back by their habit of silence. Emotional barriers to communication  uth's silence, which always coincides with the appearance of meteor showers in the sky, links her with Precious Auntie, whose real name sounds like "shooting star." LuLing says that seeing a shooting star means a ghost is trying to contact you, but Ruth dismisses this as her mother's morbid superstition. However, this interpretation suggests that Ruth's profession as ghostwriter could be taken literally. In fact, when Ruth was a child, LuLing believed that the ghost of Precious Auntie spoke through Ruth via messages written on a sand tray.
When Ruth comes across a manuscript written by her mother, she feels pangs of  guilt for not making the effort to translate it. The untranslated manuscript becomes a symbol of LuLing herself, who remains misunderstood by her daughter. Ruth views her mother as a woman bent on unhappiness and recalls with some bitterness LuLing's erratic behavior--her ongoing depression, morbid view of the world, and repeated threats of suicide.
Ruth also remembers how LuLing would embarrass her by seeming too Chinese at a time when she was so anxious to consider herself American. As in previous works, Tan skillfully portrays the growing pains of the second-generation child humiliated by her mother's inability to assimilate: "Her mother couldn't even say Ruth's name right. It used to mortify Ruth when she shouted for her up and down the block. 'Lootie! Lootie!' Why had her mother chosen a name with sounds she couldn't pronounce?" When her behavior becomes even more unpredictable, Ruth accompanies her to a doctor and is terrified to learn that LuLing suffers from Alzheimer's. Communication constitutes a dominant motif in the novel, with characters who are unable to voice their true emotions. Linguistic barriers are overcome easily enough. LuLing was able to translate Precious Auntie's unique sign language for others, just as Ruth served as her mother's interpreter while growing up: "By the time she was ten, Ruth was the English-speaking 'Mrs. LuLing Young' on the telephone, the one who made appointments for the doctor, who
While spoken words repeatedly elude the women in the novel, they are able to reveal themselves in writing. This contrasts with Tan's previous novels, in which the women relate their histories orally, in keeping with the Chinese tradition of "talk story." Through its distance and rational control, the written word becomes a safe means of expression for women conditioned to internalize secret shames. As Precious Auntie advised LuLing, and later Ruth, writing should be a carefully planned aesthetic experience: "Think about your intentions ... What is in your heart, what you want to put in others.' " As a girl, Ruth could only express herself freely in a diary, which her mother repeatedly found and read. Frustrated, Ruth used her diary as a weapon one day by writing, "You talk about killing yourself, so why don't you ever do it ... Precious Auntie wants you to, and so do I!" The next day, she discovered that her mother had suffered broken bones after jumping out the window. Stricken with guilt, Ruth crossed out the hateful words and wrote, "I'm sorry. Sometimes I just wish you would say you're sorry too." It is unlikely that her mother ever read these words, and since they never spoke of the incident, forgiveness continued to elude them. Like Ruth's diary, LuLing's manuscript becomes her only outlet for honest communication. She begins it with a simple yet powerful statement: "These are the things I know are true." Precious Auntie also wrote a manuscript for LuLing revealing her own truths. Sadly, Precious Auntie's manuscript was read too late for mother and daughter to reconcile--a clear limitation of the written word compared to the immediacy of talk story. When Ruth discovers her mother's complete manuscript, she seems to know that time is growing short for them as well: "She sensed that her mother's life was at stake and the answer was in her hands, had been there all along." Things I must not forget  he second half of the novel is composed largely of LuLing's manuscript, a compelling journey into precommunist China. As Precious Auntie advises LuLing and, indirectly, Ruth, "A person should consider how things begin. A particular beginning results in a particular end."
The manuscript begins with Precious Auntie's story. She came from a family of bonesetters and bone collectors who excavated "dragon bones" from a nearby mountain and ground them for healing. When Precious Auntie rejected one suitor--a sly coffin maker named Chang--in favor of a young man from a well-respected family of ink makers, Chang vowed revenge. A month before the wedding, her fianc?came to Precious Auntie's room, and they eagerly began their nuptials. On their wedding day, bandits invaded the wedding procession, and Precious Auntie recognized Chang's voice behind the disguise. Her father was killed by the bandits, and when her fianc?fired a pistol to the sky, his skull was cracked by a startled horse. Frantic with grief, Precious Auntie attempted suicide by swallowing a fiery black resin from the ink-making studio. Her fianc?s ghost appeared to Great-Granny demanding that his family save Precious Auntie. The daughter she bore, LuLing, was said to belong to First Sister, and Precious Auntie remained in the household as her nursemaid. Her fianc?s fractured skull led to a fractured family whose heritage could not be embraced out of shame. Images of bones haunt the manuscript. They are instruments of healing, such as the dragon bones used as medicine. They are also vehicles for communication, such as the oracle bones used to speak with the gods. Then when scientists begin excavating fossils from the mountain, they become keys to understanding the past. All these metaphors relate to LuLing's manuscript; it is an instrument for healing and communication with her daughter and a key for Ruth's understanding of her heritage. Caring for the bones of ancestors becomes a literal means of preserving one's family history. Precious Auntie worries about safeguarding her family's bones in a secret cave, and after Precious Auntie's death, LuLing becomes obsessed with her bones, which were never properly buried. The act of excavation is also reflected in LuLing's manuscript, as she digs deep into her memory to uncover and reconstruct the past. As Tan states to one interviewer, "It's taken a lot of excavation to discover the names and layers of history [in my family], which is why I decided to include all these archaeological things like the discovery of Peking Man in my new book. ... It was much like digging and digging and discovering at last what the truth was, then losing the person you had just discovered." The coffin maker Chang became rich by selling the bones he stole from Precious Auntie's wedding procession to scientists. Seeking favor from the rich and famous Chang, LuLing boasted to him about Precious Auntie's secret cave. Soon after came a proposed match for LuLing with one of Chang's sons. Rebelling against Precious Auntie, whom LuLing still believed to be her
Instead of pleading, Precious Auntie remained silent for days and then presented LuLing with a manuscript she had written, saying, "Now I will show you the truth." But LuLing rejected these pages and did not read Precious Auntie's final statement declaring that she was LuLing's mother. When questioned, however, she lied. "Now that you have read my story, what do you feel toward me?" asked Precious Auntie. Spitefully, LuLing replied, "Even if the whole Chang family were murderers and thieves, I would join them just to get away from you." The next morning, she discovered that Precious Auntie had killed herself and her body was thrown into the ravine. At last, LuLing read Precious Auntie's pages and learned the truth--too late for reconciliation. She later found an oracle bone and wedding picture in the pocket of Precious Auntie's manuscript. Looking at the picture, LuLing realized, "Her face, her hope, her knowledge, her sadness--they were mine." This legacy passed from mother to daughter was in her bones; this was also Ruth's legacy to discover. LuLing was sent to an orphanage run by American missionaries and taken in only because of her ability to write and serve as a tutor, a skill she learned from Precious Auntie. As the best calligraphy student, LuLing found power in the written word. The act of writing also served as a vehicle for romance when LuLing fell in love with Kai Jing, a geologist and son to one of the teachers at the orphanage. They first realized their love while doing calligraphy side by side, "the same curve, the same dot, the same lifting of the brush as our breath filled as one." In keeping with the characters' reticence about emotional expression, Kai Jing declared his love indirectly by describing the qualities of sublime calligraphy called "Effortless": "We can sense it only if we do not try to sense it. It occurs without motivation or desire or knowledge of what may result. It is pure ... It is the natural wonder that anything exists in relation to another, an inky oval to a page of white paper." LuLing, of course, understood his true meaning: "Anyone who ov erheard us would have thought we were speaking of school lessons. But really, he was speaking of love ... the effortlessness with which one falls in love without intending to." Tan often portrays dismal marriages for women in old China, the result of matchmaking rather than love. Though LuLing was blessed with a happy union, her half-sister GaoLing married Chang Fu Nan--the opium-addicted son intended for LuLing. Her happiness with Kai Jing was short lived, however. After the Japanese invasion, he was seized by communist troops, who forced him to fight. Kai Jing briefly escaped when the Japanese scattered their troops, and he and LuLing shared their final hours together before he was captured and executed. "We are divine, unchanged by time," he promised her. These tragedies left LuLing permanently scarred, believing that a family curse plagued her. Years later in America, the loss of her second husband to a hit-and-run accident solidified her sense of doom, which she passed on to Ruth in the form of fear, caution, and an inability to accept love. Forget and forgive  f an abundance of good fortune in the novel's final pages leaves a saccharine aftertaste, Tan also weaves the mother-daughter saga into a satisfying reconciliation.
LuLing finally recalls Precious Auntie's family name: Gu, meaning "gorge" but also "bone" and "character." Her identity was unearthed from the gorge of memory, and it flashed  into LuLing's fragile mind for a brief moment, like a shooting star. Ruth can at last know these women who are in her bones, who make up her character. And in discovering her heritage, Ruth can uncover her own identity and write for herself rather than for others. She is no longer a ghostwriter, though she claims that the ghost of Precious Auntie is helping her discover her own voice.
As LuLing's memory fades, so does her fear: "Ruth remembers how her mother used to talk of dying, by curse or her own hand. She never stopped feeling the urge, not until she began to lose her mind, the memory web that held her woes in place." After all, as Precious Auntie once said, "What is the past but what we choose to remember?" Fading memory permits happiness and also forgiveness. Most of the novel portrays mothers and daughters who are unknown to each other, who can only communicate from a safe distance. Finally, LuLing utters words of apology to Ruth for the past, albeit a past she can no longer remember. Though Tan's novels all recount similar sagas of mothers and daughters reaching out to each other from distant shores, her gift for storytelling prevents any accusations of staleness. Tan's ability to transport the reader to another continent, another era, to resurrect the color, fragrance, texture, and taste of that faraway world filled with demons and remarkable heroines, makes each text a unique journey to be savored and remembered. 
Carol Cujec is a freelance writer who teaches at Lesley University and Emmanuel College. |
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