The Bonesetter's Daughter

by Amy Tan

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Amy Tan has established her literary career on the generational and cross-cultural tensions characteristic of immigrant Chinese mothers and their American daughters. The Bonesetter’s Daughter continues that tradition but with a sad personal note: one character develops Alzheimer’s disease, as did Tan’s mother, Daisy. As she dedicates the book to her mother and grandmother (“The heart of this story belongs to my grandmother, its voice to my mother”), Tan reveals that she never knew their real names until Daisy Tan’s death in 1999. A photograph of her grandmother in China appears on the book jacket and figures prominently in the novel.

Ruth Young has shared a San Francisco apartment with her Caucasian lover, Art Kamen, for the past nine years. At forty-six, she has finally managed to distance herself from her eccentric, Chinese-born mother, LuLing. However, Ruth is forced to reevaluate their relationship when she becomes aware that her mother’s behavior is growing dangerously erratic. LuLing fries eggs with the shells on, wanders the neighborhood in her pajamas, and believes she has won ten million dollars in a magazine sweepstakes. She is by turns depressed (“Look my sad life!”) and angry (“Maybe I die soon”). In one heartbreaking scene, she proudly informs her doctor that she has personally witnessed a notorious murder.

Ruth, a book doctor, is employed by authors to revise their self-help books in order to improve them. What she does not realize is that her mother has had to revise her entire life: her name, her birthdate, her marriage. While cleaning out a desk drawer, Ruth finds a manuscript that her mother once gave her and that she has avoided reading, containing LuLing’s account of her life in China. Written in flowing Chinese characters in her mother’s artistic hand, it begins: “These are the things I know are true.” (In fact, the first word of the novel is “Truth.”) The Chinese ideograms are nearly impossible for Ruth to translate, for she has always resisted whatever her mother wants to tell her. Now, facing LuLing’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and the responsibilities it will entail, she begins, laboriously, to translate her mother’s story.

LuLing’s autobiography begins with the history of her mute nursemaid, Precious Auntie, who emerges as a ghostly third presence in this novel. Born in China at the close of the nineteenth century, Precious Auntie (whose real name LuLing cannot remember) is the daughter of a highly respected doctor, a bonesetter from Mouth of the Mountain, a village in the Western Hills south of Peking (Beijing). He sets and heals bones that have been crushed in the local coal mines and limestone quarries, employing herbs, maggots, and bleeding as cures. The bonesetter is revered; his family has followed this profession for nine hundred years, father to son, with the aid of a secret cave filled with ancient dragon bones that, ground into powder, can cure any pain. These lucrative bones can also be taken to medicine shops in Peking and sold.

Precious Auntie is well educated by her father, who has already challenged tradition by refusing to bind her feet. Because she is his only remaining child, her mother and brothers having died of typhoid when she was four, he teaches her to heal others. When she is nineteen, a young man named Liu Hu Sen, from the neighboring village of Immortal Heart, seeks the bonesetter’s help because his skittish horse has stepped on his foot. At the same time, the infant son of coffinmaker Chang is brought in with a dislocated shoulder. Once Chang learns of the family’s hidden cave of dragon bones, he becomes interested...

(This entire section contains 1737 words.)

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in Precious Auntie as a second wife, but he is politely refused. Liu Hu Sen, a gentle soul from a reputable family of ink-makers in Immortal Heart, likewise seeks a wife and is soon betrothed to Precious Auntie. He courts her with poetry and comes to her at night; he is LuLing’s true father.

On her wedding day, Precious Auntie’s doctor-father spares no expense. Together they travel to the Liu clan’s village with carts, guards, and her dowry—a jar of opium and a jar of dragon bones. En route they are attacked by two men, one of whom is Chang, disguised as a Mongol bandit, who wants the valuable bones. Precious Auntie is knocked unconscious in the struggle, but her father’s neck is broken in a fall from his horse. She awakes to find her anxious bridegroom Hu Sen bending over her, but as he vows vengeance he is accidentally kicked by his startled horse and killed. The wedding never takes place.

Precious Auntie is carried to the Liu family compound. When Chang arrives with the coffins for her father and bridegroom, she accuses him, having recognized his voice, but no one will believe her. Instead, she is restrained and drugged. Waking after the funerals, she attempts to commit suicide by drinking boiling ink. The family matriarch, Great-Granny Liu, protects her and nurses her back to health, guided by the ghost of Hu Sen, who appears in her dreams. Although Precious Auntie survives the scalding, her lower face is permanently scarred and disfigured, and she loses all ability to speak. Voiceless and futile, she continues to spit and gesture whenever the treacherous Chang’s name is mentioned. Still the family ignores her warning. After she gives birth, her baby LuLing is taken in by Hu Sen’s eldest brother and his wife and is taught that they are her parents; their own child, GaoLing, is born five months later and becomes her “sister.” Precious Auntie is permitted to be her daughter’s nursemaid.

In 1929, when LuLing is an adolescent, scientists come to nearby Dragon Bone Hill to excavate bones. They quickly discover prehistoric human remains that they label Peking Man. Wishing to complete the skeleton, they ask villagers to help them find more bones. Soon coffinmaker Chang brings them the dragon bones he stole from Precious Auntie’s wedding caravan; they are found to be human, and he becomes famous and rich.

Great-Granny Liu grows weaker, afflicted with a confusion that is probably Alzheimer’s, although it is thought to be caused by a flea in her ear that is “feasting on her brain.” When she dies, Chang delivers her coffin and discovers by accident that LuLing knows where the hidden cave of bones is located. The Lius shortly receive a marriage proposal for LuLing on behalf of Chang’s fourth son. In desperation, Precious Auntie tries to warn her daughter of danger by writing out her own history, as LuLing will later do for Ruth. Rebellious LuLing repudiates her nursemaid, unaware of their true relationship, thereby compelling Precious Auntie to kill herself to save her child from a terrible marriage. Her dying threat to haunt the Changs forever produces the desired response; their proposal is promptly withdrawn, and the Lius angrily reject LuLing, sending her to an orphanage.

LuLing’s manuscript continues with her life at the orphanage, where she meets the young scientist who will be her first husband. Taught well by her mother, she becomes a teacher and artist, a calligrapher who produces beautiful poem-paintings. After Japanese soldiers invade China, she and her loyal sister GaoLing narrowly escape to Hong Kong and eventually to the United States, where they marry Chinese brothers and where Ruth is born.

The Bonesetter’s Daughter exhibits one underlying weakness, which can be found in all of Tan’s books. Like her fellow writer Louise Erdrich, Tan is much more successful with her ethnic characters than with the others. While her wonderful Chinese characters spring immediately to life, their descendants, the Chinese Americans such as Ruth, are inclined to be less effective, and the few Caucasians are largely stick figures without personality. Inasmuch as nearly half the novel focuses on Ruth, even though the most vivid section takes place in China, that weakness creates a problem.

The silencing of these women acts as a metaphor for their lack of power. Stress renders all three speechless. After scalding her throat, Precious Auntie has “no voice, just gasps and wheezes,” communicating only by gestures and writing. She is largely ignored. Only death, together with her threat of ghostly vengeance, invests her with real power for the first time. Likewise, her daughter LuLing is unable to speak when she first arrives at the orphanage, and unpleasant truths will always remain for her “things too bad to say.”

Ruth cannot speak up. She fears disorder and emotional explosions, dreading any confrontation with her volatile mother or her lover. From a childhood accident, she has learned to be silent so that others will be nice to her. As a teenager, she dares to express her resentment towards her mother in her diary, wishing LuLing would carry out her threats to kill herself. Disaster results: LuLing reads the diary, jumps from a window, and is injured. Ruth is guilt-stricken, as her mother was at Precious Auntie’s death. Once she moves into Art’s apartment, Ruth loses her voice for a week every August, during the Pleiades meteor shower. Even her favorite spicy turnips inflame her tongue and lips.

This novel of mother-daughter bonds reexamines what mothers teach and what daughters learn. These daughters believe that their mothers fail to realize that the world has changed, although the mothers know it has—and yet has not. The daughters have to empathize with and accept their mothers’ lives before they can be made whole. They must understand, like LuLing, that “a mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.”

The physical excavation of ancient ancestors has led Ruth’s mother and grandmother to unearth their past, revealing truths of identity, parentage, and name. Ruth’s search for selfhood results in reconciliation with her mother and acceptance of her heritage. The adult Ruth now determines that she must leave the apartment and return to LuLing’s home, to care for her disintegrating mother with duty and love. Once a ghostwriter for others, she becomes an author who writes her own story for herself, her mother, her grandmother: “These are the women who shaped her life, who are in her bones.”

Sources for Further Study

Booklist 97 (December 1, 2000): 676.

Library Journal 126 (February 1, 2001): 126.

The New York Times Book Review 106 (February 18, 2001): 9.

Publishers Weekly 247 (December 4, 2000): 51.

The Times Literary Supplement, March 16, 2001, p. 22.

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