The Bonesetter's Daughter

The book I received was in great condition and it was mailed to me in a timely manner.

I've been a fan of Amy Tan's since The Joy Luck Club. I've followed her through The Kitchen God's Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses but by and large The Bonesetter's Daughter is her best all around effort. From two points of view we see the emergence of two daughters and two mothers and from different stages in life we can identify and embrace the innocence and indifference of childhood, the angst of young womanhood, and the pain of mother-daughter separation. Amy Tan's continued efforts at explaining the complex relationship between mothers and daughters is further understood in this novel as to how it can be affected by social, cultural and economical pressures. I felt that in this book Amy found the best balance between past and present and that she magically blended the right amount of mysticism with reality. The author has a wise and ancient soul and through her writing we can explore places and histories that have long been erased from the maps and pages of today's history books. Through the help of a translator, Ruth uncovers her mother's memoirs and discovers the life her mother led as a child and young woman. Ruth finds that although now weakened by age and illness her mother (LuLing) is not the woman she thought she was and through the gift of LuLing's memoirs, Ruth is able to see her mother for all of the things she has been, and not just what she has become. LuLing's headstrong determination as a child, her intelligence and strength as a young woman and her willingness to do whatever was necessary to create a better life for herself, for her family and eventually for Ruth are qualities to be admired. I quickly came to care for her character and was moved by her courage. Although pleased with the neatness in which the novel was completed, I was saddened that I had finished the book and will look forward to reading it again.Clearly, the heartache and the joy of motherhood are interwoven and from this tapestry we can discover that the basis for our relationships today were fabricated long before we ever lived. It is with this hindsight that we can only begin to piece together those parts of ourselves and our relationships that aren't quite yet complete. Ruth finds this. I did too.

In "The Bonesetter's Daughter," set in San Francisco and in North China, Amy Tan tells the story of Ruth Young and her mother, LuLing, in a story that reflects much of her own background. In the story, Ruth is a successful "book doctor," a ghostwriter who translates other people's thoughts into a coherent book--a skill at which she is adept. She is the "as told to" name below the author's, although the real creative effort is her own. Like Amy Tan herself, Ruth is in her forties, and the similarities do not stop there. While the book is not strictly autobiographical, there are a great many parallels between the author and Ruth. For example: both of their mothers were stricken with Altzheimers disease, and both had stormy relationships with their Chinese mothers, both of whom were suicidal.Ruth's mother, LuLing, came from China in the late 'forties, as did Amy Tan's mother. The story is told in three parts: first is Ruth's ten-year relationship with Art and his two daughters--teenagers in the story--with whom she lives; a relationship that is in trouble for reasons that Ruth cannot determine or resolve. Art seems to be a self-centered individual who takes advantage of Ruth's tendency to always place her own interests secondary.The second part of the story is LuLing's own story in China, which, fearing memory loss, she is writing, in Chinese calligraphy and which she eventually presents to her daughter. Ruth, because of their difficult relationship lets the manuscript gather dust for seven years, untranslated. LuLing's life story is a tale of tragedy and suffering, lost love and a tempestuous relationship with her own mother, Precious Auntie, which later--after her mother's death--haunts her.Finally, in the third section the focus is on Ruth and what she does with her new knowledge. The crux of the novel, however, is the second part: the story of LuLing in China, her turbulent relationship with her mother, and the war-torn environment of China in the 'forties.The story is about relationships, and the search by both LuLing and Ruth for their family's Chinese background, which is enveloped in mystery involving, among other things, the discovery, which actually took place in 1929-1937, of the bones of Homo-erectus, also known as Peking man, which were found in a cave at Zhoukoudian, near Peiping (now known as Beijing). Amy Tan has drawn on her own experiences to create her characters. In fact, in an interview with Nita Lelyveld, she says that her own mother was her muse. She could hear her mother's voice saying the things that LuLing said, and that she "did her best never to listen to her mother." In a parallel to Ruth's relationship with LuLing, and in turn, LuLing's with her mother, she says "my mother drove me crazy,"This is a sensitive, emotion-driven story about mothers and daughters, told by an excellent writer who has lived the things she writes about. Amy Tan is a woman writing about women. A wonderful story. It held my in

By now, like it or not, Amy Tan has made an impressive mark in American literature. She is truly a gifted storyteller with a pair of sharp ears for fluid language and dialogues. Tan has captured the audience, both national and international, in 1989 with her clever and easy-to-read "Joy Luck Club." Subsequently, Tan continues to dazzle her readers with the more coherent "The Kitchen God's Wife" and the cartoonish and somewhat weak-plotted "A Hundred Secret Senses." However and fortunately, Tan once again recaptures her glory with "The Bonesetter's Daughter." "The Bonesetter's Daughter" is a touching portrait of a daughter searching for her mother's gradual loss of memory and history. Ruth, ironically, a ghostwriter of self-help books, begins to suspect that there is something wrong with her mother, LuLing, who meanwhile is grasping as much of her waning memory as possible. Tan, again, uses the themes of oral-telling and history to weave an important lesson of preserving one's heritage. Furthermore, having losing her own mother to Alzheimer in real life, Tan timely incorporates the vitally important theme of the dreadful disease. As usual, Tan's language is effortless and flowing like a zen waterfall -- smooth and consistent. "Yet I have memory of her telling me with her hands, I can see her saying this with her eyes.When it is dark, she says this to me in a clear voice I have never heard. She speaks in the language of shooting star" reads like a luminous lantern flickering behind the back of the reader. Symbollically, LuLing's memory is short but bright. Luling's part (II)is so powerfully written that it stands out by itself. For those critics who accuse Tan of rehashing the themes of mother-and-daughter, it is absolutely unfair and unsubstantiated. Yes, Tan has the annoying habit of portraying Asian/ Asian American men in such negative light (As an Asian American man, I cannot stand the movie version of the "Joy Luck Club"). However, to attack her for her themes is totally unnecessary. It is like persecuting William Faulkner for his writing of Mississippi or of the Sartoris clan, or Louise Erdrich of her Indian heritage, or John Updike of middle-class family tragedies. Nonetheless, what makes Tan's works less challenging than others is her too neat and conventional endings. Everything always ends predictably resolved, leaving no room for readers to ponder or soak in the emotion. Regardless, "The Bonesetter's Daughter" is a great book, perhaps her best yet. Racial politics aside, Amy Tan is a natural-born storyteller in the tradition of Willa Cather and Louise Erdrich.

By seamlessly interweaving contemporary Asian-American life with life in long ago China, bestselling author Amy Tan reminds us of how the past affects the present. Ruth Young, a California ghostwriter, is unable to express her feelings to the man with whom she has had a ten-year relationship. When LuLing, her wearisome, dictatorial mother, becomes a victim of Alzheimer's disease, Ruth sees that without a mother's memory her own sense of identity may be lost. Fortunately, LuLing has kept a diary of events that occurred during her childhood in China - the discovery of the Peking Man's bones, invasion by the Japanese, the rise of Communism. We learn of Precious Annie, her nursemaid, who was burned so terribly that her mouth was sealed by scar tissue and she could not speak. Speechlessness, an inability to communicate has haunted three generations until the day that Ruth reads of her mother's tortured past and comes to understand her. Ms. Tan, who collected her own mother's stories, well knows the value of personal history even though at times the past is "what we choose to remember."