You Should Read THE BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER by Amy Tan
Reading Notes
I meant to write this post last week, but September trampled my good intentions, which is just as well because Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter is a book of good intentions gone askew.
Ruth, a sought-after ghost writer, doesn’t always understand her mother, LuLing. As Ruth tells a colleague, “My mother’s been depressed and angry all her life” (48). When LuLing is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Ruth turns to her mother’s memoirs for answers about her past. In these pages, Ruth learns a history that is far different from the one she grew up hearing from her mother, who immigrated to the United States. In her attempt to protect her daughter from old family shame, LuLing builds an emotional wall between Ruth and herself.
LuLing’s withholding encourages Ruth to become self-sufficient, but it also unintentionally stunts Ruth’s ability to connect with others and accept love. Ruth’s partner, Art, accuses her of demanding “some kind of proof of love or loyalty” but refusing to see it when it’s offered (335). That pattern began a generation earlier, when LuLing’s mother hid her identity from LuLing. Precious Auntie didn’t want to burden her daughter, LuLing, with the truth of their relationship, and once Precious Auntie realized her mistake, it was too late. LuLing spends the rest of her life trying to interpret events as signs from Precious Auntie’s ghost.
Ruth must not only learn the truth about her mother but also reinterpret her own past. Despite her talent for translating other’s ideas into coherent books, Ruth lacks the patience to translate her mother’s journals or listen to her stories. This disconnect causes tension between the pair: “If Ruth showed impatience . . . LuLing became outraged, before sputtering an oath that none of this mattered because soon she too would die anyway, by accident, because of bad-luck wishes, or on purpose” (13). Ruth shuts down around LuLing. Though she keeps her opinions to herself, she maintains an internal running commentary of rebuttals and corrections. When LuLing comes over for dinner, Ruth silently asterisks everything LuLing says. She believes it is her duty to fact-check LuLing as a way to “unclog the pathways in her brain and prevent more destructive debris from accumulating” (102). If she can do this for her mother, perhaps they will be forgiven for hurting each other (99).
Amy Tan in conversation with Jeffrey Neuman on September 23, 2024.
Tan is well-known for her deft depictions of mothers and daughters, so it’s fitting that I got to see her with my mom when we attended the first event of the 2024-2025 Pen & Podium lecture series last week. Tan spoke about her latest nonfiction book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles. Sitting next to my mom, I couldn’t help but reflect on The Bonesetter’s Daughter and think about her mom, who, like LuLing, has Alzheimer’s. In that context, the novel became more than an exploration of mothers and daughters for me. Like Tan, I wonder: Who keeps memories, and what happens when those memories are gone?
One of the hardest parts of Alzheimer’s is the lack of predictability. On a macro level, books and doctors can certainly tell families to expect things like hallucinations and fixations, but on a micro level, they can’t tell families what the patient will hallucinate or how long those fixations will last. LuLing obsesses about money. She collects “sweepstakes promotion coupons[s] that resembl[e] checks” and tells Ruth she will win money for her (59). Despite having a significant amount of money in a secret investment account, she insists she is poor and turns down her sister’s invitation for a cruise trip.
My grandmother’s fixations shift and change, as unpredictable and yet ever-present as the ghost of Precious Auntie. They are as painful for my mom as the memory of Precious Auntie is for LuLing, too.
My program and ticket from Pen & Podium, along with the barely legible notes I scribbled in the dark auditorium.
At Pen & Podium, Tan said, “What I have to do as a writer is believe there are no expectations.” Although she was explaining why she doesn’t read reviews of her work anymore (and was also speaking 23 years after the publication of The Bonesetter’s Daughter), she could have been giving advice to Ruth, to my mom, to me. Expectations, perhaps as much as the loss of memory, make an Alzheimer’s diagnosis difficult for both patients and caregivers. My grandma becomes frustrated and confused when her reality doesn’t match what her fractured memory tells her to expect. In the same way, her family mourns the loss of the woman we remember. When I saw Grandma in May, I reminded her of the M&M rice krispie bars she made for us every summer at the lake. She had no memory of these treats, and she addressed my daughter by my name. I felt discouraged, fearing I’d waited too long to visit. But when she brought up the Christmas we spent together in Florida, she remembered all of the details that I remembered—even though the “Kate” she was speaking to was my daughter.
I thought of this moment when Ruth had a revelation:
“But her mother often surprised her with the clarity of her emotions when she spoke of her youth, elements of which matched in spirit what she had written in her memoir. To Ruth this was evidence that the pathways to her mother’s past were still open, though rutted in a few spots and marked by rambling detours. At times she also blended the past with memories from other periods of her own past. But that part of her history was nonetheless a reservoir which she could draw from and share. It didn’t matter that she blurred some of the finer points. The past, even revised, was meaningful.”
Whether your family has been touched by Alzheimer’s or not, I think you’ll find The Bonesetter’s Daughter meaningful, too.
Three generations from our visit to Minnesota in May 2024.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2001
Length: 368 pages; audiobook runs almost 12 hours
Setting: California, 1998; China, first half of 20th century
Narrator: 3rd POV from Ruth; 1st POV from journals of LuLing & Precious Auntie
Fun Fact: Amy Tan narrates the audiobook!
Book Club
When Ruth breaks her arm as a child, she stays silent for days afterward. The physical break leads to an emotional one. As an adult, Ruth loses her voice at the same time each year. In this case, a repressed hurt causes a physical change in her body. In what ways do physical and emotional wounds overlap? Have you ever experienced something similar?
Precious Auntie shows LuLing the oracle bone she inherited from her father, who was a respected bonesetter. But she doesn’t let LuLing keep it. She tells her, “Someday, when you know how to remember, I’ll give this to you to keep.” It’s easy to think of “remembering” as an automatic skill, especially when we are young. As we age, more effort needs to go into remembering—but at the same time, each time you remember or retell a story, you also create a new memory through the act of narration. (I wrote about this once). How do you tell the difference between an actual memory and a reconstructed one…to what extent does it matter?
Close Reading
One of my writing goals is to develop more interiority within my scenes. Luckily, Amy Tan is an excellent mentor. Here’s an example of such a passage:
“Ruth burst into sobs. She doubled over and began crying hysterically. She had wished for this, caused this to happen. She cried until she had dry heaves and was faint from hyperventilating. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Auntie Gal had to take Ruth to Emergency too. A nurse tried to make her breathe into a paper bag, which Ruth slapped away, and after that someone gave her a shot. She became weightless, all worries lifted from her limbs and mind. A dark, warm blanket was placed over her body, then pulled over her head. In this nothingness, she could hear her mother’s voice pronouncing to the doctors that her daughter was quiet at last because they were both dead.”
In the first two sentences, we know Ruth is extremely upset, but we don’t know how she feels about being so upset. By the third sentence, Tan puts the actions (“burst” and “double[s]”) to the side and does some psychological digging: “She had wished for this, caused this to happen.” Ah—it’s is more than distress Ruth is feeling. It’s guilt. After that brief insight Tan zooms out to Ruth’s exterior once more. She “dry heaves” and “hyperventilat[es]” until she is given a sedative. As Ruth retreats into her body, Tan lets us once more into her mind. She thinks she hears her mother’s voice, but we understand that she’s only projecting her own fears into the sounds around her.
I admire the balance of objective action and subjective emotion that Tan strikes here. A novel of straight action might be exciting, but it would also be superficial. At the same time, a novel of deep introspection might be intriguing, but it would also be exhausting. Going back and forth between the two modes of writing allows Tan to move the plot forward while also developing Ruth’s character. She doesn’t sacrifice momentum for interiority (or vice versa).
Creative Writing
Fiction: Precious Auntie describes the unusual freedom she was given as a girl. Her father educated and encouraged her, but gossiping neighbors judged his progressive parenting. She recalls, “I learned to read and write, to ask questions, to play riddles, to write eight-legged poems, to walk alone and admire nature. The old biddies used to warn him that it was dangerous that I was so boldly happy, instead of shy and cowering around strangers.”
Use that last sentence as a first sentence, but change the adjectives.
They used to warn him that it was dangerous that I was so ______, instead of ________.
Start with two contrasting adjectives. Then continue writing from the 1st POV and see what you discover about this character.
Nonfiction: Precious Auntie tells LuLing, “Good ink cannot be the quick kind, ready to pour out of a bottle. You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort.” On the other hand, researchers have found that artists, musicians, and thinkers who enter the flow state, or a feeling of being immersed in an action, demonstrate increased happiness. One might argue that an activity doesn’t seem hard when in a flow state. Under what conditions do you think you create your best work? Have you experienced a flow state? If so, what was it like? Describe your philosophy (and/or experiences) about the relationship between effort and art.
Sentence Study
In the study of poetry, we can differentiate between content, or a poem’s message, and form, or a poem’s structure. A concrete poem is one in which the words are arranged on the page in the shape of an object referenced in the poem in a perfect marriage of content and form. Tan achieves a similar effect in this sentence:
“And then came rambling about who told the secret, without saying what the secret itself was, followed by more rambling about how that person had died horribly, why this had happened, how it could have been avoided, if only such and such had not occurred a thousand years before”
First, she starts the sentence with “And,” which lets us know that we are already jumping into an idea that is adding on to a previous sentence. Everything after “rambling” is, in fact,” rambling: She includes a series of dependent clauses that pile one on top of the next. Chef’s kiss!
