Mothers and daughters caught between contrasting cultures and weighty, secretive memories have dominated the work of Chinese-American writer Amy Tan since the publication of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, in 1989. It became a bestseller and that success was followed by a film version. Even at its most affecting, her storytelling was buoyed up by a good nature and warmth that made lively use of the confusion, and at times comic loss of meaning, caused by the translation process. Her new novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, is her first for six years and despite her early success seems in danger of being overlooked. Why?
Tan's characters are invariably tough little elderly Chinese ladies who remain true to the old country while living in the New World, the strange place their daughters inhabit and refer to as home. Her bouncy debut retains the charm of oral storytelling merged with the hard-headedness of mysteries determined to be finally solved. Above all, Tan, born in California in 1952, had a mission, to give voice to Chinese America, particularly the population of the West Coast.
The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) followed, again making effective use of daughters caught up in cross-cultural tensions. The Chinese want to be American, while the US-born second generation is troubled by feeling insufficiently American because of the emotional pull exerted by a country they have never visited although they carry its map on their faces. Those lively first books exude freshness, colour and a natural feel for the layers of history creating family myths and scandals. If Tan, for all her success, had a problem, it was the slight hint of "feelgood" hovering close by.
On the publication of her slight third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), that irritating "feel-good" factor emerged with all the unsettling syrup of a Tom Hanks Oscar acceptance speech. The comedy was certainly sharper and more obviously American-toned. Olivia Yee, the snappy, smart-talking narrator, is the child of a Chinese father but her mother comes from Idaho. Olivia's main problem is the existence of a half-sister, Kwan, who was brought to America by Olivia's mother shortly after her father's death. Tan explores preoccupations that are more territorial than cultural. Through the presence of the simple Kwan, the "ghost-talker" given to communicating with the dead, the strongly all-American Olivia reluctantly beings to feel Chinese. "She pushed her Chinese secrets into my brain and changed how I thought about the world. Soon I was even having nightmares in Chinese."
The grown Olivia has worse problems to deal with than her kindly half-sister. Her marriage is falling apart. Therein lies the weakness of that third book, a novel that not even the loveable Kwan can salvage. Tan abruptly rushes a weak narrative from childhood resentments to adult frustrations. It underlined a weakness apparent in her writing - she tends to be at her most self-conscious when writing the present-day US chapters. The best sequences of the book are those when Tan is describing life in a Chinese village. When her narratives move to China, the home she first visited at 35, her prose not only relaxes, it acquires a stylistic grace noticeably lacking in her American sequences.
All of which explains why the publication of Tan's fourth novel after that six-year silence seems far less exciting than might have been expected. That said, The Bonesetter's Daughter is not only an intimate and moving novel, it is an assured and curiously profound performance from Tan. Returning to her theme of mothers and daughters, she intensifies it by concentrating on her bewildered narrator, Ruth, a woman increasingly terrified by her aged mother's apparent loss of memory. Ruth works as a ghostwriter, mainly for authors of self-help books. This is interesting as Ruth, a self-effacing character who lives with a divorced American and has been involved over the years with his daughters, has reached a personal crisis of her own. The girls are now teenagers and are no longer as affectionate to her as they had been.
Ruth's vulnerability proves a strength and gives Tan's narrative an insistent conviction that never threatens to overpower the story, or rather stories. Ruth's old mother, now in her 80s, has managed to survive in the US by living tightly within a Chinese cocoon of wariness and suspicion. As Ruth was her translator, she has never bothered to unravel the mysteries of English, preferring instead to bully her child into learning Chinese script. Ruth's memories of her childhood are genuinely sad and well handled by Tan who here displays a sensitivity and intelligence far more profound than previously revealed. The old lady, LuLing, has her comic outbursts, yet is never reduced to a loveable caricature. Instead she is a woman haunted by her own guilty memories.
IT IS TRUE that, as with Tan's other novels, the most vivid writing is reserved for the sequences taking place in the past in China. This time, it is the remote village where LuLing was raised by a mute servant, Precious Auntie, whose relationship to her is far closer and more complex. As the layers of story go deeper, there is also Precious Auntie's experiences and brutal tragedy. Yet Tan is also unexpectedly in control of the present-day domestic episodes and the tensions Ruth faces within her extended family.
It never quite arrives at the expected happy ending. Nor does Tan become overly didactic on the issue of women's rights. The tone throughout is blunt rather than nostalgic. "During all these discussions," recalls LuLing, "I did not ask if my future husband was smart, if he was educated, if he was kind. I did not think about romantic love. I knew nothing of that. But I did know that marriage had to do with whether I improved my station in life or made it worse." The plot is also laced with multiple gentle ironies. Ruth only really begins to know her mother on reading the memoirs LuLing wrote because her memory was failing. Ruth, herself a ghost-writer, is also dependent on a translator. Through learning about her mother, she also discovers her grandmother.
Love in its many guises is also explored by Tan through the sympathetic character of Ruth, possibly her most engaging, certainly her least flamboyant and definitely her most human creation to date. Readers who may have felt Tan had exhausted her stories about mothers and daughters will be impressed by a deceptively simple novel suggesting she has finally learnt to balance optimism with the darker realities of lives trapped by cultural complexities and family history.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
