"For
nine hundred years, Precious Auntie's family had been bonesetters.
That was the tradition. Her father's customers were mostly men and
boys who were crushed in the coal mines and limestone quarries. He
treated other maladies when necessary, but bonesetting was his
specialty. He did not have to go to a special school to be a bone
doctor. He learned from watching his father, and his father learned
from his father before him. That was their inheritance. They also
passed along the secret location for finding the best dragon bones,
a place called the Monkey's Jaw. An ancestor from the time of the
Sung Dynasty had found the cave in the deepest ravines of the dry
riverbed. Each generation dug deeper and deeper, with one soft
crack in the cave leading to another farther in. And the secret of
the exact location was also a family heirloom, passed from
generation to generation, father to son, and in Precious Auntie's
time, father to daughter to me."Like
Amy Tan's previous three novels, THE BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER
traverses time and geography, spanning China and America with a
complex bridge of generational secrets. The fact that this is
common to all her fiction in no way lessens the impact here. Tan's
latest offering is her best yet, surpassing even THE JOY LUCK CLUB
in its insight into both the painful intricacies of mother/daughter
relationships and the tender, awkward dance between women and
men.THE
BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER opens with a flashback of a young girl in
China and her nursemaid, Precious Auntie, who communicates in
eloquent sign language understood only by her charge. It soon
becomes apparent that the young girl is LuLing, now a mature woman
who has lived for many years in San Francisco and who has a grown
daughter named Ruth.Ruth's story, set in the present, is told over the next 150
pages. A ghostwriter of self-help books, Ruth reflects on her
struggles with Art, a linguistics consultant with two difficult
teenage daughters, as she waits out her latest bout of annual
psychological laryngitis.Life
for Ruth is made infinitely more complicated by her thorny
relationship with her mother LuLing. As far back as they can
remember, "they were two people caught in a sandstorm, blasted by
pain and each blaming the other as the origin of the wind."
Remembering is now at the crux of Ruth's problems. She comes across
pages handwritten in Chinese that LuLing entrusted to her ages ago
just as LuLing is beginning to lose her grasp on the
present.This
novel has had an extraordinary history. Tan turned the finished
manuscript into her publishers and then confiscated it after her
mother's death and rewrote it entirely. For much of the five years
between publication of THE HUNDRED SECRET SENSES and her new novel,
Amy Tan was dealing with her mother's progressive Alzheimer's, and
it's obvious that this is a very personal book for her: "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."Amy
Tan has turned what must have been an emotional bombshell into a
beautifully nuanced tale, not only of the complicated relationships
between loved ones but also of the constantly evolving
relationships between history and truth, language and
memory.Ruth
is a strong, intelligent woman who spent her childhood embarrassed
and angered by her Chinese mother and much of her adult life
exhausted by the struggle that has become second nature to them
both. It is only as she reads LuLing's story that she becomes aware
of the child her mother was and the forces that molded that child
into the woman Ruth is finally, truly, beginning to know and
accept.The
middle of the novel is a first-person telling of LuLing's childhood
and how she came to America. Tan's talent is taking one person's
life and weaving through it a historical context that enriches the
individual one. THE BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER travels through China
past and present, a journey that includes ink making, archaeology,
world war, and communism. Yet, whether Tan is describing a mission
school, the Peking Man furor, the Nanking massacre, or the cultural
revolution, there is never the sense of being spoon fed facts; we
are conscious only of the characters and their diverse reactions to
the historical maelstroms that sweep them along and the everyday
occurrences that alter their lives in small but profound
ways.

Nestled one within another like hollow wooden dolls, the
secrets of LuLing come slowly to light under Amy Tan's deft pen. As
Ruth's life is forever changed by her mother's revelations, we are
subtly reminded of the pitifully short time each of us has with our
loved ones and how often we take for granted their memories and
experiences. A poignant and often humorous book, THE BONESETTER'S
DAUGHTER is an example of the best in writing and storytelling, a
novel that transcends culture and history to strike at the heart of
what makes us human.