The Joy Luck Club was in hs freshie year,
and The Kitchen God's Wife was around half(?) a year ago
can't remember if i was going to write a commentary for kitchen god
but this review isn't about that- it's The Bonesetter's Daughter,
a book which i had no idea existed til i saw it for purchase at the library
i asked them if they took apple pay and they said i could just leave now
and give em a donation later LMAO
(don't worry, i gave them some money in the box the day after)
also before i start i just wanted to show yall this generational clip from the book just LOOK AT IT:
Ruth stood, and that's when she noticed the dampness on her bottom. The toilet seat had been wet! [...] Ruth thought about rubbing the pee off with toilet paper. But then she decided it was a sign, like a pledge of love. It was Lance's pee, his gems, and leaving it on made her feel brave and romantic.
ok that's out of the way, let the actual writing begin
This is a work of fiction, and I have no clue how a reflection on one of these kinds of books is supposed to go. As I sit here writing this disclaimer, the vision is that I'm going to dump every single vaguely introspective thought and comment I had while reading and hope something coherent comes out of it. With my attention span so short, it's a miracle I can write anything at all.
Also, I'm pretty sure I'm not in the set of people this book is supposed to be relatable for. This is not unprecedented; nearly all of Amy Tan's books focus on mother-daughter relationships with only a dash of actual Chinese stuff here and there. Not saying this detracts from it being a good book, but it's just that my perspective might be a bit... uninformed? Not sure if that's the best way to describe it, but it is what it is.
The Bonesetter's Daughter follows the standard Tan formula. That's not really saying much, given that she has less than five novels published, but the pattern is still there. It's a tale of a mom, LuLing, who had a crazy life in China before immigrating to the US, and her ABC daughter, Ruth.
It's told from both parties' perspectives. Ruth struggles to both connect with her mother and sort out her own life. while LuLing reminisces about her chaotic past in China. The latter's story is told in the context of an essay she writes in Chinese. It does require a bit of disbelief since it takes up like a hundred pages and they're just supposedly stashed in a couch(?) somewhere.
That tiny thing aside, it's pretty heartwarming. Ruth finds the papers, reads about her mother (who gets diagnosed with dementia), and sees how it recontextualizes a lot of stuff she'd gone through as a child. LuLing does end up in a nursing home, but their relationship is improved nonetheless.
Yeah, this was certainly an enjoyable read. The sentences were fun, the plot was understandable, and most of the stuff was tied up with a nice little bow at the end. It's not really a happy ending (I don't think any of her books have what could really be called one of those), but it is a happier ending. In this hellhole of a world, I feel like that's the best we can do.
Despite this, there was always that little bother at the back of my mind that was also there when I read her other two books. When I picked up The Joy Luck Club for English class, I was pretty damn excited to read it. I mean, it was about some second gen Chinese people and their parents. That was basically me! Surely this book would be hella relatable, right?
The thing is, Tan's daughters are older than my mom. Their parents had to go through WW2 and cope with the civil war and eventual turn to communism. By the time my parents were born, Mao had one foot in the grave. Their experiences and motivations couldn't be more different.
Tan's mothers mainly had to deal with oppressive family dynamics. Themes regarding this got drilled into my head over and over again by my English teachers, something about the patriarchy and eggs cracking against walls. Even without their lectures, though, it was painfully obvious. The China in Tan's books demonstrates this every single moment, from the arranged marriages to the comical amount of elder respect. Reading these felt so outdated and strange it seemed foreign. Had we really come from the same country?
Maybe it's a symbol of how far China's come. This isn't even CCP glaze. The parents in Tan's books had to survive wars and a communist takeover. All my parents had to do was study well and get into a good college, and that was what a lot of my friend group's parents had to do too.
Or did they just get one stressor replaced with another? I remember my dad saying something about slaving for hours away on math problems. Granted, he was an olympiad sweat, but was he really happier than LuLing as a kid? Most days she probably just played in her old village of Immortal Heart, not caring at all about studying.
Even then, the new culture that came after the wars and all the political upheaval is regressing. There's these "cooling off" laws for divorce now, and the government is trying to get people to woohoo more (that one child policy sure worked out well, huh?). Perhaps in a couple generations Asian immigrants are gonna relate to Tan's stories more than my generation (or at least I) can.
But, well, that was that. Uh, moving on to other things!
There's a weird supernatural thing that is mentioned only at the start and end of the book. Ruth loses her voice or a week yearly on August 12th. However, after learning "to speak for herself", she starts to write a book on her own. This supposedly was, what, the cure for her lost voice? I don't know, it's really weird. There's probably some profound thing to analyze here, but it just came off as a bit forced.
Also, for once four years of high school English somewhat paid off. My walnut-sized brain managed to recognize the connection between Ruth having to reword everything her mother said and her mother having to interpret whatever her mom ("Precious Auntie" in the book) said. There's also a connection to be made between her role as interpreter and job as a ghostwriter, where her clients dump thoughts onto her and she does what she can to put them on paper in an organized manner.
But on the topic of Precious Auntie, she supposedly speaks "with her hands and eyes" and that's enough to tell paragraphs worth of stories. How did that even work? Was she slapping them together like those ninjas in, what, Naruto or whatever? I know it wasn't sign language, because she has to do this because her face got absolutely SCREWED by an attempted suicide. If she was born mute I guess it makes sense, but not really here.
final rating: 9/10 some parts in the middle are a little bland, but would still recc. p good read, and i'm not even in the target audience