Book Review: On the road to Mandalay - Amy Tan's First Novel Since Lyme Disease

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Book Review: On the road to Mandalay - Amy Tan's First Novel Since Lyme Disease

Original Source The Age (subscription), Australia

October 29, 2005

" She is definitely the voice of my mother, " says Tan, whose mother died in 1999

from Alzheimer's, after figuring prominently in Tan's previous novels, such as

The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter's Daughter. It was the start of a

very hard time for Tan. That same year she came down with Lyme disease. First it

attacked her body and then her brain - leading to hallucinations and trances.

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Amy Tan deals in fiction but her new novel travels to the very real politically

repressed nation of Burma, writes Freeman.

AMY TAN'S latest novel, Saving Fish from Drowning, begins with a rather cruel

hoax on the reader. It introduces Bibi Chen, a woman Tan professes to be real,

only later to present her to us as the narrator of this novel - from beyond the

grave.

Sitting in her SoHo loft, surrounded by two feisty Yorkshire terriers named Lily

and Bubba, Tan remains unapologetic about this gambit.

" Why would anyone believe me, " asks the 53-year-old novelist, when I tell her I

fell for the ruse, " I'm a fiction writer. I make things up. "

Indeed she does. Since making her debut in 1989 with The Joy Luck Club, Tan has

published three other novels, two children's books, a collection of essays, and

advised on a hit children's series.

But recently she began to question how faithfully people trust what is presented

as true. " I was starting to question where we get the truth, " she says.

" And I was interested in what happened when you looked at something that had the

appearance of authority. Like a note to the reader, you automatically assume

it's the truth. "

To read Saving Fish from Drowning is like entering a fun house mirror where

everything is upside down and backwards. Where what's true is false, and what's

false is true. Or maybe not.

Unfolding in Bibi's cranky, if amused register, the book describes the

misbegotten holiday taken by 12 wealthy, art-loving San Franciscans to the

country of Burma, or Myanmar, as the military dictatorship calls it.

A careful reader won't have to look hard to find a nod to Geoffrey Chaucer here,

and they'd be right to find it.

" I started outlining the story an hour after I finished writing The Bonesetter's

Daughter, " says Tan, " and imagined a Canterbury Tales goes to Burma. "

BUT THE similarities end there. For Chaucer's travellers did not find themselves

quite as lost in translation as do Tan's Americans. Mostly rich, mostly white,

and entirely unfamiliar with the culture into which they have dunked themselves

headfirst, they make a number of errors. The whopper of them all involves a

celebrity dog trainer urinating on a sacred shrine.

Bibi Chen looks down on this debacle with a bemused and often lashing humour.

She critiques the decor of their hotel, and ridicules her friends for being so

tacky as to have a Christmas lunch in a Buddhist country.

" She is definitely the voice of my mother, " says Tan, whose mother died in 1999

from Alzheimer's, after figuring prominently in Tan's previous novels, such as

The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter's Daughter. It was the start of a

very hard time for Tan. That same year she came down with Lyme disease. First it

attacked her body and then her brain - leading to hallucinations and trances.

It was a big setback for a writer who came to writing almost as a form of

therapy. Tan had been working 90 hours a week as a technical writer for IBM in

the '80s when an agent encouraged her to turn what was one story into a book.

That book became The Joy Luck Club.

The novel spent nine months on the bestseller list, sold more than 4 million

copies, inspired a critically acclaimed movie, and kicked off a career that many

writers could only dream of. Until Tan became ill.

Saving Fish from Drowning was begun in the aftermath of getting better, when Tan

was " just happy to be able to write at all " , she says. " I knew from the

beginning it would be a comedy. "

Humour and the topic of Burma do not often go together, but Tan felt an

obligation to slip readers in the back door.

" The wonderful thing about fiction is it's subversive: you can get people into a

very repugnant situation through fiction - and comedy is one way to get people

to let their defences down.

" The sad thing about Burma is that some of the most absurd things are the real

stuff. You have a military regime that is called SLORC. Doesn't that sound

Bondian? It's State Law Order and Restoration Council . . . I think someone

finally said, 'You know, it's not a very good name'. So they hired a Washington

DC-based PR firm, and revamped their image, renamed them. It was ludicrous. "

Tan captures some of this absurdity in her book by having her merry travellers

kidnapped by a group of Burmese tribesmen, who believe that one of the tourists

- a teenager who reads King and performs card tricks - is the Young

White Brother, a man fabled to save them.

Harry, the aforementioned urinating dog trainer, is left behind and helps ignite

a media frenzy to rescue the kidnapped Americans. Little does he know he is

actually helping the military regime spread propaganda, via a global news

network called the GNN.

" I wanted to play with the idea that the news makes it happen, " says Tan,

explaining why she felt compelled to have her trip of innocents abroad evolve

into a media circus.

AS A POWERFUL Chinese-American with an enormous audience, Tan is frequently

asked to speak about issues - to use her platform in the media as a way to call

attention to injustices in Asia.

" During the time after Tiananmen Square, people thought I should go to China,

stand on the square and denounce the Chinese Government. And I just wasn't sure

that would be effective. That would be me asserting my American rights to say

anything, but does it really help people who are suffering?

" So my bottom line now is: how would it help people if I do something, and how

would it hurt them. "

Tan became intimately acquainted with this equation when she went to China

several years ago after the BBC aired a documentary called The Dying Room, which

showed secret footage of babies dying in orphanages.

In response, the Chinese Government shut the orphanages to Western observers,

stopped doing cleft-palate operations, and refused money given to them.

" And I thought to myself, " says Tan, " did that save any lives? "

In the novel, the kidnapped travellers, who Tan depicts as bumbling but

basically good people, experience this dilemma first hand when they witness some

of the repression of the Myanmar government.

Naturally, they become convinced they must speak out. Doing so, however, means

risking tipping off the government to the exact location of the tribesmen.

Tan sees this dilemma as part of everyone's lives, not just Westerners. For

instance, the title refers to how Buddhists allow themselves to catch and kill

fish.

" They scoop up the fish and bring them to shore, " explains a man in the novel to

one of the tourists. " They say they are saving the fish from downing.

Unfortunately . . . they do not recover. "

Tan doesn't have any illusion this book will make the people in Burma pay such a

price, and so she hopes readers begin to have the country on their radar again.

" This is a country that has been largely forgotten by people since the name was

changed, and it would be nice for people to remember it. Burma has some of the

worst cases of human rights abuse. It has the world capital of growing heroin. "

In the meantime, Tan is going to keep writing and entertaining, and finish the

opera she is working on. And, of course, help out with charities where she knows

her cultural intentions are known.

For instance, she recently helped Dave Eggers by lending her name to an event at

his 826 writing lab in San Francisco. In return for cancelling her plans one

night to attend a gala event, Eggers sent her a list of what he would do, from

cut her grass to fetch her coffee. Tan simply asked for his first born.

" I said, if it's a boy, I don't care, if it's a girl I want her to be Amy Tan

Vida Eggers. "

Tan cackles for a bit. And only then does it become clear she's joking.

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