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Amy Tan explores the relationship between mothers and daughters in this compelling story. “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” follows Ruth Young as she struggles to care for her mother, LuLing, when she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Ruth’s relationship with her partner, Art, also undergoes challenges and rethinking as Ruth cares for her mother. Ruth finds two documents that her mother wrote in Chinese when she started to lose her memory so that she would not forget important aspects of her life. Upon reading these documents, Ruth discovers new secrets about her mother’s life as well as a new understanding and appreciation for the choices that she has made. When learning more about her mother, Ruth also begins to reflect on herself and her past. Tan explores the themes of mother-daughter relationships as well as the dynamics among different generations of Chinese-Americans in her riveting novel.

Three words that describe this book: Mother-daughter relationship, history, Chinese-American immigrant life

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Synopsis

In memories that rise like wisps of ghosts, LuLing Young searches for the name of her mother, the daughter of the Famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the Mountain. Trying to hold on to the evaporating past, she begins to write all that she can remember of her life as a girl in China.

Meanwhile, her daughter Ruth, a ghostwriter for authors of self-help books, is losing the ability to speak up for herself in front of the man she lives with and his two teenage daughters. None of her professional sound bites and pat homilies works for her personal life: she knows only how to translate what others want to say.

Ruth starts suspecting that something is terribly wrong with her mother. As a child, Ruth had been constantly subjected to her mother’s disturbing notions about curses and ghosts, and to her repeated threats that she would kill herself and was even forced by her to try to communicate with ghosts. But now LuLing seems less argumentative, even happy, far from her usual disagreeable and dissatisfied self.

While tending to her ailing mother, Ruth discovers the page

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LuLing Liu Young remembers a significant moment from her childhood in China. When she was six, her nursemaid, Precious Auntie, took her to pray in a temple and burned a piece of paper on which she’d written her family name. In the present, LuLing, now an elderly woman, struggles to remember the name Precious Auntie wrote on the burned paper. She begs Precious Auntie’s spirit for forgiveness and reveals a startling truth: Precious Auntie is her mother.

The narrative shifts to the perspective of Ruth Young, LuLing’s daughter. Ruth is a shy, subdued Chinese American woman in her mid-40s who works as a ghostwriter. She lives in a flat in San Francisco with Art Kamen, her long-term partner, and Art’s teenage daughters, Dory and Fia, who spend every other week with him. Ruth isn’t completely satisfied with her life. She longs to write a book of her own one day but lacks the confidence to do so. She also has doubts about her relationship with Art, which has become strained over the years. The couple has yet to marry despite being together for a decade. Unable to sleep one night, Ruth si