A Bond Unbroken by Silence, Illness and Death

SAN FRANCISCO —  The study where Amy Tan wrote her new novel is strewn, like her books, with images of her mom. Framed snapshots are all over, and it’s not easy to recognize the maternal juggernauts of “The Joy Luck Club” in the little old lady who peeks from the pictures. Isn’t that always the way with other peoples’ mothers? The gray hair is wispy; the eyes are wide and confused-looking. Where Tan has posed with her, the celebrity daughter dominates the frame like a peacock. No matter.

“The heart of this story belongs to my grandmother, its voice to my mother,” Tan writes in the acknowledgments for her fourth novel, “The Bonesetter’s Daughter,” due out Monday from Putnam. Publisher’s Weekly calls the story of a woman’s disappearing memory “a sure hit.” Kirkus Reviews says it’s another “beautifully modulated” study of “mothers and daughters simultaneously estranged and bonded.”

“My husband, Lou,” says the author, “calls it a eulogy.”

Tan is sitting in the dark, book-lined dining room of her red brick condo. Her home, in swank Presidio Heights, is decorated in Chinese-print fabrics and Asian knickknacks and fake houseplants--”fakus,” Tan calls them. Literary success has meant splitting her time between this home and a New York apartment. Her mother, she says, was dying of Alzheimer’s during the book’s gestation, even as those photos in her study were being shot.

That mother--the inspiration for so many willful, protective, comic, difficult Chinese-moms-with-a-past in Tan’s work--reappears in “Bonesetter’s Daughter” as LuLing, the aging and rapidly deteriorating parent of Ruth Young, a San Francisco ghostwriter of self-help books. Every year at the same time, Ruth loses her voice, a quirk that more or less reflects the general voicelessness she feels in her live-in relationship with a divorced white man and his two kids.

The situation is strained further when Ruth discovers that her elderly mother, who lives across town, is losing her mind to Alzheimer’s. The mother’s illness prompts Ruth to finally decipher the Chinese calligraphy in a dusty memoir her mother hand-wrote, giving part to Ruth and hiding the rest under the cushion of a chair.

The story within, Tan says, is “about memory and the things unsaid between a daughter and her mother, what her mother doesn’t want her to forget but has never told her.” It is Tan’s theme, though she’s not as hard on the daughter character as she’s been in previous books. The novel is also, again, a refraction of Tan’s own life, in broad strokes and odd details.

“My mother died in 1999. Nov. 22, 1999,” Tan says. She notes the date exactly in a quiet, scholarly voice. “She was diagnosed in 1995, but she had symptoms earlier than that. A lot of times, especially if you have a mother with an eccentric personality, it’s easy to think, ‘Well, it’s just getting a little worse.’ ”

But on Thanksgiving Day six years ago, Tan says, she “finally admitted there was something seriously wrong” with her mother, whose American name was Daisy. At a packed family table, the 83-year-old woman insisted she’d been an eyewitness to the murder of O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife--a poignant scene that Tan ended up re-creating in the new book.

It is one of countless autobiographical touches that are woven so intricately into the text that “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” feels, in places, almost like a memoir:

“I don’t remember you ever going to L.A.,” the fictional daughter tells her mother, who, in the book, makes the Simpson assertion during a visit to her doctor.

“How I go, don’t know. But I there. This true! I follow that man, oh he sneaky. O.J. hide in bush. Later I go his house, too. Watch him take glove, stick in garden, go back inside change clothes--” LuLing caught herself, embarrassed. “Well, he change clothes, course I don’t look, turn my eyes. Later he run to airport, almost late, jump on plane. I see whole thing.”

“I thought she was just unclear with her English,” Tan says now of the real-life moment. “I kept trying to get her to say what she really meant, and she kept saying the same thing over and over. Everybody got real quiet at the table, and finally Lou said, ‘Amy, I think you should just let it go.’ But in my mind, her mind was in the balance. I needed to get her to change her mind.” The author pauses ever so briefly.

“And she didn’t, of course.”

*

As Tan speaks, she fingers a heavy silver necklace, a gift bought for her by her mother’s then-boyfriend during a vacation in China they all took several years ago. Tan is tiny in person, with beautiful hands that are at once knobby and delicate. She is dressed up to have her picture taken. Her black hair, with its trademark bangs, hangs to her shoulders. Her smile, with its smoker’s teeth, is rimmed with her signature red lipstick.

Critics have rapped her for making a literary shtick out of her Chinese-ness. “Ethnic chic,” a Salon.com literary guide called the specialty of the Oakland-born writer, who says she tried to get people to spell her name “Aimee” for a while when she was young. But there are many reasons for assuming a persona, niche marketing being among the least common. Tan talks about it in the same way she talks about revising each page a minimum of 30 times before publication--as part of her job description. This theory, too, seems to lack conviction, and the author acknowledges that parsing her own character isn’t her strong suit. Still, it is also her style to respond to such questions in a manner that is determinedly up-front.

She has talked candidly, for instance, about the power struggles she had, as an adult, with her mother. She’s also gone public with the difficulty she had, for many years, in finding her voice. Daisy Tan wanted her daughter to become a surgeon; instead, Amy Tan moved in with her college boyfriend and went into linguistics. She was getting her doctorate at UC Berkeley when a friend’s violent death threw her off track and onto the trajectory that would lead to fiction writing, a hobby she took up to combat what she claimed was “workaholism.” For several years now, she says, she has been on antidepressants, most recently Selexa. It is prescribed by “a friend.”

She has told interviewers she stopped seeing therapists when one fell asleep during a session. But, she elaborates, touching the necklace, she also has “a hard time going anywhere on a regular basis, or leaving the house to do anything.”

“I see,” she says wryly, “a lot of dangers.” It’s a trait she suspects is inherited, from her mother’s side.

Tan’s psychology also shows in the book, along with much of her personal history. Before she wrote fiction, she was a ghostwriter of corporate publications. Her husband of 27 years, tax attorney Lou DiMattei, is white (though Tan is quick to note that he “is not like any of the flaky men in my books”). After a close friend was murdered in his Oakland apartment in 1976, two days after Tan had come to visit, she, too, developed psychosomatic laryngitis. LuLing’s love interest is a Christian missionary; Tan’s father was a Baptist preacher. Tan discovered--as does Ruth in the novel--that the Chinese and American names by which she knew her mother and grandmother were not their real names. (For the author, this discovery didn’t come until the last day of her mother’s life, as she and her Chinese-born half-sisters were completing the death certificate.)

And, like Ruth, Tan is middle-aged and childless. For all her interest in fictional motherhood, the 48-year-old author and her husband have no offspring. When her brother, some years back, gave her a carved necklace for Mother’s Day, she says, she wore it until it fell apart. She and her husband refer to each other as “Mommy” and “Daddy” in front of their Yorkshire terriers, Bubba and Lilli. When the possibility of regret arises, she says, she remembers that they can still adopt if they choose to.

Still, Tan says, “I’ve never had that urge that says, ‘I must reproduce the gene pool that Lou and I have.’ Although every couple you see with kids, you know, you think, ‘Oh, ours would have been just as cute.’ ”

After the 1976 murder that so influenced her life, she says, that she dropped out of the doctoral program and took a series of jobs working with developmentally disabled children. “I wanted to make sense,” she says, “of a meaningless act.” The work gave her a taste of “that feeling when children adore you and you’ve won them over.” She’s used that in her fiction, along with the feelings she’s had as an occasional caretaker of friends’ children.

“Over the years,” she says, “I’ve imagined how I would have been as a parent if they had been my children . . . . [And] I think I would have been so obsessed with worrying about everything that could go wrong--before birth, after birth and at each stage--I think I would have driven that child crazy and made them as unhappy as I was growing up. I would see myself becoming the things I’d vowed I’d never become.”

The book’s broadest parallel with its author’s life, however, is its depiction of the loss of a powerful mother, driven home by the almost simultaneous loss of Tan’s longtime editor, Faith Sale. Sale, whom she loved “like a second mother,” died of cancer two weeks after Tan’s mother’s burial. It was Sale, she says, who convinced her that several other stories she’d been developing--one about a Jewish girl who lives next door to a Chinese mortuary, another about a composer, a third set during China’s Boxer Rebellion--were “false starts,’ and who urged her to return to the story of herself and her mother.

*

“The books had no center,” she says now. “Faith knew that and gently nudged me toward what was really on my mind.

“After they both died,” Tan says, “I felt I was in a state of wonder, and I had a depth of heart that I think a lot of people have when they go through losing someone they love. If you don’t close down from grief, you open up and look for answers and meaning.”

Her questions, for all the familial exploration of her past books, seemed still to be all about identity.

The novel ended up dedicated to Tan’s mother and grandmother, under the birth names they were forced to relinquish by scandal. Her grandmother was raped when Daisy was a toddler in China, Tan says. For security, she married the rapist and, before committing suicide, made her child take the name of his family. The sepia-toned portrait on the book jacket is of that grandmother, Gu Jingmei.

The mother in the book immigrates to the United States shortly before the Communists rise to power, as Tan’s mother did in 1949. Tan says LuLing is not her own mother in every detail, but “the regrets are hers, the fear of the curse, the sense of danger she instilled in me while wanting me to have a better life. Asking forgiveness is in the book as well. That was part of our saying goodbye.”