BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER, THE
作者： Amy Tan 编
出版社：Random House US 2011年11月
简介： At the beginning of Amy Tan's fourth novel, two packets ofpapers written in Chinese calligraphy fall into the hands of RuthYoung. One bundle is titled Things I Know Are True and the other,Things I Must Not Forget. The author? That would be theprotagonist's mother, LuLing, who has been diagnosed withAlzheimer's disease. In these documents the elderly matriarch, bornin China in 1916, has set down a record of her birth and familyhistory, determined to keep the facts from vanishing as her minddeteriorates. A San Francisco career woman who makes her living by ghostwritingself-help books, Ruth has little idea of her mother's past or trueidentity. What's more, their relationship has tended to be an angryone. Still, Ruth recognizes the onset of LuLing's decline--alongwith her own remorse over past rancor--and hires a translator todecipher the packets. She also resolves to "ask her mother to tellher about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. Shewould sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else todo." Framed at either end by Ruth's chapters, the central portionof The Bonesetter's Daughter takes place in China in the remote,mountainous region where anthropologists discovered Peking Man inthe 1920s. Here superstition and tradition rule over a successionof tiny villages. And here LuLing grows up under the watchful eyeof her hideously scarred nursemaid, Precious Auntie. As she makesclear, it's not an enviable setting: I noticed the ripe stench of a pig pasture, the pockmarkedland dug up by dragon-bone dream-seekers, the holes in the walls,the mud by the wells, the dustiness of the unpaved roads. I saw howall the women we passed, young and old, had the same bland face,sleepy eyes that were mirrors of their sleepy minds.Nor is rural isolation the worst of it. LuLing's family, a clan ofink makers, believes itself cursed by its connection to a localdoctor, who cooks up his potions and remedies from human bones. Andindeed, a great deal of bad luck befalls the narrator and hersister GaoLing before they can finally engineer their escape fromChina. Along the way, familial squabbles erupt around every corner,particularly among mothers, daughters, and sisters. And as she didin her earlier The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses these conflicts toexplore the intricate dynamic that exists between first-generationAmericans and their immigrant elders. --Victoria Jenkins --Thistext refers to the Hardcover edition.
