nwasianweekly.com
Mar. 4, 2006

A quick look at books

By Paul Kim
For the Northwest Asian Weekly

Saving Fish From Drowning, by Amy Tan. Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005.

Tan’s latest novel, Saving Fish From Drowning, chronicles the adventures of 12 American tourists as they travel through the Burmese jungle in search of ancient Buddhist art. Using Burma’s troubled political history as the novel’s backdrop, Tan departs from her usual theme of mother-daughter tension to explore the consequences of American ignorance in trying to grapple with an utterly foreign sensibility.

Full of eccentric, highly opinionated characters, ranging from Harry, the celebrity dog trainer who happens to be a womanizer, to Marlena Chu, the ravishing beauty who can’t tolerate breaking a fingernail, the story revolves around the transformations that occur when each of the characters comes face to face with impending mortality. Stereotypical characterizations notwithstanding (there’s even a gay Asian male who resembles a distorted “Saturday Night Live” caricature), the novel succeeds largely because of the irony produced by the wry observations of Bibi Chen, the protagonist who dies just before the story begins. Bibi is resurrected in the first chapter as an omniscient ghost capable of pulling off the most dazzling of verbal quips without the slightest hint of self-consciousness. At once witty and aristocratic, knowledgeable and annoyingly WASP-y, Bibi nonetheless exerts a powerful-enough narrative presence to unify an otherwise sprawling, incoherent plotline.

Tan uses Bibi’s omniscient perspective to allow readers a panoramic glimpse into the comedic mayhem that ensues when the tourists are hijacked by a Burmese hill tribe. The characters are caught in an absurd predicament: They have been kidnapped because the tribe has mistaken one of the protagonists as a long-awaited Messiah, prophesied to save the tribe from the cruelty of autocratic rule. If the protagonists escape and alert the authorities, the Burmese tribe, whom the characters have befriended, will surely be executed. This circumstance eventually leads to some profound reflection on the nature of action and consequence, intentions and actual results. At a pivotal point in the narrative, when the characters must confront the possibility of their own demise, Tan writes not from the perspective of an individual character who is limited by trivial and ethnocentric prejudices, but from the collective voice of all humanity: “They were open portals to many minds, and the minds flew into one soul, and the soul contained the minds of everyone … the greatest knowledge now effortlessly known, and the greatest knowledge was love.”

In the latest effort, Tan moves away from her colloquial style to one that encompasses a more rounded, humanitarian perspective. If she risks sentimentality in her descriptions of universal love, at least she can be credited for writing out of genuine concern for some of the problems plaguing certain areas of the world. In this respect, Tan’s novel succeeds.  

Paul Kim can be reached at scpnwan@nwlink.com.

Send correspondence to:
Northwest Asian Weekly • P.O. Box 3468 • Seattle • WA  98114
Tel: 206.223.5559 •  Fax: 206.223.0626 • Email: scpnwan@nwlink.com
Please bookmark this site: www.nwasianweekly.com.