#trimester two

I have come into some criticism of Amy Tan’s work describing her fiction as ‘stiltedly feminine’ and one read only by the ‘Mom’ demographic. This journal, if anything then, is a take down of this shallow assessment, and to present some deeper thought of Amy Tan’s inspiration as a storyteller.

This is a story of universal and multicultural relevance. If a gritty, violent drama is as masculine as this reflective, meditative domestic drama is feminine, then perhaps a target reading ‘demographic’ is as irrelevant and strategically faulting in regards to marketing any kind of novel. There is nothing inherently wrong with determining some ‘gender-leaning’ done by a story, whether in the amount of characters based on gender or the subject matter of the story or whatever, YET it is inherently wrong to dismiss one gender-leaning story (namely ‘feminine’ stories) as less successful and, most importantly, less accessible than another type. 

The Bonesetter’s Daughter is based on so much horrifying truth and experience from Amy Tan’s once mysterious ancestry. The shocking discoveries made by Ruth regarding LuLing and her far reaching ancestry are written in deliberate similarity to Amy Tan’s own ancestral discoveries (see relevant links). She bears these stories with great pride, and she values her unique narrative as a Chinese woman and daughter over any other ‘kind’ of storyteller she might have chosen to be instead. Perhaps instead of labelling her a ‘Mom’ writer (as it were an insult), her detractors should try determining what makes a good story, no matter the content or gender bias, effectively told. 

word count- 258

Amy Tan’s novel’s, being so frequently focused on the Chinese-American experience for women at different ages and from different backgrounds, has a lot of realistic, palpable experience from which to derive. Tan is known for including particular anecdotes and memories of her childhood or young adulthood in her storytelling. Her experiences are certainly not uncommon.

Some particular experiences encountered by Ruth in her observance of the junction of Chinese and American culture are, I believe, paralleled in many immigrant families that are establishing roots in the United States. At one dinner celebrating the Chinese Moon Festival, Ruth exhausts herself trying to introduce the American children in her boyfriend’s family to traditional Chinese cuisine and the symbolism paired between the food and the holiday. She feels embarrassment at her adult age, as she feels this guilt, or at least, obligation to promote the culture her mother and aunt had to sacrifice for America’s promise. This obligation is inherent in any immigrant family with children to be raised in America; in childhood, distancing oneself from their mother or fatherland truly means the decline of one’s original customs. Living in a land of opportunity yet also keeping close to that diaspora and those roots your ancestors planted across the world is a challenge worth fighting. 

Dear Reader of Fine Literature,

     What you're doing on my blog in the first place is a complete mystery, but since you're here already, it would be rude of me to leave you without a recommendation. So, for your reading pleasure: The Virgin Suicides.

     This book is, surprisingly enough, about virgins who commit suicide (okay, the virgin thing doesn't apply to all of them, but you get the idea). Except-- it's about so much more. This book is about family and love and community and beauty and life and death. It's about femininity and masculinity and everything in between. It's about the way one person can change so many lives. And yes, it's about suicide. But I'm getting to that.

     Let's talk about love first. You wouldn't think love would be easy to find in a book so blatantly about death, but the beauty of The Virgin Suicides is in the moments of life and love between morbid discussions. The love is in the way the Lisbon sisters cared for each other and in how they preserved Cecilia's memory, no matter how strange they might have found her. The love, however misplaced, is in how eager the neighborhood boys were to help the Lisbon girls escape the terrible lives they were being forced to live. Love was in the way the deaths of Cecilia, Lux, Mary, Bonnie, and Therese wrecked their parents-- pain of that kind cannot be felt without love first.

     And beauty. Let's talk about beauty. The Lisbon girls were beautiful, that's not in doubt. It was one of the things which made their deaths so tragic. Cecilia was beautiful, with her ethereal eccentricity; Lux was beautiful, with her mysterious physicality; Bonnie was beautiful, with her quiet dignity; Mary was beautiful, with her subtle poise; and Therese was beautiful, with her sharp intelligence. Each girl supremely different, but each girl undeniably beautiful. Beauty can be found in everything, and Jeffrey Eugenides makes that easy to see.

     Finally, death. We can't end a discussion about a book called The Virgin Suicides without talking about death a little bit, so here it is: in fiction, death doesn't have to be sad. It doesn't have to be happy either. It can be whatever you want it to be and it can be nothing at all-- that's what makes it fiction. The thing to remember is that literature can mimic the real world, and vice versa, but, with a book like this, some things are better left in an alternate universe.

Peace and blessings, Sarah

                                                            TRUTH

“These are the things I know are true:

    My name is LuLing Liu Young. The names of my husbands were Pan Kai Jing and Edwin Young, both of them dead our secrets gone with them. My daughter is Ruth Luyi Young. She was born in a Water Dragon Year and I in a Fire Dragon Year. So we are the same but for opposite reasons.”

The opening sentence to a novel seems like a particularly relevant quote when it is narrated in first person in a prominently limited third person narrative, is displayed with an imposing and broad word in bold, capitalized font, and, the general rule of thumb, the proverbial colon of IMPORTANCE.

All joking aside, the featured quote presents a multitude of broad and specific ideas and traits and facts that also flow with the tone Tan wishes to introduce first and foremost. As if settled into a conversation across the page, the first person introduction of LuLing depicts a subtle sense of urgency as she pours some personal truths. Names of characters and their fates are revealed nonchalantly, and at least a few interpersonal relationships are given in blunt, obvious language. Like the emboldened word printed before the quote, LuLing, and by extension Amy Tan, brings truth to precede the events of the novel, as if to establish the fundamental prompts readers are to keep as they enter the novel. 

Yet, such opening statement, such enumeration of the truths LuLing has to present is clouded in incredible ambiguity. At what time and place does LuLing present these ‘facts’? Not yet having read the rest of the novel, a reader is not equipped with developed notions of LuLing’s motivations or her conflicts. In her opening narrations, LuLing continues to put forth truth, yet she explicitly presents some secrets. LuLing is a woman with an undetermined past and an undetermined future, as Ruth is to discover. 

And the ambiguity with Ruth presents the greatest mystery regarding what LuLing hides and what she wishes to give her daughter before she passes on. Is this narration given after the childhood of Ruth and she is the expected, middle aged protagonist? Is this introduction given in Ruth’s childhood? Or could this introduction originate out of any certain time, and Amy Tan changes the narration of her novel not only in narrative point of view, but also in the tangible state of LuLing’s character, be it from her life or whatever come afterwards. 

A focus of Amy Tan’s several works of fiction, the relationship between mother and daughter poses a constant influence of individual character growth. No where is this idea accentuated more than in her integration of traditional Chinese values regarding one’s bound duty to service and to honor one’s mother, even if that provides insurmountable grief and arduous effort. To put it simply, love your mother despite any inconvenience. 

The Bonesetter’s Daughter makes this a clear burden for the novel’s protagonist, Ruth, and her mother. Ruth and LuLing must coincide with the laid path of rigid Chinese tradition to pay obligatory respect and strict reverence to their mother, and such obligation and sanctity is then juxtaposed and exaggerated with the foreign informalities modern American women and American girls tend to display. That is not to say American or Western ideals and customs of motherhood are not valued, or respectable, or inappropriate, so much that they do not assume the cultural drive inherent in Chinese values. This traditional, Eastern impetus of honor and selflessness of the offspring is alien to the novel’s current setting. There we find Tan’s thematic argument instilled in her characters; this responsibility and position of being a Chinese mother and a Chinese daughter is one so unique and often sacrificial that the guilt is to be worn on one’s conscious until closure, or death, is met. This is neither described as better or worse than the Western ideals of motherhood that Ruth observes with her boyfriend’s daughters or her White American contemporaries, but simply, vastly different- foreign. 

Such drastic, thematic context is evident in the following passage of Ruth’s internal promise at the end of Part I: 

“He might take her moving out as a sign of problems. But someone had to take care of her mother. And she wanted to. She wanted to be here, as her mother told her about her life, taking through all the detours of the past, explaining the multiple meanings of Chinese words, how to translate her heart. Her hands would always be full, and finally, she and her mother could both stop counting.”

Ruth acknowledges the Western lifestyle she chooses to delay in order to assist her mother.  The boyfriend she loves (or at least believing to love) cannot understand the weight of this obligation, and for that reason she must act alone as her mother’s only child. The guilt of her misunderstanding and immaturity regarding her mother is one she now understands is one to be solved, else she must carry the guilt in full hands. 

     Foreshadowing is one of the fiction author’s classic dramatic devices. That big "eureka" moment one gets when understanding a particularly subtle piece of foreshadowing or the feelings of dread when recognizing what will likely be a vicious indicator are unparalleled in literature. I'm not sure you could call what happens in The Virgins Suicides "foreshadowing." It's more blatant statement of fact. The novel opens with "On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide...." Like I said, not exactly subtle. If you define foreshadowing simply as something that foretells a future event/plot point, then yes, it does do that, but this kind of explicit use of foreshadowing in which the author flat out tells the reader what's going to happen is highly unconventional. 

     With such important details given away freely at the beginning of the book, it's the little things that stick out and catch the reader's attention. Small allusions to the girl's fate that unsettle more than anything else: describing the homecoming dance as the "best of their lives," the descent into the basement on the night of Cecilia's party and then the night of the triple suicide, Dr. Hornicker's insistence to continue therapy due to his belief that certain families have high instances of repetitive suicide. In a book in which the reader wasn't aware of the ending from page one, these allusions would be strange and not understood until the climax of the novel. As it is, these tiny moments lend to a greater feeling of unease and impatience as the book builds, instilling in the reader a feeling much like those shared by the doomed Lisbon sisters.

Word Count: 275

     When scouring The Virgin Suicides for traces of popular themes and motifs, one can look at the Lisbon daughters' sensational deaths and unremarkable lives and see a disconnect. A viable theme, then, could be that the American obsession with happiness and suburban tranquility is deeply unhealthy and can, in fact, mask something much darker underneath.

     The community surrounding the Lisbons is one that is obsessed with suburban ritual. They pride themselves on their outward appearances, while prying into the personal lives of neighbors and attempting keep others out of theirs. Following Cecilia's death, the neighborhood "banded together," attempting to keep the Lisbon house in a state of semi-repair-- removing the fence Cecilia impaled herself upon, taking out trees assumed to be on the decline, offering sympathy dinners and pastor consultations. Then once they assumed their duties to be filled and the issue to be resolved, they stop their efforts. The community focus on what is proper far outweighed the human response of what is good. They contented themselves with doing what was expected, and were satisfied they had done all they could for the Lisbons. However, it was this suburban hell which led to the deaths of the five Lisbon girls. The continual facade of being the pinnacle of mental health and well-adjusted Christian values was stifling for Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese and it was what killed them.

     The only person in the book who saw this from the beginning and who was as disillusioned by the charade of American happiness as the girls was Old Mrs. Karafilis. She is saddened by the loss of young life, but is not surprised by it, to the point where the boys of the neighborhood suspect her of communicating with the Lisbon girls somehow, but Old Mrs. Karafilis simply knows that the suburbs' idolization of the ideal Americana is unsustainable. Eugenides knows this as well. He is warning that the forgery of happiness is self-destructive and will prove fickle and fatal in the end.

Knowing Amy Tan’s life and career, I believe, provides incredible context and relevance to her works.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10417111/Amy-Tan-a-life-thats-stranger-than-fiction.html

Here is a The Telegraph’s biography of Amy Tan covered when she published her most recent novel in 2013.

https://youtu.be/QishhWj5S10

Here is a video interview of Amy Tan back in 2008; she discusses some of her motivations and inspirations that I will discuss in journal #6 and throughout discussions regarding the novel’s themes and its verisimilitude.

https://youtu.be/-M4rmrDMcjU