Appeared in City Link, March, 2001.

Though The Bonesetter's Daughter is a work of fiction, much of it is Tan's direct response to events in her own life. Starting in 1995, she worked on it unsteadily during the four years of her mother's decline into Alzheimer's.

After her mother died, Tan finished the novel in a six-month burst. The book is a meditation, Tan recently told Time magazine, "on things we remember and the things that should be remembered."

The story begins with LuLing trying in vain to remember the real name of her childhood nursemaid Precious Auntie. LuLing's written recollection of an important moment with Precious Auntie languishes in the desk drawer of her 46- year-old daughter. Ruth, a ghostwriter, translates the thoughts of strangers for a living but doesn't find the time to decipher her mother's complex traditional Chinese calligraphy. LuLing inquires about it several times, but eventually gives up.

Ruth hates the term "ghostwriter," partly because her mother believes it means she can communicate with ghosts. LuLing is convinced that every bad thing that happens in her life, including the death of her husband when Ruth was 2 years old, is caused by a curse from the ghost of Precious Auntie. Ruth still chafes from a lifetime of manipulation by her mother wielding the curse, guilt and frequent threats of suicide. "Maybe I die soon! Then everybody happy!"

Ruth's life is consumed by tasks and deadlines, leaving her feeling overextended. She worries that she's drifting apart from Art, the man she's lived with for the past 10 years. His teenage daughters seem to irritate her on purpose. She has difficulty expressing herself and mysteriously becomes mute for about a week each year.

One night during her voiceless spell, Ruth cleans out her desk and comes upon the sheaf of paper covered with her mother's writing. She experiences another wave of guilt. During the five or six years since her mother had asked her to read it, Ruth hadn't been able to get much beyond the title, "These Are the Things I Know Are True." Now, she vows to hire someone fluent in the traditional Chinese characters to translate it. She gets distracted by a broken hot water heater, though, and doesn't get around to it right away.

Then, LuLing begins to behave erratically, and to forget things. Ruth hopes the cause is depression, but her mother denies it. "Depress 'cause can not forgot! Look my sad life!" The problem turns out to be Alzheimer's, and as LuLing's health declines, Ruth confronts the necessity of refocusing her life on the care of her mother. She moves in with her.

"These are the things I must not forget," starts another packet of Chinese writing that Ruth discovers as she cleans out the accumulated junk from LuLing's house. Ruth vows to ask her mother to talk about what she still remembers of her life, before it becomes too late. And Ruth "would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do." She also hires the translator to begin work on the manuscripts.

The heart of the novel is the story of LuLing's childhood in the mountains of rural China, and her love for her mute and disfigured nursemaid, whose father had been a famous bone setter.

This story-within-a-story reveals the secrets and tragedies that have shaped LuLing. Ruth, having misread her mother as irrational and superstitious, now sees that some of her eccentricities make sense. Digging below the surface of her mother's life helps Ruth understand her own background and identity, and her singular ways of relating to other people.

The book grapples with important issues of communication, interpretation, caring and attention, coming to grips with pain and loss, and knowing the self through one's family history.

With such compelling themes, it's disappointing to find most of the plot lines resolved at the end with Love Boat-perfect tidiness. Ruth's lover Art, whose connection with her had seemed rather shaky, suddenly turns out to be a saint.

Even his difficult teenage girls start to appreciate Ruth. The main problem of caring for LuLing is nicely solved when money conveniently becomes available.

Certain aspects of The Bonesetter's Daughter echo Tan's previous novels. Conflict between American-born daughters and Chinese mothers, seemingly peculiar superstitions that turn out to make sense, and daughters belatedly learning to appreciate their heritage are all recurrent motifs.

This is the territory of Amy Tan. It is to her credit that she writes about the issues she struggles with in her own life, instead of trying to manufacture novelty for the literary marketplace. In Tan's capable hands, these themes are always fresh and charged with insight and genuine emotion. The Bonesetter's Daughter is no exception.