So, the premise is that 12 travelers to Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, go missing and a perusal of all the details that accompany that fact. At first, I thought this book was a disappointment after Tan fare like The Joy Luck Club and the Kitchen God's Wife. Nonetheless, Tan, true to literary style, enchants with cultural, political and other engaging details and even outdoes herself with the most outstanding character development I have ever read of each of the characters. In all honesty, I was a bit bored until about midway through the novel when I became hooked with the mini-drama of each person's life and realized I was reading a television reality show, aka Survivor, but creatively told from the viewpoint of the deceased original Chinese tour guide, Bibi Chen's ghost.
Did I mention that this book is also chock full of great quotes, life reflections and philosophical quips? Here are some of my favorites:
“The only thing certain in times of great uncertainty is that people will behave with great strength or weakness, and with very little else in between.”
“From what I have observed, when the anaesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.”
"What bloody good was human adaptability if people weren't willing to change? Wasn't that why no penal system really worked to prevent crime, why people went to psychiatrists for years eithout any intentions of overcoming their obsessions and depressions? Humans had this extraordinary fondness for their own peccadilloes. That's why you could't change a Republican into a Democrat and vice versa, why there were so many divorces, lawsuit, and wars. Because people refused to adapt and accommodate to others even for their own good!" p243
“There is a famous Chinese sentiment about finding the outer edges of beauty. My father once recited it to me: 'Go to the edge of the lake and watch the mist rise... At dawn, the mist rose like the lake's breath, and the vaporous mountains behind faded in layers of lighter and lighter gray, mauve, and blue until the farthest reaches merged with the milky sky...Here the lessons of Buddha seemed true, she thought. Life was merely an illusion you must release. As she grew older, she was aware of her changing position on mortality. In her youth, the topic of death was philosophical; in her thirties it was unbearable and in her forties unavoidable. In her fifties, she had dealt with it in more rational terms, arranging her last testament, itemizing assets and heirlooms, spelling out the organ donation, detailing the exact words for her living will. Now, in her sixties, she was back to being philosophical. Death was not a loss of life, but the culmination of a series of releases. It was devolving into less and less. You had to release yourself from vanity, desire, ambition, suffering, and frustration - all the accoutrements of the I, the ego. And if you die, you would disappear, leave no trace, evaporate into nothingness...” pp228-9
― Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning
“There is a famous Chinese sentiment about finding the outer edges of beauty. My father once recited it to me: 'Go to the edge of the lake and watch the mist rise... At dawn, the mist rose like the lake's breath, and the vaporous mountains behind faded in layers of lighter and lighter gray, mauve, and blue until the farthest reaches merged with the milky sky...Here the lessons of Buddha seemed true, she thought. Life was merely an illusion you must release. As she grew older, she was aware of her changing position on mortality. In her youth, the topic of death was philosophical; in her thirties it was unbearable and in her forties unavoidable. In her fifties, she had dealt with it in more rational terms, arranging her last testament, itemizing assets and heirlooms, spelling out the organ donation, detailing the exact words for her living will. Now, in her sixties, she was back to being philosophical. Death was not a loss of life, but the culmination of a series of releases. It was devolving into less and less. You had to release yourself from vanity, desire, ambition, suffering, and frustration - all the accoutrements of the I, the ego. And if you die, you would disappear, leave no trace, evaporate into nothingness...” pp228-9
― Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning
No comments:
Post a Comment