Amy Tan: "The Hundred Secret Senses" and "Saving Fish from Drowning"

Amy Tan's 1995 novel is typical of her oeuvre in that it focuses on the relations between two half-sisters, American-born Olivia and Chinese-born Kwan, whose different backgrounds allow the writer to depict the clash of the two cultures: Olivia stands for the pragmatic American culture whereas Kwan represents the mystical culture of China. Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco. Kwan possesses the gift of the titular "secret senses" which she defines as follows: memory, seeing, hearing, feeling, all come together, then you know something true in your heart. Like one sense, I don't know how say, maybe sense of tingle. You know this: Tingly bones mean rain coming, refreshen mind. Tingly skin on arms, something scaring you, close you up, still pop out lots a goose bump.

Thanks to the "secret senses" Kwan remembers a life in the mid-nineteenth century, in which she was a young woman participating in a historical event important for China known as the Taiping Rebellion. Such fictional rewriting of history would place the novelist among postmodern historiographers but, given the fact that Amy Tan is a bi-cultural writer of Chinese background, the device is probably more associated with the idea of reincarnation. Although at first disliked by her sister-narrator, Kwan plays a very important role in Olivia's life: she teaches her how to use her own secret senses to solve her problem with her estranged husband. In order to re-unite Olivia with her husband, Kwan takes the two for a trip to China, which becomes a place of their spiritual renewal leading to the desired "happy ending". The whole story, with its exotic detour to China and Chinese history and philosophy, is magical: you never know, just like the narrator, whether what Kwan says is reality or fairy tale; and yet, improbable as it all sounds, you find yourself believing in reincarnation and in Kwan's return to the world of Yin.

A friend told me she would never reach for a book with the title Saving Fish from Drowning. I probably wouldn't either, but for Amy Tan, whose 2005 novel is a surprise for her regular readers. The book was called by a San Francisco Chronicle critic a modern twist on a "A Midsummer's Night Dream", where a group of friends get lost in the jungle on Christmas day and become involved in a set of bizarre events. The association with Shakespeare's comedy is relevant here not only because of the plot analogy but also because Saving Fish from Drowning contains numerous scenes of slapstick humor - the fact leaving me with ambivalent feelings.

The novel, which starts with the author's foreword explaining that she based her story on the document found in a public library - the record of automatic writing performed by a Bibi Chen's ghost (this is a common device in fiction, used for example by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter), purports to be based on real events. The illusion of realism is however shattered at the very beginning, when the reader finds out that the narrator is Bibi Chen, who organized a Christmas trip to China and Burma for her friends ("Following Buddha's Footsteps") but could not realize the plan because she died. Bibi, who introduces herself in the first chapter, titled A Brief History of My Shortened Life, presents the mysterious circumstances of her death in the form of a quote from the newspaper as follows: The report was a terrible thing to read: "The body of Bibi Chen, 63, retail maven, socialite, and board member of the Asian Art Museum, was found yesterday in the display window of her Union Square store, The Immortals, famed for its chinoiserie"... The article continued with a rather nebulous description of the weapon: a small, rakelike object that had severed my throat, and a rope tightened around my neck, suggesting that someone had tried to strangle me after stabbing had failed. The door had been forced open, and bloody footprints of size-twelve men's shoes led from the platform where I had died, then out the door, and down the street. Next to my body lay jewelry and broken figurines. According to one source, there was a paper with writing from a Satanic cult bragging that it had struck again.

Apart from creating suspense, the choice of a dead person for the narrator of the story (again familiar from, for example, Desperate Housewives) has allowed Amy Tan to create first-person omniscient narration and present the events of the story in a surprisingly original manner - I definitely liked this trick. Bibi Chen is dead, but she remains cool about the fact and follows her friends as a ghost, sometimes playing the role of a guardian angel, intervening when necessary by appearing in the characters' dreams and thus influencing their decisions - after all, the dream world is her reality now.

However, under this fantastic, magical and comic surface, a very serious issue is addressed by Tan's novel, namely the critique of Burma's military regime, its killing off dissenters and, especially, the damage that human rights activists' efforts combined with actions taken up by Western media can bring instead of help. The title very well explains this: Saving fish from drowning is a Burmese name for the act of fishing, which is approached with reverence: They scoop up the fish and bring them to shore. They say they are saving fish from drowning. Unfortunately ... the fish do not recover. So, the title is a euphemism for killing, which, paradoxically, is a consequence of the desire to help. Bibi herself makes a poignant comment on the hypocrisy behind and the elusiveness of Western help as follows: the military rulers gave Burma its new name, Myanmar, and changed Rangoon into Yangon, the Irrawaddy into the Ayeyarwaddy. And thus, practically no one in the Western world knows what those new names refer to, they are like the Burmese dissenters who disappeared, the country formerly calling itself Burma is invisible to most of the Western world, an illusion. The critique of the politics of the Western world offered in a form of a comic fantastic story may sound odd, but I actually found it intriguing.