Author Tan back in the swim

Rocky Mountain News
Amy Tan's last book, 2003's nonfiction collection The Opposite of Fate, closed with an essay about her struggle with Lyme disease. Tan described increasingly alarming symptoms, including joint pain, difficulty with organization, and visual hallucinations, and she left her fans with a cliff hanger: When she wrote that essay, it wasn't clear if she'd ever be able to write another novel.

With the publication of her new novel, Saving Fish from Drowning (her first since 2001's The Bonesetter's Daughter), Tan's admirers can breathe easy.

In a phone interview from her San Francisco home, Tan said that during the worst days of her illness, "It's like pieces of my brain were sand, just rolling out, and I felt I was trying to gather the sand before it completely leaked out."

She worried that she'd never be able to complete another book, but added, "What's kind of strange, however, is that you feel apathetic. I would be anxious about my not being able to think that well and work, but on the other hand, I didn't have the energy to fight it that much."

You might think that once Tan was finally diagnosed and began to improve, she would go easy on herself and tell a simple story, but shirking a challenge has never been her approach. Saving Fish from Drowning is a sprawling, 500-page tale with more than a dozen main characters and just as many plot lines. The book marks a departure for the author, as it's the first of her novels that doesn't largely focus on Chinese and Chinese-American characters and mother-daughter themes.

Instead, it tells the story of a group of 12 Americans of different ages, genders and ethnicities on a trip in China and Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), who end up trapped in the jungle village of a persecuted minority tribe.

A touch of the familiar Tan comes through in the voice of the deceased narrator, the dynamic Bibi Chen, a San Francisco art maven whose mysterious murder begins the tale. Chen is fictional, and all of the events in the novel are likewise products of Tan's imagination, but Tan's playful approach with the book's opening might leave some readers unsure.

In "A Note To The Reader," Tan describes an unusual event that sparked the book's creation. Caught in the rain in Manhattan, she writes, she ducked into a building called the "American Society for Psychical Research," where she found the "automatic writings" that a California woman claimed had been dictated to her by the spirit of Bibi Chen.

This tale sounds far-fetched enough for fiction, but anyone who has read The Opposite of Fate, replete with tales of bizarre spiritual occurrences in Tan's life, is primed to believe the author's reports of strange coincidences and ghosts.

"I wanted to start this book off with everything in there being a question of what's true and what's not true," Tan said. "So, for example, in the epigraph, you have something that was said by Camus that was truly something he said, and then you have a quote attributed to anonymous which was actually written by me."

Similarly, although there is a real American Society for Psychical Research, it contains no automatic writing that Tan used directly for the novel. When Tan visited the Society, she said, "there were files on automatic writing and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if a whole book were just sitting right there for me and I could just take it home and copy it?' So that part was made up, and the whole thing about Bibi Chen - that wasn't anybody that ever existed . . ."

"But the strange thing is," Tan continued, "I had a friend read this book early on, and he said, 'It's great that you actually knew this woman and that this all took place in your home town.' And I said, 'What are you talking about?' And he said, 'Well, you knew Bibi.' And I said, 'Bibi? You think she's real?' And he said, 'Well yes, of course.' And I said, 'Do you remember a story about a woman who was murdered in San Francisco who was really well known?' " said Tan, referring to her fictional backstory for Bibi Chen. "And he goes, 'Yeah, I think I do.' "

While Tan fashioned the book after Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, centered on 12 people who go on a journey, she also wanted to include her deceased mother in the story.

"I had just lost her just a few months before I finished The Bonesetter's Daughter, and suddenly I realized at the end of it that it wasn't that I had to write another mother-daughter story, but that my mother - her voice - could be the narrator. She could be the dead narrator, the dead travel guide, and she could have all that humor and wry observation and feistiness that my mother had and she could come along on the trip."

Although Tan wrote with the Canterbury Tales in mind, one of the few detectable traces of this influence is in the name of one character, Harry Bailley, who was the innkeeper in Chaucer's tales and surfaces as "a British-born celebrity dog trainer" in Tan's novel. "I don't think most people would catch that," Tan said. "These are little things that are more like postcards to myself. "

Another Chaucer-like touch is the humorous tone of Tan's novel: Although it begins with a murder and includes a host of misfortunes, the book is a fun read, and the overall effect is comic. Tan said the choice to leaven some of the serious underlying issues of the book - which touches on questions of human rights in Myanmar - was a conscious one.

"It's a comic novel because I wanted to address something that was very serious, something that disturbed me that was about morality and ignorance and intentions and about a situation in the world that is very, very sad," Tan said. "And the only way that I felt that I could approach it was with humor. Humor to me is a way of opening yourself up. . . you're not approaching a subject with extreme reverence that makes the complete picture impossible to see. With humor you just sort of shake loose everything that is in you and when you're opened up you can confront what is darker and harder to look at."

Much of this humor is conveyed through Bibi Chen's wry narration. Chen, who was supposed to be the group's tour guide before her murder, instead serves as a ghostly guide, keeping readers entertained with observations such as: "Throughout history, many a world leader was injudiciously influenced by his malfunctioning bladder, bowels, and other private parts. Didn't Napoleon lose at Waterloo because he couldn't sit in a saddle, on account of hemorrhoids?"

Saving Fish from Drowning is in large part a rollicking travel narrative, and Tan does a masterful job of capturing the unease Americans feel when traveling in countries where they don't understand the language, especially at border crossings and passport checks where scowling, armed officials often engage in "ten minutes of inspecting and stamping and huffing with authority."

Tan teases the reader with such scenes, by having Bibi state right away that the trip is going to go awry. But true to the book's comic tone, some of Bibi's most ominous foreshadowing presages a group bout of traveler's diarrhea. Tan said she included this event partly for "verisimilitude."

"I was recently going into the interior of China, and you're on a bus being jostled about for eight hours a day, bumping up and down and knocking your head into the window, and there were people having diarrhea. There's never been a trip I've been on that somebody did not have a problem like that. For me that just had to be in there because it would have been unrealistic to have nobody get sick."

Suspense builds throughout the book as the reader wonders what is going to become of these bumbling, very American travelers. Tan "wanted to bring the story to a point that I knew was going to be very uncomfortable," she said. "As they go further on this journey, they're going to encounter deeper and deeper moral issues for themselves," and become increasingly unsettled by the country's repressive regime.

With all of the confusion, cultural missteps, and ominous signs throughout the novel, the ending may surprise some readers. "What I hoped to get across is that we simply left the story off at a certain part of their (the characters') lives that is to me on some scale of happiness, probably right there about in the middle, and you don't know for certain which way their lives are going to go."

As for Tan's life, a year and a half ago she embarked on a project with the composer Stuart Wallace to reinterpret The Bonesetter's Daughter as an American opera. She estimates the opera will premier in 2008.

"What I've learned from all of it is that you cannot translate an original work to another form, to another medium. You have to really take it all apart and pare it down to literally its bones and then recast it and recreate it with the bones in a different configuration and give it its own life."

Tan is clearly back on her feet and making up for lost time. "I went through quite a period of struggle there," she admits, "and it really just took finally getting treatment so that my brain could come back. It was literally as though the fog had cleared when finally I started getting better."