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kangeikoSaving Fish From Drowning
by Amy Tan
page count: oh, millions...
This book was a real struggle for me. Having sung Tan's praises in my review of The Kitchen God's Wife, I was anticipating much the same fare, but satisfying nonetheless. Instead of a main meal, however, I was instead treated to a series of hors d'oevres which left me feeling strangely devoid of any overall impression.
Saving Fish From Drowning is different from Tan's previous work. Instead of the mother-daughter relationship and a retrospective look back to China, we are given twelve friends on a trip to Burma. The story is narrated by Bibi Chen, who died a few days before the trip was supposed to take place, and would have been her friends' guide. Instead, they blunder from one disaster to another, and don't really seem to learn much from it. Tan gives us the stereotypical American tourist - loud, coarse and inclined to trample through people's holy places through sheer ignorance. When harry - said tourist - pissed on a holy shrine in China, I was literally gritting my teeth with frustration. When his friends take absolutely nothing away with them from that experience - and being banned from most tourist places on the China/Burma border - I was beyond frustrated. All these people seemed concerned about was who was going to end up canoodling with whom.
If this sounds like a bad gap-year trip, hold on to your hats, because these are supposedly middle-aged second-gen well-to-do Chinese Americans with a vested interest in the arts. Excuse me, but bzuh?? There was little if no learning or refinement shown by any of the party, and seeing as how they had supposedly gone on similar trips before, their complete haplessness started to grate a little bit. To be blunt, they read like teenagers, rather than adults, and I found their behaviour a lot more immature than I myself would have been able to stand if I'd been marooned with them.
The American tourists, however, don't suffer the most in this story. That pity spot is reserved for the Karen tribe living deep in the Burmese jungle. These are people who have absorbed a con-man's version of Christianity, call themselves the Lord's Army, and are concerned with satellite TV and escaping the junta. The plight of the tribes people of Burma was, in my opinion, used for comedic relief and cheap pathos in this book, as their suffering is used to explain their 'simple outlook' - how they assume that the teenaged boy with the party is in fact the Younger White Brother, and he will do... something. They're not particularly clear on what the something is. The belief in deities - especially in the two children addressed as such in the tribe - is later attributed to PTSD, which made me very angry. In short, this was a tribe of happy natives, who have suffered a great deal, yes, but this allows them to (comically!) believe that the American tourists are gods and prophets.
Cringe-worthy.
The book is overly-long and this is because the narrator, Bibi - a wandering spirit - has a habit of dipping into every person's head as the group pass them. We get Walter's story, the fisherman's story - even some policemen's stories - and I, as the reader, really couldn't care less after a certain point. Instead of painting this cohesive, multi-faceted dramatic voyage into a forbidden land, we instead get treated to a paragraph here and there that are supposed to explain entire characters to us. Unsurprisingly, this means that the land is populated with caricatures and one-tone characters.
I'm not spoiling anything by saying that the Americans live happily ever after and the tribe they encounter - don't. If the book intended to highlight the insensitivity and self-absorption of the group, then it did so admirably. However, if it meant to make us sympathise with them and their good intentions, then perhaps it should have made them a little less infuriatingly obtuse, and the tribe a little less ridiculous. (Watch out, in particular, when they - perfectly capable of understanding English, btw - mistake the teenager's copy of Misery as The Bible. Yes.)
All in all, very disappointing and not recommended.
by Amy Tan
page count: oh, millions...
This book was a real struggle for me. Having sung Tan's praises in my review of The Kitchen God's Wife, I was anticipating much the same fare, but satisfying nonetheless. Instead of a main meal, however, I was instead treated to a series of hors d'oevres which left me feeling strangely devoid of any overall impression.
Saving Fish From Drowning is different from Tan's previous work. Instead of the mother-daughter relationship and a retrospective look back to China, we are given twelve friends on a trip to Burma. The story is narrated by Bibi Chen, who died a few days before the trip was supposed to take place, and would have been her friends' guide. Instead, they blunder from one disaster to another, and don't really seem to learn much from it. Tan gives us the stereotypical American tourist - loud, coarse and inclined to trample through people's holy places through sheer ignorance. When harry - said tourist - pissed on a holy shrine in China, I was literally gritting my teeth with frustration. When his friends take absolutely nothing away with them from that experience - and being banned from most tourist places on the China/Burma border - I was beyond frustrated. All these people seemed concerned about was who was going to end up canoodling with whom.
If this sounds like a bad gap-year trip, hold on to your hats, because these are supposedly middle-aged second-gen well-to-do Chinese Americans with a vested interest in the arts. Excuse me, but bzuh?? There was little if no learning or refinement shown by any of the party, and seeing as how they had supposedly gone on similar trips before, their complete haplessness started to grate a little bit. To be blunt, they read like teenagers, rather than adults, and I found their behaviour a lot more immature than I myself would have been able to stand if I'd been marooned with them.
The American tourists, however, don't suffer the most in this story. That pity spot is reserved for the Karen tribe living deep in the Burmese jungle. These are people who have absorbed a con-man's version of Christianity, call themselves the Lord's Army, and are concerned with satellite TV and escaping the junta. The plight of the tribes people of Burma was, in my opinion, used for comedic relief and cheap pathos in this book, as their suffering is used to explain their 'simple outlook' - how they assume that the teenaged boy with the party is in fact the Younger White Brother, and he will do... something. They're not particularly clear on what the something is. The belief in deities - especially in the two children addressed as such in the tribe - is later attributed to PTSD, which made me very angry. In short, this was a tribe of happy natives, who have suffered a great deal, yes, but this allows them to (comically!) believe that the American tourists are gods and prophets.
Cringe-worthy.
The book is overly-long and this is because the narrator, Bibi - a wandering spirit - has a habit of dipping into every person's head as the group pass them. We get Walter's story, the fisherman's story - even some policemen's stories - and I, as the reader, really couldn't care less after a certain point. Instead of painting this cohesive, multi-faceted dramatic voyage into a forbidden land, we instead get treated to a paragraph here and there that are supposed to explain entire characters to us. Unsurprisingly, this means that the land is populated with caricatures and one-tone characters.
I'm not spoiling anything by saying that the Americans live happily ever after and the tribe they encounter - don't. If the book intended to highlight the insensitivity and self-absorption of the group, then it did so admirably. However, if it meant to make us sympathise with them and their good intentions, then perhaps it should have made them a little less infuriatingly obtuse, and the tribe a little less ridiculous. (Watch out, in particular, when they - perfectly capable of understanding English, btw - mistake the teenager's copy of Misery as The Bible. Yes.)
All in all, very disappointing and not recommended.