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I have been informed that this writing is neither typical of Amy Tan nor her best. Thank heaven for that. The story starts strong and really pulls the reader in as the dead narrator recounts a bit of her life, but as the plot goes on, that ultimately turns out to be irrelevant, as do most of the occurrences in the book. With a scattered plot and far too many unessential and uninteresting characters, "Saving Fish" feels sloppy and directionless. The tone is also completely wrong for the subject matter. While the recounting the American travelers is light-hearted and often amusing, we are suddenly forced to deal with a tribe of internally displaced Karen people who have suffered unspeakable tragedy in the Burmese genocide against minorities. I felt that very little time and very little respect was given to this crucially important and little discussed issue. I would give Amy Tan's other novels a try and pass this one up.

Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan, her fifth novel, explores superstitions and religious beliefs about life, love and death and satirizes the exploitation of individuals, corporations and governments for power and profit.

Narrated by a ghost and set in Burma among Christian Karen people who still believe in indigenous pre-Buddhist era deities called “nats,” the novel explains the military takeover of the country, the name change to Myanmar, the repression of activist Aung San Suu Kyi, and the ongoing violence that began in 1948. As usual, Tan shows the reader cultural values and intent.

The novel describes the experience of eleven San Francisco Bay area Americans on an art tour down the Burma Road who disappear in Myanmar at Christmas, frightening other tourists and attracting the attention of the world. They spend the time that they are missing with a group of Karens known as the “Lajamee” in No Name Place, one of many of Tan’s apt labels. The group includes two teens each with a single parent, a married couple, a couple together for the trip, a gay man and two each single men and women. Among them is a TV personality who trains dogs, a professional art curator, an evolutionary biologist, a behavioral psychologist, and an influential Black woman

The title, Saving Fish from Drowning, refers to a proverb that justifies plundering humanity, and Tan makes many pointed and sarcastic statements about imperialism and human rights. Most of the life of the Karens contrasts starkly with the lives of the tourists, yet even in the jungle, the corrupting influences of TV and cell phones exist. The benefits of the simple life are obvious, not so the line between admirable trust and childish naïveté.

The multitude of characters and themes, the overload of information, and even the mystery of the narrator’s death make the story confusing and hard to follow. They also reinforce the theme that avoidance and suppressing feelings, not feeling, is a sure way to sidestep pain and prevent being hurt too much.

“... I learned to hide from pain. I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I had placed them” (30), Bibi tells us. "But then I discovered art. ...A painting was a translation of the language of my heart. ... I went to museum after museum ... there they were--my feelings, and all of the natural spontaneous, truthful, and free" (31). The lost tourists 'focus on trivial matters. All else was unbearable to consider.'

The tribe is held captive, according to Tan’s take on the region's animist beliefs and traditions, because they believe the teenage boy in the group, who carries a book that could be the “Important Writings” they await and appears divine because of his card tricks, is the fabled “Younger White Brother” for whom they have waited 100 years. They were duped a century ago by English scoundrel E.S. Andrews, who took refuge among them, seduced several dozen of the tribal daughters and the elders whom he called "The Lord's Army,” and then disappeared.

Tan’s includes her customary focus on mother/daughter relationships. Ghost narrator Bibi’s mother dies in child birth, and she learns to suppress feelings and assume she isn’t lovable from her cruel stepmother. "I would always be deficient in great feeling. It was because I never had a proper mother when I was growing up" (30). Although her death is initially presented as a freak murder, she in fact kills herself accidentally when she falls while allowing herself to savor joy after she opens a package from a cousin in China and find a jeweled comb, worn by her mother but lost when the family fled China.

Memorable quotes:



"Nothing filled with with the satisfaction that I believed I would have at the end of my life" (7).



"He had one of the finest attributes a uman being can have, in my opinion, and that is kindness without motives" (48).



"All I am saying is, nomatter what the religious beliefs in a country, a certain degree of acquisitiveness is always there" 148).



(In the novel's foreword, Tan pointedly informs readers that her novel is loosely based on a "true" and widely reported news story about 11 missing tourists "last seen on December 25 at Inle Lake as guests of the Floating Island Resort." She even reproduces a Chronicle article about the disappearance that Bay Area readers will have a very hard time recalling ever reading.)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...



Encounter with Karen people maimed by land mines - 286-290.

This book was released about 13 years ago, so I guess I’m slow to catch up. I’m glad that I did though! I borrowed it on disc from my local library, and it became my companion both in my vehicle and on my morning treadmill workouts. It tells the story of 11 travelers on a tour to China and Burma, organized by a friend who dies suddenly right before departure. The journey commences without her and many incidents and travails await.
I truly enjoyed this book! Even with the obvious satire and political overtones, it rings true to the heart of actual international tourist experience. The characters could have used some more fleshing out up front as the detailed epilogue later on was a bit too late for this reader to care, but they were a likable bunch on the whole without any intentional Ugly American behavior.
The plot, as unlikely as it was, moved at a good pace and while it didn’t resolve in the way that I would have liked for some characters, I give the author credit for her realistic acknowledgment of the human rights climate in certain parts of the world.
Since I did use an audible version of the book, the narration by the author herself is worth noting. While she gamely attempted to bring life to the characters and storyline she created, it may have been a better idea to appoint this task to someone else. Her mastery of UK and Aussie accents was distractingly poor, and her occasional lack of expressiveness completely pulled me out of the story at times. Still though, the book was well worth the time to listen, and I spent lots of extra time engaged in aimless drives and extra treadmill minutes to get to the end of chapters.

I liked aspects of this book. I loved a whole section in the middle, where it became so surreal and the tangled ironies were as so dense (reminiscent of the Burmese jungle) that I decided to treat it as a comedy. That was fine until everyone got rescued and the ending was far too long and drawn out (and boring).

I did like the narrator, she was a real personality and reminded me of Lee Lin Chin in a way, she seemed like she was half satirising herself even as there was a real person (fictional I do realise) with feelings behind her reflexive self-satire. She also became tender and tolerant toward her friends as the book progressed though I am sure in the beginning she was planning on being a bitch and a gossip in the malicious sense.

I didn't like the tourists. I didn't like their tendency to buy, break or burn their way through Burma. I briefly wondered if this was intentional characterisation of Western (especially American) tourists? I didn't like the compulsory and ever present heterosexuality (with one obligatory but homonormative gay). If all that coupling is as "natural" as we get told it is then why make such a big deal of it and if it is socially constructed (as I am sure it is) why not make it more interesting with some variety and greater complexity and unfinishedness (not just successful breeding pair, unsuccessful breeding pair).

That was part of what annoyed me about the long ending. Really it was just a role-call of whose tedious coupling succeeded and whose did not and whose partially did. The teenager almost-sex is something that could have been left offstage, we did not need to witness that. It also ruined the wovenness of different cultures and worldviews that had provided comedy and thought in the middle sections and gave it back a US-centric focus. The Karen tribe disappear (probably dead) would have been a place to end it or give a much shorter summary of everyone's white picket boringness ever after.

The paranormal/spiritual elements were left vague and contradictory enough to appeal to me. That was a bold move by Amy Tan and she did it far, far better than almost anyone. She had good reason to go there, she did it calmly and unobtrusively but also unapologetically. It was not cutesy pie. There was a comforting component but after all this is supposed to be a cosy book.

I thought most of the women in the book would have been better without their men or their focus on their men and I was annoyed that the kid had to hit puberty in so many tawdry words at the end. Bibi has her dignity at least (if not her dog). I loved the various Asian identities in the book including one that was American-Chinese to the point where she was more American than anything else, wheras Bibi was more cosmopolitan, almost transnational to the point where I though she had died on another overseas trip but no I had that wrong.

It's a solid three from me.

This is quite a departure from Tan's previous writings and it clearly threw some of her reviewers and readers off, who were comfortable with Tan's musings on the Chinese American community, and found themselves thrown off balence with this novel. Personally, I thought it was her most original effort to date and well worth reading. The name of the novel comes from fishermen's efforts to rationalize the deaths of the fish they catch. They aren't killing them to eat, they are attempting to save them from drowning. The central character is the spirit of a woman who is killed before the story begins. And the spirit accompanies her friends on a tourist trip to Burma/Myanmar that she helped arrange before her death. Her friends find themselves going more and more astray as they venture off the beaten tourist path, and while the spirit struggles to determine what happened to her in life and why, she attempts to help her friends.

I have enjoyed Amy Tan's other books very much, but I resisted reading Saving Fish From Drowning because I heard it was narrated by a ghost. Too improbable, I thought. I'm not interested in ghost stories. Now I've finally read it and am glad I did. The narrator, Bibi Chen, is a fine ghost who does not haunt anyone or intrude much in the action. She agonizes because she can't do much to help her friends.

Bibi, a San Francisco importer and art patron of a certain age, was supposed to lead a mixed group of her friends on a trip to South China and Myanmar (Burma). But she died suddenly.

Her friends can't be reimbursed if they cancel the trip, so they go anyway, with a guide who knows nothing about the areas where they will travel. When they arrive in Liajiang, China, Bennie, the well-meaning guide, learns that the local guide Bibi had hired has been snagged by other customers. So they wind up with a guide who doesn't speak the local language.

The travelers are all strong-minded Americans who sense Bennie's weakness and make their own decisions about where to go and what to do. Trouble ensues.

The narrative is great, and Amy Tan's knowledge of China and Burma (I think she prefers that name to Myanmar, a name chosen by the military dictators), suffuses the book. Yes, the reader becomes well aware of the brutality of the dictators, but Tan skillfully weaves that in to the story, which focuses on the hapless Americans. Thank goodness I finally read this book.

Amy Tan does not disappoint.

This was an engrossing read. I enjoy how Amy Tan weaves multiple stories into one narrative, combining many lives in one story. I felt that in the discussions of the trip and it's results, I lost a lot of Bibi Chen's narrative voice, and missed it. Overall, I found the book engaging and fun. I'd love to read more of Tan's work in the future.