Amy Tan has always followed a formula. While I love her writing, it would be hard to distinguish one book of hers from the other. The Joy Luck Club was fantastic, and I liked The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses, but after that, I stopped. Every book seemed like a version of the previous one – quirky titles, Chinese-American conflict, generational gap conflict, and a confused protagonist; it stopped getting interesting for me.
Then I saw Saving Fish From Drowning last month and thought, ho-hum, more of the same. I then turned to the back of the book and read the blurb.
Hmm…this sounds interesting. For one, it was set in Burma (Myanmar), and two, it wasn’t a family story.
And so I picked it up.
What It’s About
San Francisco art patron Bibi Chen has planned a journey of the senses along the famed Burma Road for eleven lucky friends. But after her mysterious death, Bibi watches aghast from her ghostly perch as the travelers veer off her itinerary and embark on a trail paved with cultural gaffes and tribal curses, Buddhist illusions, and romantic desires. On Christmas morning, the tourists cruise across a misty lake and disappear.
~ Synopsis from Goodreads
My Review
So, this book is way different from Amy Tan’s other books. This book is outside of her usual voice and writing style. It’s also pretty bizarre and out there (in a good way).
12 American tourists go on a package tour to China and Myanmar. During this trip, they create every foreigner faux pas possible, from peeing on fertility goddesses to getting mixed up with the military junta and getting every sickness under the sun. Eventually, they are absconded by a hidden Karen tribe, convinced the young boy in their travel group is the second coming of The Younger White Brother, who will save them from the oppressive regime of Myanmar’s militaristic government.
At first, the tribe genuinely believes that the white boy will save them. However, once they realize they are wrong, they adroitly maneuver the situation to get a hit reality show on American TV.
Yes, that’s what I meant when I said the plot is bizarre. Quirky would also be a good word to describe it.
But sadly, while the idea is good, I think the execution went a bit wonky.
For one, the book is overlong for the story it wants to tell. I usually enjoy travelogues, but this one started extremely slow and dull. I also think 12 tourists was a bit too much. Amy Tan could easily have cut a couple of underdeveloped characters and made the book tighter. The story rambles until more than the middle of the book when the kidnapping occurs.
The first half of the book emphasizes the tourists’ ignorance. The Ugly American trope is played up to the max, stretching all limits of the reader’s credulity. There is one situation where the tourists conduct themselves abominably in a Chinese temple. They anger the locals and are forced to flee the place quickly. It was funny, but I also thought it was disrespectful to everybody concerned – the natives and the tourists. Throughout, the book gave me these uneasy laughs, especially where tragedy and farce are mixed in a very jarring way.
The book settles down a bit once the kidnapping occurs. The kidnapping is hilarious, with the tourists getting tricked into hiking into the jungle with the Karen tribe. They don’t even realize that they have been kidnapped until the end of the book!
Amy Tan then uses the tribals’ situation to educate us about some of the ongoing issues in Myanmar – the government’s brutality, the people’s sad state, and so on.
The book ended on a mixed note for me. The book lingers quite a bit on all the tourists letting us know what happens to each of them. However, the tribals’ fate ends abruptly in a couple of paragraphs.
Overall, this is an uneven book. I liked the uniqueness of the plot, and the humor really shines in places, but the book was too long, and the plot was not meaty enough. I love that Amy Tan has tried something new with this book, and I look forward to reading more such unique stories from her.
