In the epilogue to The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Amy Tan offers a scene that combines the adult writer, Ruth Young, at her desk developing a story with the writer’s childhood memory of writing messages from a ghost on a tea-tray lined with sand. By fusing the two in one scene, Tan provides an apt metaphor for the work she performs throughout her fiction, that of investigating and reclaiming aspects of the past in order to define the self, align it with female ancestors, and orient it toward the future. The image of the daughter at the tea-tray writing out messages from the dead symbolizes the “possession” of the daughter by her ghostly female ancestor. This possession is not a passive state but an active one, for the daughter exercises her agency as a writer by using her imagination and responding through her written words to her mother LuLing about Precious Auntie, or Bao Bomu.

Moreover, the story of Precious Auntie in The Bonesetter’s Daughter may be interpreted as a creative revision of “No Name Woman,” the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. As Ken-fang Lee explains, “the ghost of [Kingston’s] no-name aunt represents the repressed female tradition in a patriarchal society”(113). As does Kingston, Tan portrays the silencing of women and uses the imagery of paper and ink to recover the silenced female forebear. For example, when Ruth tries to guess the next word in the first sentence of her mother’s memoir in Chinese (“These are the things I should not—”), the three options she tries out reflect her expectation of repression: tell, write, and speak. Instead, the verb is actually forget, which makes the sentence an act of preservation instead of repression (Bonesetter’s Daughter 147–48). In addition, “No Name Woman” opens with the mother’s admonition to the narrator to refrain from repeating the story she divulges, while Tan’s protagonist Ruth Young suffers from a seasonal and evidently psychosomatic form of laryngitis near the beginning of The Bonesetter’s Daughter. However, in her revision of Kingston, Tan ultimately transforms an anonymous woman into a cherished maternal ancestor with a personal name and transmissible biography.

In The Bonesetter’s Daughter, the detail that the Liu family manufactures ink is a critical feature of LuLing’s childhood experience and her relationship with Precious Auntie. The women of the family make the ink, while the men sell it. In the memoir that constitutes part two of the novel, LuLing recalls the scent of the ink’s ingredients and describes the stages of its production, culminating in the form of carved sticks. “It was boring work,” she writes, “but we were proud of our secret family recipe. It yielded just the right color and hardness. An inkstick of ours could last ten years and more.” Moreover, their customers confirmed its high quality, reporting that in the documents they wrote with such ink, “their words lasted black and strong” (157). As Lisa M.S. Dunick has noted, the power of writing to preserve experience is an important aspect of the novel as a whole (13). Given that ink is the means by which Precious Auntie tries to kill herself (the first time) and instead injures and disfigures herself, it is also a primary element in the plot of Precious Auntie’s life (174–75). LuLing’s professional calligraphy (52) and Ruth’s own work as a ghostwriter (28–29) are part of the family of images relating to writing in the novel, too.

Just as significant as Tan’s descriptions of ink and writing are Precious Auntie’s advice about the attitude one must adopt before writing. Tan fuses the writer’s proper approach to writing with an emphasis on the materiality of the signifier in the opening scene of part two, in which LuLing narrates her memory of one of Precious Auntie’s writing lessons. The lesson is about how to write Immortal Heart, the name of the village in which LuLing passed her childhood:

In raising such questions, Precious Auntie not only teaches her daughter how to write, but how to think (Bonesetter’s Daughter 52–53). She situates LuLing in the social world around her by teaching her how to inscribe the name of the village she inhabits. Precious Auntie’s questions echo the tragedy of “No Name Woman” in Kingston’s Woman Warrior.

In “No Name Woman,” the narrator, conventionally referred to as Maxine, learns from her mother that a paternal aunt became pregnant out of wedlock and was punished by her community and deliberately forgotten by her family after she committed suicide. The story is a cautionary tale warning Maxine to avoid her relative’s example. Despite being sworn to silence, Maxine finds it impossible to forget her unknown aunt once she learns of her. Plagued by unanswered questions about this woman whose name she never discovers, Maxine speculates about a variety of possible storylines leading to No Name Woman’s pregnancy and death. Violating her family’s secrecy, Maxine feels compelled to honor the aunt by writing about her. Since, as Klara Szmańko observes, “The family’s curse haunts . . . No Name Woman even after death” (193), Maxine writes in order to reclaim her “forerunner” from oblivion (Kingston 8).

In The Bonesetter’s Daughter, when Precious Auntie asks, “Whose dead heart gave shape to this word?” she broaches her own history and associates writing with a ghostly “dead heart,” though LuLing would not have understood this at the time. The intense lyricism of the question reflects the personal stakes Precious Auntie feels in raising it, but this personal feeling is grounded in the linguistic conventions and visual quality of the character, so the lesson transcends her personal experience. Precious Auntie’s lesson to LuLing includes the idea that “A person should consider how things begin. A particular beginning results in a particular end.” LuLing takes up this challenge when she confesses, “Since then I have wondered about the beginning and end of many things” (153). Tan defines this beginning as the basis of an etiology, or explanation of the cause and origin of Precious Auntie’s family tragedy. Tan also seems to emphasize the meaning of end in terms of both finality and teleology: as both “outcome or death” and “purpose or goal.” The sense of purpose Precious Auntie associates with writing emerges with a new urgency for Ruth by the end of the novel.

Tan’s images of ink, Chinese characters, and calligraphy provide a strong parallel to the writing metaphors in “No Name Woman” and “White Tigers,” the first two chapters of Kingston’s Woman Warrior. In “No Name Woman,” Kingston figures her memoir about her anonymous aunt as a tribute or homage, taking the place of origami offerings to the dead (16). In “White Tigers,” Kingston portrays the long section in which Maxine “becomes” the woman warrior Fa Mu Lan as an imaginative figure entering into an ink drawing, a passage that focuses on the similarity between the image of a bird in flight with that of the Chinese ideograph for “human” (Sato 196). This image symbolizes Kingston’s active engagement with the tale of Fa Mu Lan in her work as a writer.

In her adaptation of Kingston’s story of her anonymous aunt in The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Tan also features Chinese ideograms at the beginning of each chapter of LuLing’s memoir. This visually reinforces the centrality of writing to the novel’s plot as well as its theme. In part two, Tan showcases the ideograms for Truth (1), Heart (153), Change (177), Ghost (209), Destiny (227), Effortless (245), Character (267), and Fragrance (283). Coming at the head of each chapter, before the English words, the ideograms also remind readers that LuLing’s account is a translation from Chinese into English: “the pages were written in Chinese, her mother’s writing” (Bonesetter’s Daughter 12). As Dunick explains,

The importance of the ideograms is accentuated even further by the fact that the chapter headings for parts one and three of the novel are numbers instead of names. The centrality of the actual Chinese signifier in Precious Auntie’s narrative also makes it different from Tan’s usage in her previous novels. Except for one ideogram that appears at the beginning of The Joy Luck Club, Chinese characters are not reproduced elsewhere in that book. Nor do they appear in The Kitchen God’s Wife or The Hundred Secret Senses. By contrast, throughout The Bonesetter’s Daughter Tan spotlights the materials and practice of writing in order to transfigure Kingston’s anonymous aunt, a forgotten female ancestor, into a mother with a name and life story that she can recover and confidently narrate.

Tan also rewrites Kingston’s story of the ostracized aunt through her use of ghosts. She provides a number of ways to consider the meaning of ghosts, including the psychological, social, and imaginative. In “The Ghosts of the Imagination,” for example, she associates them with imagination and inspiration, taking up the idea of the muse, which she defines as “memory added to imagination, subtracted by false starts, and multiplied by a fraction of the tons of hard work you’ve put into the mess” (Opposite of Fate 250). Among other things, the ghost is a figure for the self’s permeability, both in terms of the self’s vulnerability and the compassionate openness to the Other. The various forms of ghostwriting performed by Ruth throughout the book demonstrate how the self is suffused by others: she turns the ideas of others into coherent texts and mediates access to Precious Auntie’s ghost for LuLing to help LuLing cope with her grief and shame about Precious Auntie’s suicide. Avery Gordon provides a relevant insight for understanding the impact of Precious Auntie’s ghost in The Bonesetter’s Daughter. “Following the ghosts,” Gordon writes, “is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located. It is about putting life back in where only a vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look” (22).

At different points in Tan’s novel, Ruth seems to be of two minds regarding ghosts. Sometimes she seems to believe in them, at other times she is more skeptical. In a key episode of her childhood, Ruth breaks her leg and seems unable to speak for herself in the wake of this injury. To help her communicate, LuLing encourages her to write by using the improvised means of sand on a tea tray in which letters can be inscribed with a chopstick. (This means of writing parallels the use of chalk and slate when Precious Auntie taught LuLing to write.) By a curious accident in which Ruth expresses a wish, LuLing becomes convinced that one of Ruth’s inscriptions is actually a message from the ghost of Precious Auntie. Once she gets this idea, LuLing continues to believe it, so that Ruth’s writing becomes permanently associated with Precious Auntie.

Tan describes Ruth’s response to this turn of events in a later episode, writing,

The mixture of the mundane and mysterious in this passage reflects the impact on her daughter of LuLing’s demand for messages from Precious Auntie. Although Ruth feels the task is a “boring chore,” she also understands that it is a “duty,” a value that her mother instills in her. In addition, even though Ruth finds the sessions tiresome, they also include an element of surprise that she cannot quite account for. As a result, Ruth’s sand-tray writing becomes a way for her to bond with her mother and the enigmatic figure of Precious Auntie over time.

As a busy adult with a family of her own, Ruth’s subsequent perspective on these interactions is a bit more jaundiced. (In “Room with A View, New Kitchen, and Ghosts,” Tan raises the question of whether she herself believes in ghosts, but she playfully refrains from answering it ([Opposite 268]). In a subsequent episode when Ruth reflects on her aging mother’s dementia, she wonders whether ghosts exist even as she uses ghostly discourse to think about her relationship to her younger self:

Tan’s phrasing in the last sentence posits Ruth’s former self as inhabiting her in the way a ghost or spirit might “possess” a living person. Her adolescent self is both alien and central to her personality, an abandoned yet lingering perspective on the world. As a wiser adult, she can understand her past point of view more clearly because of the critical distance supplied by maturity and experience. But “the unhappy girl who lived in her body” is a way of expressing this insight in a dramatic way, as though that girl vestigially persists in her.

In the same scene, the adult Ruth goes on to consider whether ghosts exists and what she thinks about them:

Ruth’s thinking here is informed by a Western, post-Enlightenment view of reality, tentatively consigning ghosts to the realm of superstition and fantasy. While most of her ideas are posed as unresolved questions, this passage suggests that Ruth might share Yuan Yuan’s view that ghosts “are signifiers with diverse meanings, especially when configured in a multicultural context” (299). The either/or logic of belief in ghosts as superstitious folderol or sane acknowledgement of the paranormal does not apply well to Ruth, her mother, and their family predicament.

Ruth’s questions about belief segue into her recollection of a diary she maintained as a girl. By resorting to writing, the teenaged Ruth records her perspectives in order to process her emotions. But she also communicates with her mother, as she learns that her mother reads her entries. This double use of writing as a tool for self-understanding and oblique communication is at the heart of The Bonesetter’s Daughter. This is true not only for Ruth, but her mother LuLing and Precious Auntie, whose story unfolds in the account LuLing commits to paper.

LuLing’s story of Precious Auntie is a ghostly text because Ruth does not read the account until after her mother has fallen prey to Alzheimer’s. Of course, LuLing is alive when Ruth finally does read the account, but LuLing is not consistently coherent enough to be able to interact with her daughter in a sustained and stable way. This makes her somewhat less accessible to Ruth than her written memoir turns out to be, at least after it is professionally translated into English. The text is also ghostly because it conveys the story of the dead Precious Auntie, ultimately revealing her identity, her biography, and her true relationship to LuLing as mother rather than aunt (and by extension, as Ruth’s grandmother instead of her great-aunt). This happens long after Precious Auntie has died. By reading her mother’s text, Ruth learns not only about Precious Auntie but also about her mother LuLing. In turn, this provides the basis for a new understanding of her own identity in relation to both of them. As the end of the novel indicates, this process culminates in Ruth’s new sense of purpose and self-acceptance.

In the personal essay “Family Ghosts Hoard Secrets That Bewitch the Living,” Tan suggests an autobiographical origin for Ruth’s séance-like sand-writing. She tells a similar story in Where the Past Begins about her mother’s belief “that I had a secret ability to talk to ghosts” and their use of a Ouija board to do so (286–88). For this reason, the activity should be considered as another example of the intertextual connection between The Bonesetter’s Daughter and The Woman Warrior. After all, the subtitle of Kingston’s book is “Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts” [italics added]. In “Family Ghosts,” Tan writes,

Tan’s recollection in this passage shares something of Ruth’s mixed feelings of frustration and surprise. Just as Kingston sought to make sense of her family’s history in the person of an unknown female “forerunner” (8), in The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Tan’s protagonist Ruth tries to piece together her sense of self and heritage by reading LuLing’s memoir of Precious Auntie.

In The Bonesetter’s Daughter Ruth’s sand-tray writing begins under duress, as LuLing insists that Ruth write out messages when she comes to believe they derive from Precious Auntie. Later Ruth attunes her answers to her mother’s wishes in order to assuage or comfort her, depending on the occasion and her mood. Still later, as an adult, Ruth cultivates the practice more deliberately in a way to express care for her mother and to learn more about her past. Reaching out and showing her love in this indirect way, Ruth tries to address her mother’s concerns about her situation in life, including her emotional needs (such as wanting quality time with her daughter) and her financial worries about her home, her health, and her tenant.

In all these cases, Ruth must discern her mother’s anxieties in order to respond to her. The act of writing is mediated by the absent figure of Precious Auntie: ostensibly, Ruth’s writing is an act of communication between herself and the spirit of the dead woman. But at its most fundamental level, it is a form of communication (and collaboration) between Ruth and her mother. As her dead grandmother’s ghostwriter, Ruth channels Precious Auntie’s messages to LuLing. LuLing seems to believe that she cannot directly communicate with her mother herself, so she relies upon Ruth as a conduit to connect her to Precious Auntie. Once, in what serves as a preface to her memoir or an internally spoken supplement to its opening pages, LuLing directly addresses her mother:

This speech takes the form of a poetic apostrophe or prayer. As Ruth grows up, LuLing may continue to address Precious Auntie in her private, unspoken thoughts, but she transfers her need for a response to Ruth. The passage does not appear in the translation of LuLing’s memoir when it is fully narrated later on, in part two. Instead, it functions as a kind of draft of the first chapter or as LuLing’s internal discourse as she composes the memoir. In terms of the novel’s overall form, perhaps it is best viewed as an intimate, sotto voce preface to the written account that makes up part two. It also corresponds to Kingston’s effort in “No Name Woman” to forge a connection wither her anonymous aunt.

Ruth seems to be the necessary medium for the ghostly messages because LuLing is not confident that she can know Precious Auntie’s thoughts directly. As Hannah Ho Ming Yit writes, “the ghost of Bao Bomu signifies how Ruth becomes the unwitting yet crucial mediator and transmitter of her grandmother’s history and her mother’s memory of China” (157). LuLing is so distraught that she needs a go-between to help her face her feelings about her mother’s death. She is afraid of losing her mother’s approval and affection because LuLing sought to marry without her permission, and she appeared to disclaim Precious Auntie as her biological mother. LuLing is overcome with remorse about Precious Auntie’s death. This guilt is so all-encompassing that it puts LuLing in a perennial panic. As readers eventually learn, LuLing is haunted by Precious Auntie because LuLing believes she drove her to suicide. Precious Auntie’s decision to kill herself is based on the false assumption that LuLing refuses to accept and love her as her real mother. LuLing does not learn this until after Precious Auntie dies because she stopped reading Precious Auntie’s letter before she reached this revelation (Bonesetter’s Daughter 210).

When Ruth becomes a teenager, she mirrors her mother’s girlhood rebellion against Precious Auntie by lashing out against LuLing in her diary, which she is certain that LuLing reads. Whereas LuLing drives Precious Auntie to suicide by supposedly repudiating her as her mother, Ruth writes in her diary that she is sick of LuLing’s manipulative suicide threats and suggests that she should follow through with them. Ruth explicitly links her angry recommendation to Precious Auntie, writing, “Go ahead, kill yourself! Precious Auntie wants you to, and so do I” (Bonesetter’s Daughter 141).

This parallel is significant because, as an extended piece of writing, the diary corresponds to LuLing’s personal memoir about Precious Auntie. Daughter and mother are both writers, and they read one another’s texts, but not in each other’s presence. Both texts are linked to suicide or attempted suicide: Precious Auntie’s unread letter leads to her despair and suicide (Bonesetter’s Daughter 210–12), while Ruth’s diary entry is followed by LuLing’s hospitalization for supposedly falling out of their apartment window (Bonesetter’s Daughter 142–43). This pattern of solitary writing and deferred but equally solitary reading indicates the emotional distance and even aggression between the daughters and mothers at various points in their lives. At the same time, the act of reading becomes an opportunity to bridge the distance. Reading the other’s text becomes the means by which the other is known, and in the case of LuLing’s text, it also serves as an occasion for mother and daughter to talk directly to one another about its contents and their relationship to Precious Auntie.

While Ruth’s diary and LuLing’s memoir are both forms of writing aimed at understanding oneself and one’s heritage in terms of family and personal development, Tan offers the even broader contexts of evolutionary history and geological time through the book’s references to archaeology and to Peking Man, the collective name for early human fossils discovered at Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, in 1927. Precious Auntie is aligned with this context in terms of her father’s profession as a healer and his use of ancient bones as medicine (Bonesetter’s Daughter 163–64). The family connection to this past is also grounded in Precious Auntie’s dream in which her dead father explains that the bones she possesses belong to an ancestor and must be reburied in order to remove a curse against their family (Bonesetter’s Daughter 178).

This connection to an ancient, not fully knowable past is further reinforced by LuLing’s love for Kai Jing, who works with scientists at the archaeological site near the orphanage where LuLing is sent after Precious Auntie kills herself (Bonesetter’s Daughter 233). As a professional geologist, he brings a scientific outlook to his marriage, providing companionship to LuLing and helping her assuage her guilt regarding Precious Auntie’s suicide. The idea of the family curse needs to be countered in order for LuLing to heal, and Kai Jing explains that “There are no such things as curses.” The scientific idea of considering events without attributing them to supernatural causes (“There is no reason”) is one means for LuLing to lift the burden of the curse she feels will plague her life because of her family’s tragic past (Bonesetter’s Daughter 258).

Like Kai Jing, Mr. Tang, the man Ruth hires to translate her mother’s memoir, discusses some of the broader historical and archaeological contexts of LuLing’s text near the end of the novel, in the scene where Ruth and LuLing view an oracle bone in a museum. The inscriptions on the oracle bones parallel Ruth’s sand-writing. Regarding the oracle bone that Ruth, her mother, and their male partners view, Ruth’s boyfriend Art asks, “What’s the writing on the oracle bone?” Mr. Tang answers, “They’re the questions the emperors asked the gods. What’s the weather going to be tomorrow who’s going to win the war, when should the crops be planted. Kind of like the six-o’clock news, only they wanted the report ahead of time” (346).

Mr. Tang goes on to explain that the answers are “cracks you see next to the black spots. The diviners of the bones used a heated nail to crack the bone. It actually made a sound—pwak! They interpreted the cracks as the answers from heaven. I’m sure the more successful diviners were skilled at saying what the emperors wanted to hear” (346). Mr. Tang’s science-oriented answer corresponds to Ruth’s strategy when writing in sand for her mother; she fits her answers to LuLing’s questions in a way that recognizes and mitigates her mother’s anxieties. In addition, the oracle bone in the museum corresponds to the one bequeathed to LuLing by her mother. Like the other images of writing, it plays a role in strengthening the emotional ties between Ruth and LuLing, and it embodies the cultural centrality of writing in the long sweep of human history.

While the oracle bone in the museum situates LuLing in a longer span of time, the personal history and the name of Precious Auntie provide a more immediate and sustaining link to the past. By translating the meaning of Precious Auntie’s personal and family names once she learns them near the end of the novel, Ruth collaborates with her aunt GaoLing in an act of interpretation. The name becomes a kind of poem, one that parallels the fortune told by the blind girl consulted by LuLing after Precious Auntie’s death (Bonesetter’s Daughter 219–21). GaoLing confirms that LuLing is right to claim her mother’s surname was Gu, but GaoLing explains that the syllable can mean other things besides “bone,” including “gorge,” “old,” “thigh,” “blind,” “grain,” and “merchant.” Ruth even makes up the following sentence to emphasize the rich, bewildering polysemy of the Chinese word: “The blind bone doctor from the gorge repaired the thigh of the old grain merchant” (349). Ruth’s fanciful sentence significantly includes the verb “repaired,” suggesting that her recovery of the forgotten name initiates a healing process.

Ruth and her aunt GaoLing engage in a similarly collaborative process of translation and interpretation when it comes to Precious Auntie’s personal name, Liu Xin. Ruth believes this means “shooting star,” recalling her mother’s story that such a star had fallen into Precious Auntie’s mouth, but GaoLing corrects her by explaining that the word for star is xing, while xin means truth. Consequently, Liu Xin means “remain True.” Nevertheless, given that xin and xing seem so easy to confuse with one another, the other meaning of “shooting star” lingers in the background, haunting Precious Auntie’s life story. As GaoLing explains, the latter meaning was derogatory for some family members, who did in fact call her Liu Xing. They did so because they confused shooting stars with comets and the “calamity” they believed such astronomical events to signify. Ruth receives the news of the meaning of Precious Auntie’s true name in positive terms that rebut her denigration by the Liu family:

This act of interpretation is stated in terms of religious revelation, or divination. It is also figured as a form of writing (“etching”) in permanent ink (“indelibly”). Ruth’s meditation on Precious Auntie’s personal name is an act of affirmation, since she lays claim to Gu Liu Xin as her grandmother and restores her rightful place in a cherished lineage.

By foregrounding Ruth and GaoLing’s act of interpretation, Tan makes the scene a commentary on her novel and her relationship to her readers. Ghostwriting results in a text inhabited by the ancestral Other. LuLing’s memoir of Precious Auntie provides the means for resolving her torment about Precious Auntie’s suicide. LuLing is haunted by the part she played in the death. This demonic memory must be exorcised, and identifying the reason for the pain is the first step in that process. Committing the memory to writing recuperates the loss by turning it into a legacy. As Pin-chia Feng explains, “the act of ghost-writing thus links three generations of women together; for the guilt-ridden Lu Ling especially, this ritual of reaching toward the other world is an important ritual of exorcism. At the end of the novel Ruth, the granddaughter, starts to write her own book with the spiritual inspiration of the grandmother” (338). Ruth writes in the private space of her “Cubbyhole,” the nickname she gives to her cozy office. With the blessing of her maternal ancestors, she writes for herself and for the simple pleasure of writing. This scene reflects Tan’s own enjoyment of private writing as a child, when “writing was almost like letters to myself . . . so it was like a confidante, in a way” (Redford 17:27–18:12).

Tan makes the metafictional nature of the texts in her story explicit in the epilogue by depicting Ruth at work as a writer, meditating on what she has learned about her mother, her grandmother, and herself. Although Kingston also reflects on the experiences of her mother in The Woman Warrior, the story of her aunt remains shrouded in mystery. By contrast, Tan’s epilogue takes on a ritual quality because it is the means by which Precious Auntie’s personal name is recuperated, cherished, and spoken. This coda corresponds to LuLing’s spoken prayer to Precious Auntie at the beginning of the book, so that the frame of the novel is antiphonal, making the book a kind of literary call and response between the past and the present.