Saving Fish from Drowning—Overview

Despite its interesting deployment of mixed-race characters, transnational experiences, and genre-blending, scholars have had little to say about Saving Fish from Drowning. Tan’s earlier novels having already displayed her interest in cultural and social intersectionalities, but in this work, she approaches the issue from a more overtly political angle. Unfortunately, despite the many changes Myanmar has undergone since the novel’s publication, the actions committed by its regime still make the news today, attesting to the lasting importance of Tan’s fiction. In addition to the usual book reviews, just a handful of critical articles and book chapters probe more deeply into aspects of Tan’s novel. The most interesting contributions include Tamara Wagner’s article examining Tan’s novel in the light of postcolonial literary criticism. Using Stanley Fish’s term “boutique multiculturalism” as her point of departure, Wagner demonstrates how, unlike other Chinese American authors, Tan expands her repertoire from the simple America-China (daughter-mother) dichotomy to include Burma as a new South Asian setting, and thus complicates the idea of the ethnic author’s “authenticity” by introducing a host of cultural misunderstandings and misreadings.

A chapter in Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature, edited by Christopher Conti and James Gourley, highlights the political thrust of Tan’s novel by detailing the translation and censorship complication of the Chinese edition: apparently all the novel’s elements critical of the Myanmar regime were removed by the translator. Moreover, the translator—himself a successful novelist—also removed story elements that might compete with his own publications. For my reading of Saving Fish from Drowning, early studies by Amy Ling and E. D. Huntley still provide a solid foundation. Amy Ling discusses, for instance, how the “Between Worlds” position produces a “feeling of being between worlds, totally at home nowhere” (105). Hence “the gulf between the Old World and the New, between Chinese mother and American daughter, and the painful difficulties resulting from attempts to bridge this gulf” (134). Like Ling, E.D. Huntley discusses “linguistic differences and miscommunication; identity; biculturalism, ethnicity, . . . ; cultural dislocation”—as a major concern of Tan’s works. In “The Semiotics of China Narratives in the Con/texts of Kingston and Tan,” Yuan Yuan also notes the tension caused by in-between worlds in Tan’s work but adds that it is not necessarily a negative feeling because being vested in several cultures may be a positive experience (300). I believe that this is how the profusion of multicultural, transethnic, and other in-between experiences operates in Saving Fish from Drowning: Tan unpacks the inevitability of misunderstandings when humans from all walks of life interact without being sufficiently aware of their cultural differences and the significances of these differences.

Postmodern authors, such as Amy Tan, are known for their playful experimentation, involving the questioning of traditional forms and genre boundaries. Nineteenth-century realists believed that reality could be objectively represented in fiction through carefully detailed settings, descriptions of ordinary characters, their speech patterns, and everyday environments. Early twentieth-century modernist innovators, on the other hand, began to question the desirability of realistic representation, with the next generation of postmodern authors contesting the possibility of such representations and even parodying earlier movements and blending styles and genres. Consequently, many contemporary US writers have adapted what is sometimes referred to as “magical realism” from its original artistic manifestations in the 1920s and its later uses in Latin American writing. By blending ordinary, realistic settings with fantastic occurrences, magical realism can also offer covert social criticism.

Amy Tan’s Version of Magical Realism

All of Tan’s novels are marked by an interweaving of verifiable historical facts, Chinese myths and folklore, and some autobiographical elements. Her narratives are also comprised of varying narrative voices, a prevalent method ever since the publication of Joy Luck Club (1989), in which a daughter is trying to make sense of her recently deceased mother’s life, and in the process recovers her two long-lost sisters. In several of the stories contributed by the mother’s girlfriends and their daughters, the ghost world is vividly present. Nonetheless, Tan renders the world of Chinese Americans so realistically that some readers have mistaken the novel for a sociological study. In The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), the theme of a daughter recovering her mother’s past continues, as the mother’s embrace of traditional Chinese beliefs contrasts starkly with the daughter’s rejection of mysticism. In A Hundred Secret Senses (1995), Olivia’s China-born sister Kwan is steeped in the spirit world of “yin people,” whereas in the The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), the narrator claims that she wrote the novel with the assistance of a “ghost writer,” the ghost of her deceased grandmother.

In Saving Fish from Drowning, Tan adopts several new strategies; specifically, she parodies traditional forms of literary realism, creating her very own version of magical realism. She employs historicizing elements and other authenticating strategies that early novelists used to make believe that their novels were factual. For instance, like Cervantes or Swift, Tan begins with a note to the reader, a traditional truth claim, aimed at ascertaining the factuality of the materials presented in this novel. Tan describes a rainstorm in New York that forces her to step into the offices of the “Society for Psychical Research” in whose archives she happens to come across the carefully catalogued entries on “automatic writing” that include the story of Bibi Chen as recorded by the medium Karen Lundegaard from Berkeley, California. Tan further claims that she met with Karen, and after Karen died of breast cancer, decided to fictionalize Bibi’s story since she had been a distant acquaintance. NPR’s Lynn Neary reported that this approach was so successful that, upon first reading the novel, Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Sharon Barrett thought Tan’s truth claims were meant seriously.

In addition to explaining the circumstances of composing the story, Tan also, as is customary in traditional, realistic novels, thanks those who contributed additional “factual information” to the writing process. She even supports the accuracy of the event (i.e., the kidnapping of 11 American tourists) with an intercalated newspaper article from the San Francisco Chronicle. Writes Wagner in her insightful article, “The novel’s parody of mediation carefully dismantles the assumed truth-value of reportage” (138). Throughout the novel, the varying newspaper and news accounts of what happened to the abducted tourists further reveal the tenuousness of what is commonly seen as factual, historical truth.

That the novel is narrated by a ghost further complicates its verisimilitude. From the very beginning, Tan shuns the idea that there is only one (rational) truth and immerses her readers in the possibility of various perspectives, of illusion and doubt, of a world of verifiable reality that exists parallel to a spirit world of the imagination and non-verifiable impressions. In the manner of the realist novel, Tan introduces an omniscient narrator, but her twist on this technique is that her omniscient narrator, named Bibi Chen, is already dead and speaks to us from some liminal space between life and death. When Bibi’s friend Bennie becomes the tour guide, she refuses to abandon her friends to his leadership, and thus Bibi’s ghost journeys with them. Quickly, Bibi recognizes the advantages of this new perspective: “I was privy to their secret thoughts: their motives and desires, guilt feelings and regrets, joys and fears, as well as the shades of truth within what they said, and what they refrained from saying” (34). She even likens her new-found abilities to the Buddha’s “Mind of Others.”

Bibi’s struggle to make sense of her own memory fragments explores yet another difficulty realists and historians experience: memories change and are notoriously difficult to reconstruct. While Bibi is retelling the events of the tourists’ abduction, she is also recollecting her past, her mother’s death, and the family’s flight from Shanghai during World War II. Alice Bennet in her book on Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction comments on the narrative transparency gained by the ghost narrative but contends that surrounded by others’ emotions, Bibi must translate these into her narrative, which is only as transparent as her own self-knowledge permits (145). This narratorial difficulty echoes one of Tan’s mother Daisy’s statements included in Tan’s memoir The Opposite of Fate: “I think about what my mother said. Isn’t the past what people remember—who did what, how and why? And what people remember, isn’t that mostly what they’ve already chosen to believe?” (103). As we look back on past events, we can never be entirely certain of the veracity and accuracy of what anyone remembers. The dead narrator can access information that would be unavailable even to omniscient narrators; thus, this plot device confuses and collapses existing notions of narratorial discussions (Bennett 117). Because Bibi’s kind of mind reading would only be available to a divine being, “[d]ead narrators insert themselves into this binary model of all-knowing God and ignorant humanity and open the way for thought experiments implying other knowledges in between” (Bennett 117). Bennett further points out that a narrative like Tan’s is purposely non-mimetic, “therefore bursting out of the boundaries of any narratology based on models from speech and life-writing like history and autobiography” (125).

In another twist on realist novel conventions, Tan also writes in the language of nineteenth-century naturalist writers, whose fictions sometimes introduced worlds that resembled scientific lab experiments. Tourists Harry, Moff, and Dwight are scientists and like to employ scientific discourse to impress and influence others. They share a belief in their ability to know and explain the phenomena that surround them completely. Interestingly, this approach works at times; for instance, when they are trying to flirt or when Harry flusters the impressionable, thirteen-year-old Esmé, but while they are stranded at the Karen compound, they are as helpless as the other tourists. They, too, become ill with malaria, and it is the Karen’s traditional herbal medicine that makes them well again. It is not their science that ultimately frees them, but a television program ironically called Darwin’s Fittest. Despite their relative isolation in the Burmese jungle, the Karen have managed to rig a satellite TV that they power by pedaling on a bicycle generator that recharges a battery. The introduction of a ghost narrator and parody of traditional literary realism successfully contribute to Tan’s version of magical realism.

Knowledge Through Multiple Perspectives and Cultural Intersections

In addition to Bibi Chen, Tan introduces a large group of ethnically diverse characters who journey together to Burma. Her detailed descriptions of sights, landscapes, and characters are what we would ordinarily call realistic. Over the course of the first few chapters, each character is introduced by mentioning his or her family circumstances and upbringing as well as their reasons for going on this journey. They all have different rationales for booking this strenuous, educational trip. Their reasons are revealed by the narrator as historical baggage that sheds light on the perceptual “lenses” they wear. Dwight, for instance, is a behavioral psychologist who is aware that his reasoning is not “scientifically possible”; nonetheless, he wants to make the trip because he is intrigued by the knowledge that his great-great-grandfather voyaged to Burma in 1883 (36). Like several of the other tourists, Heidi wants to journey toward wholeness (132). The trip is a means of alleviating the trauma of having found her murdered roommate. Overanxious, she is prepared with any number of gadgets and medicines that ultimately help the group survive their hardships.

Thus, we quickly realize how circumstances and upbringing influence each person’s perceptions of the world. With this multi-voiced and multi-perceptual approach, Tan contributes to a reevaluation of what reality is. It is not singular and unchanging but dependent on who looks at the world and interprets its many facets. For instance, on the road through southern China, several tourists notice trees along the roadside that are “painted white halfway up.” For one woman, relying on similar sights from her sphere of experience, this looks like a white picket fence. Harry’s scientific training makes him think it is an insecticide while another person concludes, “it was so the drivers could see the road at night.” And lastly, it becomes a convenient pick-up line for Harry as he moves over to touch Marlena (56).

In another instance, Wendy sees shapes moving in a darkening field and wonders what they are. A Chinese restaurant owner replies “Burr” which is his attempt at saying “Burmese” in English, but which Lulu, one of the official Chinese tour group leaders, interprets as “birds.” She continues to explain that these are egrets with a “long, long neck” (128). When Lulu realizes her misperception, she corrects herself by saying that these are Japanese people engaged in a ritual of retrieving the bones of Japanese World War II soldiers who had been killed in this field during a battle with Kuomintang. Eventually, we find out, however, that the shapes are Burmese peasant women, hacking sugar cane. In this novel, we quickly learn that nothing is what it appears to be. Tan questions our ability to perceive accurately and to know completely and with certainty.

Characters in this novel face other obstacles to perceiving the world. They can get trapped in a deterministic master narrative that does not allow them to see possible alternatives. The Karen’s embrace of a non-native religion that draws heavily on the Christian salvation story makes them expect the return of a Younger White Brother. Their beliefs include a vision of a future in peace and prosperity after Younger White Brother’s return, which will make them invincible and rid them of oppressive forces. This single-minded belief has made them resistant to other perceptions and has blinded them to the often-absurd expectations and actions associated with this belief. Just because the boy Rupert knows card tricks and carries a little black book in which he frequently reads, they see their savior in his person. Readers know, however, that Rupert is just Moff’s quite average son who reads Stephen King’s Misery to while away the time and boredom of the bus trip. The Karen see the world through lenses colored by their religious beliefs and thus overlook all the indicators that Rupert is not the person they expect him to be. Tan uses these examples to illustrate how often we see as real what we want to see and believe—which may have very little to do with actual happenings.

Despite their many other cultural differences, the tourists are as prone to committing errors of reasoning as are the Karen. A good example is the ease with which the Karen are able to abduct them. Having been promised a Christmas surprise, they eagerly follow the Karen guides even though their own tour guide is absent. They climb into a truck because it is quaint and authentic looking; they forge ahead into the jungle because they are looking forward to encounters with natives; and they don’t think twice about the disappearance of the bridge that links the outside world to that of the Karen’s encampment because they do not think the natives could possibly lie to them. They want to believe that they are among friends who mean them no harm.

Transcultural experiences and intersectionalities do not just occur on an interpersonal but also on a personal level. Dwight’s ancestors roamed imperial Burma; Moff attended a boarding school in Switzerland. Even though Moff runs a bamboo farm in Salinas, California, he would rather live part of the year in Nepal. The name of Wendy’s mother is the best indication that mere biculturalism is a thing of the past: Mary Ellen Brookheiser Feingold Fong can associate a different ethnicity with each element of her long name. Marlena Chu has a multicultural background, and her daughter Esme “could easily have passed for a child from Lijiang” (65). Most of the inhabitants, writes Tan, “were the result of centuries of bedtime mergers among Han Chinese, a dozen Yunnan tribes, and over the ages, British opportunists, European explorers, passing nomads, and fleeing Jews. The populace was an unplanned and lovely mix, no two ever the same, just like art” (65). Bibi’s assessment suggests how cultures benefit from meeting and blending, yet readers discover how many complexities and complications arise from such meetings.

Tan’s novel provides ample evidence that the process of transculturation has been ongoing for a long time. We learn, for example, that Bibi’s tour was supposed to introduce the tour group to diverse cultural influences on Buddhism (1). Again, Tan shows her readers that even an ancient religion emerged from a multicultural environment and, over time, absorbed various influences. When the group finally arrives at Stone Bell Temple, Bibi wants her friends to understand the age of the artifacts and the many cultural layers they include: “By seeing a medley of ancient Nanzhao, Bai, Dai, and Tibetan images, they might have sensed how streams of minority tribes’ religions had joined the dominant—and often domineering—Chinese river of thought” (75). Cultural blending and intercultural connections extend into the political borderlands as well. The ancient border town of Ruili, opposite Muse in Myanmar, offers a good example of the longstanding existence of such cultural melting pots. It has thrived on flux and change as a natural stopping point between China and Burma (104).

Despite such ample evidence of the benefits cultural exchanges provide, Tan also introduces potential problem areas. Burma’s colonial past offers one prominent example of the sometimes-exploitative nature of cultural exchanges. Tan, however, relativizes these observations by making none of the characters impervious to possible personal gain. In the same breath that Bibi mentions the British empire’s plundering of the colonies, she admits to taking treasures for her business well below their actual cost. Often cultural exchanges end up being one-sided, as we see in the Burmese tour guide Walter, whose family has been speaking English for varying reasons but for many generations. He attended western schools and speaks with an impeccable accent, adores western music and philosophy, but the tourists in his charge show no such eagerness to get to know his culture. When he is finally ready to leave his home for study in the United States, 9/11 thwarts his plans, and he must abandon his dreams.

As a matter of fact, Bibi observes with some disappointment how little her friends want to learn about the cultures they are eager to visit. Having prepared extensive documentation for their travel, she mentions repeatedly that they are neither reading her papers nor paying sufficient attention to what they are being told; they even fall asleep. The consequences of such inattention to cultural differences become immediately apparent when various and sometimes comical misunderstanding result from misperceptions. Not being able to speak the language of another culture puts one immediately at a disadvantage even when body language and gesturing may be able to bridge the communications gap. The Chinese tour guide Ms. Wong leads the group into a potentially dangerous situation at the Stone Bell Temple grottoes because of her ignorance of local dialects and thus, inadvertently, awakens the wrath of local Nats, spirits who don’t want their sacred places desecrated (180). Wagner’s article emphasizes that “[m]istranslation, wilful or inadvertent, is indeed central to the novel’s self-reflexive reworking of cultural myths” (139).

Knowledge Through Feeling and Empathy

A position between two states of being, fully at home neither in one nor in the other, can evoke a sense of doubleness that may defy purely rational perceptions and require the development of a more nuanced emotional intelligence. Therefore, the most important way of knowing proposed by Tan is a knowing through the heart. Reflecting on her life, Bibi comments on her inability to experience strong emotions, most likely the outcome of her mother’s early death and her stepmother’s teachings. Sweet Ma’s continued criticism trains Bibi to become indifferent and “deficient in feeling” so that she would not be hurt again (29). Her habit of suppressing her feelings makes Bibi’s life so empty that she wonders whether she lacks “the proper connection between the senses and the heart” (30). Eventually, she tries to assuage this deficiency by collecting art (32). After her death, Bibi acknowledges that her new-found insights into the minds of others permit her for the first time to feel “the ache of others” (13). At the end of the novel, when Bibi’s friend Vera learns from a police detective how Bibi died, Bibi finally recalls how she lost her balance while mounting Christmas lights and fell to her death. She had received a packet from a cousin that included her mother’s long-lost hair comb, which triggers deep emotions and causes the loss of balance. The emotion evoked by this item removes her emotional blockage and she feels “the emptiness of her loss replaced with the fullness of her love” (472). In death, Bibi finally acquires the emotional knowledge that always eluded her in life.

Questioning the Western tendency to privilege reason over emotion is the greatest challenge Tan poses to Western thought and understanding. In fact, the novel’s central episode set in the Karen’s “No Place” exile resembles an allegory comprising several vignettes meant to train the tourists’ emotional intelligence in a manner reminiscent of contemporary care ethics. In Connected Lives: Human Nature and an Ethics of Care, Ruth Groenhout describes the importance of care ethics by likening it to a web of emotionally connected individuals who care for each other to maintain their “full intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being” (24). It is an outlook that acknowledges humanity’s potential not as individualistic selves but as communal beings. The outcome of the tourists’ journey in Tan’s novel satisfies the four central tenets outlined in Groenhout’s study: care, embodiment and particularity, finitude and interdependence, and social selves.

For Groenhout, care constitutes “the emotion involved in tending to the physical needs of other, dependent humans” and it “holds a central place in ethical theory because of its indispensability for human life” (24). To some extent, all humans want and need to experience care, which for Groenhout necessitates active involvement in the lives of others and is, thus, deeply connected to matters of justice (29). Consequently, Groenhout emphasizes embodiment and particularity because “[i]nsofar as we are physical beings, an account of ethics that remains at the level of intellectual considerations without connecting up with concrete physical activities cannot be a full account” (30). In this manner, embodiment is tied to particularity because “[e]ach person looks at the world through different eyes, from a vantage point shaped by his or her physical being and its relationship to other humans and the rest of the physical world” (32). Acknowledging human finitude and interdependence, facilitates examination of broader social interconnections, for “humans are fundamentally interdependent and finite, or limited. Humans are not completely self-sufficient” (33). On the contrary, argues Groenhout, “humans become selves, in some sense, in the context of and through relationships with others” (36). Ultimately, in Groenhout’s conception of care ethics, humans must embrace these four ideals in order to flourish (43).

First and foremost, there is an emphasis on care itself evidenced in the group’s increasing concern for the Karen. Initially, they arrive overseas as paying tourists only, regard the local population as interesting tourist sights. They buy their crafts and other gadgets but ignore their plight. After the Karen abduct the tourists, take them to their village in No Name Place, and recount for them the atrocities committed against them, the tourists can no longer dissociate themselves from the natives and their concerns. After the old Karen grandmother finishes her eyewitness account of atrocities committed against her people, the tourists feel awful and ponder what they could do to improve the Karen’s situation. Bibi reports that they feel “uselessly sympathetic” and wonder how they should deal with “their moral discomfort” (288). Roxanne records what she sees with her camcorder; some of the others assuage their guilt by leaving money with the Karen. While pondering how to escape from No Name Place, they do consider how to do so without endangering their hosts.

Second, their feelings hinge on a sense of embodiment, that is, an awareness of the physicality of human lives. By encountering tremendous hardships during their stay with the Karen in No Name Place, the tourists abandon some of their trivial aspirations and begin to focus on care for each other. In the jungle, complete darkness surrounds them at night, and they bemoan the absence of beds when they enter their ‘bungalows’ fashioned inside strangler trees (295). But the absence of real toilets and the use of makeshift latrines become their least worry when they fall ill with malaria. Without his medications and CPAP machine, Bennie feels especially vulnerable and fears that the stress will cause a seizure that will make him appear weak in the eyes of the others (309).

Tan’s novel illustrates the characters’ realization of human finitude and interdependence that has “shaken them to the depths of their soul” (140). This insight is nowhere clearer than when they all fall ill and require medical assistance. Unable to call a doctor or find a nearby hospital, the group members realize that some of them could, indeed, die. They must rely on each other to recover and get well. After rejecting the Karen’s advice at first, Heidi and Moff eventually recognize the old women’s knowledge of herbal medicines and accept teas and soups that hasten the patients’ recovery. Without group work and mutual support, and the assistance of the Karen, they would have been unable to overcome the hardships that befall them during this part of their journey.

Lastly, Tan depicts humans as possessing social selves by examining very carefully the social relationships among her characters. Moff, who used to be selfish and objectified the female members of the tour group, has been chastened and humbled by his worries about Rupert; “after his son’s illness, he seemed softer, protective, yet vulnerable” (358). Their journey toward knowledge culminates in a moment of awakening achieved as the Karen perform a drumming ritual. It is a magic communal moment, and a kind of liberating out of body experience during which “[t]he pounding and chanting had become a communal heartbeat” (417) so that they are suddenly open to the thoughts of others. Bibi Chen’s comment on this experience is that the tourists reached “the greatest knowledge” which is “love” (417).

Of course, the friends vow to keep in touch and to continue looking after each other. As is so often the case, however, their resolutions are quickly forgotten upon their return to San Francisco. Still, most of them end up experiencing marked changes: Heidi and Moff continue seeing each other; Roxanne gives birth to Lucas; and Wendy starts writing for a human rights organization. The outcome of the adventure is less optimistic for the Karen. After initial TV deals and hopes of gaining income from medicinal plants, all traces of them are lost in the jungle (440). It appears that Tan does not wish to give her readers too much hope for happy endings.

While the novel’s tourist characters’ physical, lived experiences and interactions with each other and with the Karen lead to a growth of their empathetic abilities, the novel’s readers also become engrossed in the action. Probing deeply into character motivations and emotions, readers undergo their own moral education. According to the latest research in cognitive psychology, this emotional investment in fiction reading is, indeed, capable of stimulating reader empathy in ways comparable to our experiences in real-life events (Mar and Oatley). In an NPR interview with Lynn Neary shortly after the novel’s publication, Tan confirmed that her intentions in writing the novel coincide with Mar and Oatley’s theoretical findings. She intended to “lure” her readers by whatever means necessary into the story to make them aware of “the often-brutal politics and human rights violations of Myanmar’s military regime.” She meant to prevent her readers from forgetting the “suffering and dying” of the people of Myanmar. Neary summed up the conversation as follows: “For Amy Tan, ‘Saving Fish from Drowning’ is about larger issues and emotions. Ultimately, Tan says, she wants both her characters and her readers to discover their own capacity for compassion for people who are all but forgotten by the outside world.”

Conclusion—Living Successfully in the In-Between, Living Successfully with Paradox

Tan’s novel reveals through its parodic approach to realism and its multivocal narration, a deep distrust in truth claims while at the same time affirming the author’s responsibility for other human beings. Tan recognizes the freeing power of storytelling for exploring new possibilities. In The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, she offers an anecdote that involves looking at her grandmother’s photo: “Together we write stories of things that were and shouldn’t have been, or could have been, or might still be. We know the past can be changed. We can choose what we should believe. We can choose what we should remember” (104).

Tan’s insistence on changing the past constitutes a resistance both to following a master plot, and also to embracing a binary position of either/or. She advocates the many opportunities of the in-between. She suggests that we need not seek certainty but can dwell in paradox. The title of Tan’s novel introduces such a paradox that the tourists repeatedly try to solve. They realize eventually that the idea of “saving fish from drowning” applies to their situation, too: by attempting to help, they cause even more problems for the Karen, yet that possibility should not be seen as an excuse for not trying to lend a hand.

I believe that this is how the profusion of multicultural experiences operates in Saving Fish from Drowning: It demonstrates the inevitability of the crossing of cultural and personal boundaries due to globalization. Tan reveals the likelihood of problems occurring when humans from all walks of life interact without being sufficiently aware of their cultural differences and the significance of understanding and honoring these differences. To correct some of these “vision” problems and perhaps even to suggest methods by which modern individuals can lead more productive and less harmful lives, we must at least try to cross boundaries and bridge differences through greater empathy.

Works Cited