The title of the book is derived from the practice of Myanmar fishermen who "scoop up the fish and bring them to shore. They say they are saving the fish from drowning. Unfortunately... the fish do not recover," This kind of magical thinking or hypocrisy or mystical attitude or sheer stupidity is a fair metaphor for the entire book. It may be read as a satire, a political statement, a picaresque tale with several "picaros" or simply a story about a tour gone wrong.
Bibi Chen, San Francisco socialite and art vendor to the stars, plans to lead a trip for 12 friends: "My friends, those lovers of art, most of them rich, intelligent, and spoiled, would spend a week in China and arrive in Burma on Christmas Day." Unfortunately, Bibi dies, in very strange circumstances, before the tour begins. After wrangling about it, the group decides to go after all. The leader they choose is indecisive and epileptic, a dangerous combo. Bibi goes along as the disembodied voice-over.
Once in Myanmar, finally, they are noticed by a group of Karen tribesmen who decide that Rupert, the 15-year-old son of a bamboo grower is, in fact, Younger White Brother, or The Lord of the Nats. He can do card tricks and is carrying a Stephen King paperback. These are adjudged to be signs of his deity and ability to save them from marauding soldiers. The group is "kidnapped," although they think they are setting out for a Christmas Day surprise, and taken deep into the jungle where they languish, develop malaria, learn to eat slimy things and wait to be rescued. Nats are "believed to be the spirits of nature--the lake, the trees, the mountains, the snakes and birds. They were numberless ... They were everywhere, as were bad luck and the need to find reasons for it." Philosophy or cynicism? This elusive point of view is found throughout the novel--a bald statement is made and then Tan pulls her punches as if she is unwilling to make a statement that might set a more serious tone.
There are some goofy parts about Harry, the member of the group who is left behind, and his encounter with two newswomen from Global News Network, some slapstick sex scenes and a great deal of dog-loving dialogue. These all contribute to a novel that is silly but not really funny, could have an occasionally serious theme which suddenly disappears, and is about a group of stereotypical characters that it's hard to care about. It was time for Amy Tan to write another book; too bad this was it. --Valerie Ryan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
“Following the Buddha’s Footsteps” is what I named the expedition. It was to have begun in the southwestern corner of China, in Yunnan Province, with vistas of the Himalayas and perpetual spring flowers, and then to have continued south on the famed Burma Road. This would allow us to trace the marvelous influence of various religious cultures on Buddhist art over a thousand years and a thousand miles—a fabulous journey into the past. As if that were not enough appeal, I would be both tour leader and personal docent, making the expedition a truly value-added opportunity. But in the wee hours of December 2nd, and just fourteen days before we were to leave on our expedition, a hideous thing happened...I died. There. I’ve finally said it, as unbelievable as it sounds. I can still see the tragic headline: “Socialite Butchered in Cult Slaying.”
The article was quite long: two columns on the left-hand side of the front page, with a color photo of me covered with an antique textile, an exquisite one utterly ruined for future sale.
The report was a terrible thing to read: “The body of Bibi Chen, 63, retail maven, socialite, and board member of the Asian Art Museum, was found yesterday in the display window of her Union Square store, The Immortals, famed for its chinoiserie....” That odious word—“chinoiserie”—so belittling in a precious way. The article continued with a rather nebulous description of the weapon: a small, rakelike object that had severed my throat, and a rope tightened around my neck, suggesting that someone had tried to strangle me after stabbing had failed. The door had been forced open, and bloody footprints of size-twelve men’s shoes led from the platform where I had died, then out the door, and down the street. Next to my body lay jewelry and broken figurines. According to one source, there was a paper with writing from a Satanic cult bragging that it had struck again.
Two days later, there was another story, only shorter and with no photo: “New Clues in Arts Patron’s Death.” A police spokesman explained that they had never called it a cult slaying. The detective had noted “a paper,” meaning a newspaper tabloid, and when asked by reporters what the paper said, he gave the tabloid’s headline: “Satanic Cult Vows to Kill Again.” The spokesman went on to say that more evidence had been found and an arrest had been made. A police dog tracked the trail left by my blood. What is invisible to the human eye, the spokesman said, still contains “scent molecules that highly trained dogs can detect for as long as a week or so after the event.” (My death was an event?) The trail took them to an alleyway, where they found bloodstained slacks stuffed in a shopping cart filled with trash. A short distance from there, they found a tent fashioned out of blue tarp and cardboard. They arrested the occupant, a homeless man, who was wearing the shoes that had left the telltale imprints. The suspect had no criminal record but a history of psychiatric problems. Case solved.
Or maybe not. Right after my friends were lost in Burma, the newspaper changed its mind again: “Shopkeeper’s Death Ruled Freak Accident.”
No reason, no purpose, no one to blame, just “freak,” this ugly word next to my name forever. And why was I demoted to “shopkeeper”? The story further noted that DNA analysis of the man’s skin particles and those on both the blood-spattered trousers and the shoes confirmed that the man was no longer a suspect. So who had entered my gallery and left the prints? Wasn’t it an obvious case of crime? Who, exactly, caused this freak accident? Yet there was no mention of a further investigation, shame on them. In the same article, the reporter noted “an odd coincidence,” namely that “Bibi Chen had organized the Burma Road trip, in which eleven people went on a journey to view Buddhist art and disappeared.” You see how they pointed the shaking finger of blame? They certainly implied it, through slippery association with what could not be adequately explained, as if I had created a trip that was doomed from the start. Pure nonsense.
The worst part about all of this is that I don’t remember how I died. In those last moments, what was I doing? Whom did I see wielding the instrument of death? Was it painful? Perhaps it was so awful that I blocked it from my memory. It’s human nature to do that. And am I not still human, even if I’m dead?
The autopsy concluded that I was not strangled but had drowned in my own blood. It was ghastly to hear. So far none of this information has been of any use whatsoever. A little rake in my throat, a rope around my neck—this was an accident? You’d have to be brainless to think so, as more than a few evidently were.
At the postmortem, photos were taken, especially of the awful part of my neck. My body was tucked into a metal drawer for future study. There I lay for several days, and then samples of me were removed—a swab of this, a sliver of that, hair follicles, blood, and gastric juices. Then two more days went by, because the chief medical examiner went on vacation in Maui, and since I was an illustrious person, of particular renown in the art world—and no, not just the retail community, as the San Francisco Chronicle suggested—he wanted to see me personally, as did esteemed people in the professions of crime and forensic medicine. They dropped by on their lunch hour to make ghoulish guesses as to what had happened to cause my premature demise. For days, they slid me in, they slid me out, and said brutish things about the contents of my stomach, the integrity of the vessels in my brain, my personal habits, and past records of my health, some being rather indelicate matters one would rather not hear discussed so openly among strangers eating their sack lunches.
In that refrigerated land, I thought I had fallen into the underworld, truly I did. The most dejected people were there—an angry woman who had dashed across Van Ness Avenue to scare her boyfriend, a young man who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and changed his mind halfway down, an alcoholic war vet who had passed out on a nude beach. Tragedies, mortal embarrassments, unhappy endings, all of them. But why was I there?
I was stuck in these thoughts, unable to leave my breathless body, until I realized that my breath was not gone but surrounding me, buoying me upward. It was quite amazing, really— every single breath, the sustenance I took and expelled out of both habit and effort over sixty- three years had accumulated like a savings account. And everyone else’s as well, it seemed, inhalations of hopes, exhalations of disappointment. Anger, love, pleasure, hate—they were all there, the bursts, puffs, sighs, and screams. The air I had breathed, I now knew, was composed not of gases but of the density and perfume of emotions. The body had been merely a filter, a censor. I knew this at once, without question, and I found myself released, free to feel and do whatever I pleased. That was the advantage of being dead: no fear of future consequences. Or so I thought.
WHEN THE FUNERAL finally happened on December 11th, it was nearly ten days after I died, and without preservation I would have been compost. Nonetheless, many came to see and mourn me. A modest guess would be, oh, eight hundred, though I am not strictly counting. To begin, there was my Yorkshire terrier, Poochini, in the front row, prostrate, head over paws, sighing through the numerous eulogies. Beside him was my good friend Harry Bailley, giving him the occasional piece of desiccated liver. Harry had offered to adopt Poochini, and my executor readily agreed, since Harry is, as everyone knows, that famous British dog trainer on television. Perhaps you’ve seen his show—The Fido Files? Number-one ratings, and many, many Emmy Awards. Lucky little Poochini.
And the mayor came—did I mention?—and stayed at least ten minutes, which may not sound long, but he goes to many places in a day and spends far less time at most. The board members and staff of the Asian Art Museum also came to pay respects, nearly all of them, as did the docents I trained, years’ and years’ worth, plus the people who had signed up for the Burma Road trip. There were also my three tenants—the troublesome one, as well—and my darling repeat customers and the daily browsers, plus Roger, my FedEx man; Thieu, my Vietnamese manicurist; Luc, my gay haircolorist; Bobo, my gay Brazilian housekeeper; and most surprising to say, Najib, the Lebanese grocer from my corner market on Russian Hill, who called me “dearie” for twenty-seven years but never gave me a discount, not even when the fruit had gone overripe. By the way, I am not mentioning people in any order of importance. This is simply how it is coming to me.
Now that I think of it, I would estimate that more than eight hundred people were there. The auditorium at the de Young Museum was crowded beyond belief, and hundreds spilled into the halls, where closed-circuit television monitors beamed the unhappy proceedings. It was a Monday morning, when the museum was usually closed, but a number of out-of-towners on Tea Garden Drive saw the funeral as a fine opportunity to sneak into the current exhibit, Silk Road Treasures from the Aurel Stein Expeditions, a testimony, in my opinion, to British Imperial plundering at the height of cupidity. When guards turned the interlopers away from the exhibits, they wandered over to my funeral fête, morbidly lured by copies of various obituaries that lay next to the guest book. Most of the papers gave the same hodgepodge of facts: “Born in Shanghai...Fled China with her family as a young girl in 1949...An alumna of Mills College and guest lecturer there, in art history...Proprietor of The Immortals...Board member of many organizati... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
I suppose that Saving Fish from Drowning is supposed to be fun or perhaps satiric. It's about a group of Americans who go on an art tour to Burma, and though the woman who organized the tour has died under mysterious circumstances, this doesn't stop her from (1) going along and (2) telling this story. (Sort of The Canterbury Tales with a ghost as the Host.) This narrator, named Bibi Chen, is a woman of social pretensions, not to mention an expert in Asian art, and she imagines herself to be a dry wit, but mostly when she says catty things about her friends, she sounds dated, ugly and bigoted. The tourists are ultimately kidnapped by some Burmese cultists, who have mistaken a member of the group as their savior.
Tan may have intended Bibi Chen to have an Evelyn Waugh quality, but where Waugh is surprising in his arch observations and in his delight with the impossibly cruel, Bibi is off-putting, particularly in her fascination with the scatological and her infantile attitudes about sex. For instance, Bibi holds forth on how various races and nationalities smell. She dislikes the way a Chinese peasant smells, but, she says, "I am not obsessive about cleanliness, not like the Japanese. . . . Why, even their toilets are equipped to spray your bottom with warm water and then dry it with wafts of air. . . . And while I'm on the topic, I can't say that cleanliness is renowned among the British I have known. . . . Theirs is a spit-and-polish kind of clean, a shiny shoe, a scrubbed face, while parts unseen are left untended. . . . The French are so-so, in my estimation, though I don't have a tremendous amount of experience here . . . but you do have to wonder why they invented so many perfumes."
Saving Fish from Drowning doesn't improve when you consider the minor characters either; they seem to be cliches in search of some signifying detail. For instance, we have Harry Bailley, one of the tour members, who is a middle-aged dog trainer "desperate for love and sex." "The damn trouble was, he had an enlarged prostate, the typical benign prostatic hyperplasia that afflicts many men, more annoying than harmful. But, by God, Harry would moan, it shouldn't strangle a man's best friend before he's even turned fifty!" The image of man's best friend is one that Tan just can't let alone. When Harry is propositioned by a prostitute, she writes, "Though Harry was tempted, he was also a veterinarian who was well aware of the precise opportunistic methods by which parasites and deadly viruses travel. Down, boy. Good boy."
This infantile attitude isn't occasional. For instance, there is "the other attractive single woman in the group, Heidi." She is described as having "big wondering eyes, limber legs, tumbling bunches of blond hair." Harry, however, is convinced that her breasts "could not possibly be real. (In fact, they were.) Harry, an expert in animal structure, had convinced himself he knew better. They pointed and didn't sway; he had noticed that many times. What's more, the nipples sat too high, as if they were doilies floating on balloons."
The sad thing is that, hidden away in these hundreds of pages, is a potentially fascinating story. The cultural misunderstandings between the kidnappers and the hostages and the way in which the media operate in sensational cases are amusing and could have been insightful. But the central element of this book's plot, the kidnapping, doesn't take place until after 230 pages of Bibi's inane observations, and by the time you get there, you're ready to go home.
Reviewed by Craig Nova
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.