I finally decided to look for The Joy Luck Club at the library – and found The Bonesetter’s Daughter instead. In a way, this book was a similar experience to it – I went into it expecting to find one thing and found another.

What I think is expert on Amy Tan’s part is the way she unveils her characters over the course of the book: to begin with, LuLing is the silly, pushy, morose, slightly embarrassing Alzheimer’s-suffering mother of Ruth. Her identity, for being what I thought a stereotypical version of Chinese motherhood, is easily put in a box. Her appearances in the book come as comic relief to the more complex Ruth’s inner musings. I look no further. I know about all there is to know about Luling and her crazy superstitious idiosyncrasies. Sure, Luling has this memoir that she wrote for her daughter all about her childhood in China, and Ruth (after several years) is finally finding the time to get it translated.

And then…

Comic relief suddenly becomes poetry. Is this young version of Luling, with her hopes and dreams and failures and disappointments, anything akin to the dumpy elderly woman that I admittedly overlooked? So much of her personality is lost in translation. In America, she is only a semi-fluent mother struggling to make it as a calligrapher, embarrassing her daughter with comments such as “Maybe I die soon!”

What is tragic is that I can’t simply pass this off as a story of Chinese immigrants. The story is applicable to mothers and daughters everywhere. Every daughter thinks she is the first to live the story with its dramatic twists and turns. The mother she sees every day of her up-bringing turns into a two-dimensional figure; the complexities and the subtleties are lost. Is age the mask that keeps us from looking further into their lives to find the keys to our own?