Fiction: Saving Fish From Drowning

 As a first generation Canadian born Chinese, I am often asked about my heritage and the ties that I have to the "homeland". Most people marvel that I can understand two dialects of Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin)but remain functionally illiterate. I know and love my Chinese heritage but dont know how to pass that heritage on to my children who exist very much in the white suburban lifestyle that we have come to embrace as our own. I gravitate naturally, then, to other writers who can illuminate the cultural divide that exists (mostly unspoken) between us.

Amy Tan is an American born Chinese writer whose ability to paint those corners of my life that are sometimes uninspected with a brilliant brush of understanding. The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife made me hear my mother's voice in those pages, the small idiosyncracies that unite us even as much as we are separate. She made me long to embrace all of that which had departed from me and shovel as much of it into my children as I could before it was lost forever. I laughed at the absurdities of missed cultural connections and cried with the associations of communal shared tragedy. Amy Tan understood me.

Saving Fish From Drowning then was much anticipated, and then heavily disappointing. Bibi Chen, the narrator of the story was clunky and smug. I couldnt find those delightful familiar chimes of understanding in Tan's sentences and phrasing. Instead, her story moved stoically from one place to another, neither making connections with the reader or between characters themselves.

There were pockets of humour that struck me as lonely islands in a barren plain--serving only to show how drab the rest of the landscape was rather than having those pockets of text be enjoyed for the genius that Tan's writing created.

The setting of the novel begs for a certain amount of gravity and attention; Mynamar, and indeed all of Burma, is best not relegated to forgotten corners of the planet, however, I am not certain that Tan is aiding their cause. We are drawn to the potential of her storytelling and are left bereft and longing for her customary turn of phrases and sharp wit.

I will, undoubtably, pick up more of her fiction, however the sting of this novel might push further selections from this writer futher down on the "must read" list, which is a tragedy all on its own.