Search - Saving Fish from Drowning

Very good book, even though the story drags a bit at times. An American Chinese woman arranges a trip to Burma for herself and a group of friends. She dies before the trip begins, but accompanies her friends as a ghost. The group gets into trouble, due to their general ignorance and cultural insensitivity. One morning the whole group disappears. Very nice characterizations.

While not Amy Tan's best- It drags but the premise is good and it is different. If you like Amy Tan you will like this novel. I had a hard time with it but I actually love the narrator- Bibi and her sense of humor. I feel like she is truly an "Amy Tan" creation. I am also learning a lot from Bibi's tour guide teaching as well as her perspective on the other chracter's thoughts and ways. BUT I cannot relate to any of the other characters at all nor can I feel for them... so I trudged along with this book for Bibi...

Amy Tan writes a lovely book following a group of friends that take a trip together to Burma. The tour guide has died prior to the trip, but goes along to narrate the book. We hear from the characters in their own words and the narrator tells us the real happenings. Very interesting read... some asian history mixed in to make it exciting and informative.
What really happened to the tour group when they vanished while on an expidition.....

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!

I like Amy Tan’s writing style and this book had a really interesting genesis. According to the introduction at the start of the book, Tan was caught in the rain in New York and came across a building marked ”American Society for Psychical Research.” That sounded like an awesome place to escape the rain, so she went in and spent the rest of the day reading automatic writing, when she came across writing supposedly channeled from one Bibi Chen, someone Tan had known when she was alive. She contacted the woman who channeled Chen and they talked a lot and that inspired this book.

This book is narrated by Bibi Chen, post-morten, as she follows a tour group she helped organize before her death comprised of 12 of her friends. They went to China for a bit, then on to Burma where they were kidnapped by a separatist tribe in the jungle when they mistake one of the tourists for the reincarnation of their mythical savior, Little White Brother. There’s a whole big media circus that follow and eventually the group is rescued, even though the idiots never actually realized they’d been kidnapped (they thought they were only stranded in the village when the rope bridge over a canyon went down). Because Bibi is dead, she can kind of see/hear everyone’s thoughts so you get to see the events through the eyes of many different characters. Tan is a great writer and the story is really interesting and you can picture everything perfectly.

The problem was, I didn’t like any of the characters. The women were obnoxious enough, but I fucking hate the men. HATED. It wasn’t like Tan was trying to make them all into awful misogynists, but she did a great job of making them into believable, common American men, which unfortunately means there is a lot of banal sexism in them as a matter of course. Like, one guy just automatically ascribes nefarious motives to women’s (especially his wife’s) reactions to everything, imagining they’re trying to undermine him or are trying to emotionally punish him by withrawing from him when actually they’re just confused by what just happened. And another guy…well, he pissed in a stone sculpture of a vulva at a holy site in China. That should tell you everything you need to know about how he treats women. But they were all so naive, ethnocentric, and condescending, even while congratulating themselves on how open-minded, adventurous, and generous they are. I know that’s such a common attitutde in America (I’ve met more people like that than I can count), but it was just so irritating. By the end of the book, I wanted the Karen tribe to just push them over the canyon and into the river and be done with it.

I put off reading this book for a long time because of the horrible reviews. I can see some of the reviewers points, but overall, I really enjoyed this novel.

This is definitely a departure from Tan's normal novels about the relationships between Chinese-born mothers and their Chinese-American mothers. Although she does a wonderful job capturing the dynamics of those relationships, while weaving in fascinating glimpses of Chinese history, I'm glad to see her trying something new.

A few of the characters in this novel are Chinese, but the majority are not. One of the criticisms I have read is that she has too many prominent characters and therefore spreads her character development too thin. I agree somewhat, but beyond the narrator, the recently deceased, but always bigger than life Bibi Chen, the plot is more important.

Plot-wise, this is also a huge change for Tan. This is an adventure novel which ventures into the land of magical realism. This begins with the idea that Bibi's spirit is following her friends on the trip through China and Burma that she was supposed to lead.

Thrown into the mix is a glimpse of life in the military regime of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

Overall, this was a great read, which I found to be relatively quick, despite it's healthy length.

A fan of Amy Tan but had a difficult time getting into this book.