from sexual abuse, and eventually leave her home
to begin an education and embark on adulthood.
Critics praised Yamanaka for her charged por-
trayal of the damage caused by silence and secrets.
Ivah must eventually learn, and her father must
come to acknowledge, that Eleanor died from kid-
ney failure after years of abusing medication that
cured her leprosy. Ivah learns that her mother and
father, when they were children, had been force-
fully separated from their families and sent to live
in a leper colony on Molokai. Although cured,
they never returned to their homes in Honolulu,
eventually married and began a family in Molokai,
and buried their pain of lost youth and innocence.
Eleanor’s death from addiction to the medication
that saved her life symbolizes the tragic effects of
unhealed psychic wounds. Her loss of innocence
and painful past are then inherited by her chil-
dren, especially Blu, who loses his innocence when
a neighbor rapes him. As the family works through
the traumas of the past that continue to haunt
their present lives, Yamanaka works to “retrieve
and reveal the neglected voices of sexually and psy-
chologically violated victims” (Parikh 201).
After winning a prestigious award from the
Association for Asian American Studies, Blu’s
Hanging sparked controversy about the difference
between ethnic studies and literary studies, and
about an author’s responsibility to her commu-
nity. The portrayal of the rapist Filipino neighbor
raised questions about the stereotypical portrayal
of Filipinos as sexual deviants. However, Yamanaka
and her supporters point out that the novel also
portrays Japanese sexual molesters. More impor-
tant, the novel raises awareness about the necessity
of revealing unrecognized, untold losses in order
to end the painful legacy of past trauma.
Bibliography
Shea, Renee H. “Pidgin Politics and Paradise Revised.”
Poets and Writer, 26, no. 5 (1998): 32–37.
Parikh, Crystal. “Blue Hawaii: Asian Hawaiian Cul-
tural Production and Racial Melancholia.” JAAS
(October 2002): 199–216.
Amy Lillian ManningBonesetter’s Daughter, The
Amy Tan (2001)
In this novel that covers both emotional and ar-
chaeological ground, AMY TAN examines the na-
ture of memory and communication through the
lives of LuLing Young, a Chinese immigrant liv-
ing in California, and her daughter, Ruth Young.
LuLing begins recording her life in Chinese in
an effort to remember fragments of her past that
had long been buried, including the name of her
mother, who was the daughter of a famous bone-
setter in China. Ruth, a ghostwriter in San Fran-
cisco for self-help authors, decides to translate her
mother’s story amid the debris of her own rela-
tively unexamined life. Living with a man and his
two daughters in San Francisco without a formal
arrangement, Ruth has lost her voice each year for
the past nine years for several days, always start-
ing on August 12, and she often finds it hard to
express herself. Both the mother and the daughter
are searching for satisfying ways to make them-
selves known to each other.
The novel’s prologue is in LuLing’s voice and
is in fact the beginning of the narrative of her life.
Her story therefore encompasses the story of her
daughter, which begins in part 1. As she worries
about her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and serves
more and more as her caretaker, Ruth remembers
her own past—how her mother relocated repeat-
edly, made her communicate with ghosts, and
generally made her life difficult. As her mother
begins to lose her memory, Ruth begins to read
and translate her mother’s memoirs given to her
years before.
Part 2 of the novel is Ruth’s translation of her
mother’s memoirs. In the first person, LuLing tells
of her strained relationship with family in China,
while being cared for by a disfigured woman she
called Precious Auntie. Unbeknownst to LuLing,
this woman is in fact her birth mother, whose
identity is concealed because of her personal and
cultural transgressions. The narrative mainly con-
cerns the life of Precious Auntie, whose family
made ink and lived in a village called Immortal
Heart, where in nearby caves valuable “dragon
bones” have been found. As Precious Auntie grew,Bonesetter’s Daughter, The 25