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Tim Cribb

review of the week

Saving Fish From Drowning

by Amy Tan

Fourth Estate, $165

Travel may broaden the mind, but as British essayist G.K. Chesterton observed, first you must have the mind to broaden. Tourism, on  the other hand, makes a virtue of mindlessness with its packaged escapism into contrived culture.

As the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 draw near, China will increasingly become the  focus of tourists, particularly  those wanting to get in touch  with the  China that lies beyond the Great Wall. And the more intrepid will continue on into neighbouring countries.

That many of them will be Americans  may send a collective shiver up the spines of tourism officials and  expatriates who live among the locals.

There are hints of things to come in Amy Tan's latest novel, Saving Fish From Drowning,  a marked departure from the Chinese-American cross-cultural confusion that dominated The  Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter's Daughter.

Arts patron and purveyor of gorgeous chinoiserie Bibi Chen  is to take a group of her affluent friends from San Francisco on  a cultural tour of China and  Myanmar. She hopes, of course,  to whet their appetites for the pieces she sells.

But just before their planned departure, Bibi is found dead in the window of her fashionable shop, The Immortals.

The group  decides that she would have wanted them to go ahead with the tour - they can't get refunds, anyway.

Bibi, who is now in the Buddhist equivalent of limbo,  can see her friends and hear  their thoughts. She follows  them on their travels, and  her wryly amusing narration becomes an  examination of Americans let loose.

Tan traverses the usual thoughtless offences, culminating in one of the group urinating  on an ancient Chinese icon.  Not surprisingly, the authorities soon suggest that they cut short their stay in China and cross over into Myanmar.

Bibi planned to sensitise her charges in relatively safe China, and had carefully  mapped out their stay in the Shan State to avoid brushing up against the military.  Of course, all goes awry.

What Bibi didn't foresee was one of her would-be charges being mistaken for a god, and the group disappearing into the jungle - which brings into sharp focus the plight of  Myanmar, as Tan sees it.

'Ask ten of your friends where or what Myanmar is, and I would wager nine would not know,' muses Bibi's ghost. 'But if  you said Burma, they would  say, 'Oh, Burma!' - vaguely remembered in the way we  say, 'Oh, Barbara - how is she doing?' Like the Burmese dissenters who disappeared, the country formerly calling itself Burma is invisible to most of  the western world, an illusion.'

Few would fault her description of the State Law and Order Council as the response  to a breakdown in law and order 'when sixty-seven ethnic groups disagreed on how Burma should be governed, especially after the military overturned election results, claimed tribal territory  as national land, and placed Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest'. Too subtle for some, perhaps.

Tan is clear that the average American knows almost nothing about the world, and Bibi  says  that no one reads 'political  books on horror-ridden regimes except scholars of history and those studying that particular part of the world'.

'I just never saw the point in spending days and days reading stories only to disturb myself  with problems I was powerless  to fix,' she says.

Saving Fish From Drowning, which takes its title from a  Buddhist parable, is an admirable attempt to make  readers spend a few days thinking about Burma - and China, too.

Her writing is polished to precision and her characters  have a satisfying degree of depth, although at times her cast seems too large to properly manage.

Tan manages a balancing  act that will entertain those who do read books about 'horror-ridden regimes', while perhaps drawing in those who've never heard of Myanmar.

This is a new direction for Tan, and Saving Fish From Drowning promises a fresh, clear voice for  a troubled Asia.



Saving Fish From Drowning