Just finished Saving Fish from Drowning. The second half is just as interesting and unexpected as the first! In this portion, our travelers encounter some members of the Paduang-Karen tribe, an ethnic hill tribe living in the Burmese jungle. Without giving too much away, some members of the tribe are the last to see the tourists before their disappearance. Anthropological imagination is an obvious pleasure in this part of the story—you’ve probably seen pictures of the Paduang women, who wear rings on their neck so that they appear unnaturally elongated—and Tan has a field day inventing the patchwork religion practiced by this fictional splinter group of Karen. But lest anyone accuse Tan of poking fun at the natives, this portion of the novel also spends just as much effort skewering the global media circus that erupts over the mystery of the missing tourists. An image- and sound bite-driven culture can be just as false and misdirected as the most bizarre of religions, Tan implies. Who’s really the “primitive” or the brute in this scenario?

Four novels and nearly two decades after The Joy Luck Club, Saving Fish from Drowning shows how much more amazing work Amy Tan still has in store. Throughout the latter book, I was constantly struck by how different it is from her first novel. Both works may be narrated by Chinese women living in San Francisco, but the similarities end there. Where Joy Luck’s tales of mothers and daughters dwell heavily on the past, Saving Fish from Drowning’s drama of sudden disappearance emphasizes the present. Where Joy Luck pulls at the heartstrings, Saving Fish speaks to the mind—and really to a reader’s sense of humor! Indeed, as if to acknowledge a deliberate break with the defining aspects of Joy Luck and several other of her earlier works, in Saving Fish from Drowning Tan includes a Chinese mother and her daughter among its cast of characters—but in this novel the pair’s ethnicity rarely plays into the plot, except when discrepancies between their own thoughts and how others view their supposedly “inscrutable” beauty illustrate the ridiculous preconceptions and faulty interpretations that drive the book’s plot.

With Saving Fish from Drowning, Amy Tan has accomplished a most remarkable thing—a modern adventure with a primordial setting, and a social satire with a generous heart. I wonder whether we’ll find these themes developing in her other novels? Let me report next week on The Hundred Secret Senses…