Tan gives adventure tales a new viewpoint

Saving Fish From Drowning

A Novel

Amy Tan

Putnam: 476 pp., $26.95

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IN her new novel, “Saving Fish From Drowning,” Amy Tan observes that the “Lost World” adventure novel is a meditation on the act of reading. Adventures have long had this meditation as a theme: In H. Rider Haggard’s “She,” Horace Holly deciphers Greek uncials to discover the African sanctum of the sorceress She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed; in “The Lord of the Rings,” much depends upon Gandalf’s decipherment of Mordor’s language. In these stories, reading is fabulously dangerous: The hero makes his way through a deadly “dark continent” with only a scrap of text as his guide. One false interpretation, one sloppy translation, and he’s dead.

But what happens if, watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” you realize that you look more like the bug-eyed heathens who are trying to shoot Indie with their blow-darts? Or else that you resemble “Rings’ ” Urukai hordes far more than the archer Legolas? (You might feel like shouting, “Labo vi Orodruin” -- “go jump in Mount Doom” in Tolkien’s tongue.)

In other words, the classic adventure tale describes a white hero ravaging foreign nations to filch treasures from its savages or destroy the dark evil that lurks within -- such politically nasty plot devices can create a queasy thrill for the fan of color.

Inspired by a similar queasiness or even grouchiness, Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley and Dan Brown have taken lively swings at genre fiction. Tan enters this company by adding a postcolonial twist to “Saving Fish.” The novel borrows several elements typical of the classics: There’s a ghost, Bibi Chen, who is killed on the eve of a “Buddha’s Footsteps” tour that is taken by a group of American travelers and that will follow the Burma Road starting in China. Though her murder is disgusting and unfortunate, it has the advantage of making her a splendid tour guide and a perfect reader of the events that follow:

“[As a ghost] I sensed others as clearly as I sensed myself.... The thoughts swam about me like schools of colorful fish, and [people’s] feelings dove through me in a flash. It was that shocking and effortless. The Mind of Others -- that’s what the Buddha would have called it.”

Thus equipped with supreme powers of perception, Bibi accompanies the remaining 11 as they stumble toward a hoped-for paradise in a malarial fog of mosquitoes. This cadre, which includes Harry Bailley, a dog trainer, Marlena Chu, a curator, and Rupert Moffett, a California teen, makes several fatal interpretive errors. After setting foot in China, they happen upon the “Grotto of Female Genitalia”: Blind to the region’s social codes and Bibi’s warnings, the travelers fornicate in the grotto and mistake a shrine for a urinal. Before they are ejected, a religieux curses them by demanding that the gods give “these foreigners bad curse, bad karma, following them forever this life and next.”

Their guide, called Black Spot, turns out to be a desperate member of the Karen tribe. Since the military junta took over Burma in 1989 (turning Burma into Myanmar), state soldiers have systematically tortured and killed Karen insurgents. The clan is understandably waiting for a savior, who they believe will come to them in the form of the “White Younger Brother,” a divinity capable of making them invisible and returning their biblical Book of Important Writings.

After the Americans have been there a few days, Black Spot sees the adolescent Rupert performing magic tricks with a pack of playing cards and carrying around a big book (Stephen King’s “Misery”). He determines: “[Rupert] could make things invisible and make them come back. And he had the Black Book [of Important Writings].... [F]inally he had come, the young man with the cards. He was the Reincarnated One.”

He decides to lure the group into a half-starved village called No Name Place (they believe he is leading them to Shangri-La) and incarcerate them until Rupert transforms the Karen into invisible, bullet-impervious immortals.

The misreadings proliferate. The media behemoth Global News Network reports that the missing Americans have “joined the Karen tribe as underground rebels.” Harry and Marlena suffer romantic angst because she “stared at him with an implacable Asian face, unreadable, unreachable, unadaptable, like a cat’s.” Rupert can’t crack a Chinese sign and nearly hurtles over an abyss. None of the cow-eyed watchers of the Global News Network understands where (or what) is Myanmar.

As the kidnapped 11 succumb to malaria in No Name Place, Tan’s plot hinges upon these questions: Will supernatural Bibi come to their aid? Will romance save the day? Will we live to see responsible reporting?

Though Tan courts her audience with these titillations, “Saving Fish” ultimately emphasizes spiritual rather than physical action because she seeks to turn adventure’s typical white hunter (or traveler) into a more humble and transcendent figure. Thus Bibi and company witness the Karen’s suffering in the jungle; they grow sympathetic to one another; their responses to Burmese culture deepen in intensity and understanding. One spiritual inquiry seems to consume Tan more than Harry’s love life or even the group’s survival: Will people ever be able to obtain the perfect Mind of Others?

And this is a fine question. One wonders, for example, about the tasty Siddhartha-like turns “Raiders of the Lost Ark” might have taken if Indie had gazed back at the dart-shooters with the all-comprehending smile of a bodhisattva. As Bibi says: “Now that I had the gifts of the Buddha ... hidden forms of life revealed themselves: a harmless snake with iridescent stripes ... flowering parasites.... I realized then that we miss so much of life while we are part of it.”

Such insights are rarely found in adventure tales. Yet Tan is writing in an era in which our superpowers are changing foreign lands in all too fantastical ways, and she shows us that celestial wisdom has its real-life uses. “Saving Fish From Drowning’s” Americans don’t spend their time relic-stealing or barbarian-hunting. Instead, they learn they are in sore need of the Buddha’s gifts in a world made incomprehensible by violence and strife.

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Yxta Maya Murray, a professor at Loyola Law School, is the author of several novels, including “The Conquest” and “The Queen Jade.”

Elvish in this review was

taken from www.arwen-undomiel.com/ elvish/phrases.html.