Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Bonesetter’s Daughter, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Secrecy and Misunderstanding
Memory, Culture, and the Past
Storytelling
Women’s Solidarity
Summary
Analysis
Ruth watches Mr. Tang kiss LuLing on the cheek in the Asian Art Museum. In the month since LuLing moved to Mira Mar Manor, the couple has been seeing a lot of each other. On weekends, they typically go to outings. This time, Mr. Tang surprised Ruth by inviting her and Art to join them at an exhibit on Chinese archaeology. When he asked them, he noted that there would be something at the museum that they’d all find highly interesting. However, Ruth is already happy satisfied from seeing LuLing so happy, and she admires the effortlessness with which Mr. Ting translates her innermost thoughts and feelings into words.
Losing her memory sets LuLing free from the past. She remembers her history but no longer fixates on the shame and guilt that for many years prohibited her from showing and accepting love. Mr. Tang’s admiration for LuLing’s history allows her to see her life’s story in a new light and appreciate the resilience, self-worth, and strength Precious Auntie instilled in her that enabled her to travel to a new country and make a life for herself there.
Themes
Finally, they reach the exhibit Mr. Tang thinks they’ll like. Ruth looks at the smooth, ivory-colored object before her. Before she can figure out what it is, LuLing voices the answer aloud: “Oracle bone,” she states in Chinese. LuLing turns to Art and explains, in Mandarin, how her mother had once found a bone like this. LuLing translates her explanation into English for Mr. Tang, who nods thoughtfully and adds that the bone is significant for LuLing, since her mother’s father had been a bonesetter. LuLing agrees.
Ruth’s improved relationship with LuLing is reflected in her happiness to translate LuLing’s words for Mr. Tang. As a child, she’d considered this task to be a burden. Now, she gladly accepts the opportunity to help her mother. LuLing’s healthier relationship to her past is reflected in the pride with which she acknowledges her grandfather’s status as a famous bonesetter. She celebrates her place within this tradition rather than lamenting the curse her familial ties have forced upon her.
Themes
Suddenly, LuLing’s eyes go blank. She pauses before speaking the name “Liu Xing,” which was the name her father called her mother in a love poem he wrote for her. Ruth tells Art that “Liu Xing” means “shooting star” and tells him she’ll fill him in on the details later. Carefully, while LuLing’s mind focuses on names, Ruth asks he mother if she can remember her mother’s family name. “Gu,” answers LuLing, confidently. Ruth is thrilled, thinking the long-lost family name has finally resurfaced before realizing that Gu simply means “bone.” Soon, LuLing’s sharpness appears to fade. As Mr. Tang explains how emperors would use the oracle bone for answers about things like the weather, Ruth considers her own history of prophecy, recalling all the times she’d write the answers in the tea tray she thought her mother had wanted or needed to hear.
Finally, in a moment so fleeting it hardly stands out as significant, LuLing remembers her mother’s family name, which she has spent her life trying to remember: Liu Xing. The moment passes as soon as it arrives, as LuLing’s illness returns her to a state of forgetting. Sadly, LuLing’s condition prevents her from holding on to this detail she’s tried so hard to remember. At the same time, perhaps this is a healthier relationship to memory and the past. She can relish the beautiful moments when her mother’s name comes to her effortlessly and unexpectedly, but she can also forget the times when the name won’t come. Ruth’s disappointment at hearing LuLing’s answer regarding LuLing’s surname, Gu, is because “Gu,” which Ruth believes means “bone,” refers to the bonesetter’s occupation rather than his family name. Ruth assumes that LuLing is confused when she claims this was Precious Auntie’s last name.
Themes
Ruth changes the subject to the Peking Man, whose bones were lost during the war. Mr. Tang can’t say for sure whether the bones will ever be recovered but suggests that “mystery is a wonderful part of life.
In speculating that “mystery is a wonderful part of life,” Mr. Tang points to the opportunity that mystery affords one to piece together the details of one’s life and author one’s own story. While the fleetingness and unreliability of memory mean that one must constantly revise, edit, and translate that story, the process of creating it, revising it, and engaging with it is part of what makes life meaningful and full of wonder.
Themes
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Later that night, Ruth and Art lay in bed together and discuss Mr. Tang’s relationship with LuLing. Ruth wonders how Mr. Tang, a cultured, intellectual man, can remain interested in her mother, whose disease makes it difficult for her to follow along with him. Art reasons that Mr. Tang fell in love with the girl of LuLing’s memoir and can still detect that person in the LuLing that exists today. Art finds Mr. Tang and LuLing’s bond to be more intimate than people who’ve known each other for years and gently conveys his interest in achieving that with Ruth, floating the idea of marriage.
Art thinks that the voice that comes through in LuLing’s words overpowers her disease’s attempts to silence her. In writing her story, LuLing presents her true self to the world. Because she has done this in writing, this self is immortalized and will exist well after she is physically or mentally gone from the earth.
Themes
Ruth remains silent, and Art stutters, telling her she doesn’t have to give him a definite answer anytime soon. But Ruth pulls herself closer to Art, kisses him, and says she finds the idea “wonderful.”
Ruth’s use of “wonderful” echoes Mr. Tang’s earlier comments about mystery making life “wonderful.” Ruth’s response implies that she is no longer afraid of making herself vulnerable to the unknown and is willing to jump into a marriage with Art, opening herself up to the possibility of being hurt, but also the possibility of experiencing love and connection.
Themes
Sometime later, Ruth speaks with GaoLing, who calls Ruth with the exciting news that she’s finally discovered the name of Ruth’s grandmother: Gu. Ruth feels disappointed and reminds her aunt that Gu only means bone. But GaoLing explains that there are many more meanings. When Ruth asks for a first name, GaoLing replies, Liu Xing. Ruth mishears GaoLing and things she has said Liu Xing ("Shooting Star"), but GaoLing explains that the name actually means "Remain True." GaoLing recalls how people who didn’t like Precious Auntie did call her Liu Xing because the name had a negative connotation due to its association with comets and calamity--with stars that burn brightly but "burn[] up quick," which is precisely what happened to Precious Auntie.
GaoLing’s admission proves that LuLing was correct in the museum the other day. It also contextualizes LuLing’s story about shooting stars that Ruth recalled in Part One: One. Ruth realizes that LuLing has remembered her mother’s name, if only unconsciously. She’d been hinting at it all these years in subtle ways. Additionally, LuLing’s remark in the novel’s opening section about the things that are “true” in her life, in which she anguishes about not remembering Precious Auntie’s name, reflects this subconscious knowledge. LuLing worried that she had forgotten Precious Auntie’s name, but it was with her all along.
Themes
Suddenly, Ruth remembers a story LuLing had written about in her account of her life, about Precious Auntie’s tale of swallowing and being burned by a shooting star that dropped from the sky and fell into her mouth. Ruth cries when she realizes that she has finally uncovered the mystery of her grandmother’s name: Gu Liu Xin.
Ruth realizes that many elements of LuLing’s story confirm that Gu Liu Xin was Precious Auntie’s real name. Her tears are bittersweet. Knowing Precious Auntie’s name strengthens Ruth’s ties to the past. This is especially important in light of Ruth’s decision not to have children: she can celebrate her family by honoring those who came before her, and she doesn’t need to have offspring to feel proud of who she is. But Ruth’s tears are sad, too, because this realization comes too late for her to discuss it with LuLing, whose illness prevents her from engaging in meaningful conversations.
Themes
