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Part One: Chapter Seven
Themes
and Colors
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
In the papers that begin with “These are things I should not forget,” LuLing explains that she was born to the Liu clan and raised in the Western Hills near Peking, in a village called Immortal Heart. Precious Auntie teaches LuLing to write the name of their village on her chalkboard. The village is an old but sacred place. According to local legend, a visiting emperor planted a tree in the middle of the valley to honor his dead mother 3,000 years ago. People would make pilgrimages to visit the tree. However, the pilgrims would take bark from the tree as souvenirs, killing it. After the tree died, people stopped visiting Immortal Heart.
Part Two is an extended flashback that covers the information LuLing conveys in her manuscript. In allowing LuLing to tell her story in her own voice, the novel explores the rich, inner life that LuLing otherwise hides from the world, and the person she wants Ruth to know before she dies.
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Nearly 2,000 people live in Immortal Heart during LuLing’s childhood. The village is a lively place with a primary school and many peddlers roaming the street. The Liu clan has lived in the same compound for several centuries. The family runs a successful ink business, and they always have money for new clothes and good meals. All the women stay home and make the ink in the ink studio, and the family earns a reputation for their high-quality product.
Knowing that LuLing’s extended family operates an ink business recasts LuLing’s talent for calligraphy as a personal talent and as something with roots in her family’s heritage.
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Each of the women is responsible for one stage of the ink-making process. Precious Auntie’s job is to carve good-luck words into the finished ink sticks. Because of this, her calligraphy becomes better than Father’s. The women claim that the black, sticky ink keeps their hair dark. Great-Granny jokes that her hair is as black as a chestnut’s shell and her flesh as white and wrinkled as the nut inside. She pauses and then adds that this is better than the opposite: having white hair and a black, scorched face. Nobody seems to care that Precious Auntie is around to hear the jokes. Later in life, Great-Granny’s memory goes, and she begins to ask for Hu Sen, seemingly forgetting that her grandson has been dead for years.
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The compound where LuLing and her family live is located on Pig’s Head Lane. There’s a cliff behind the compound, which has deepened over many years of heavy rainfall, its edge growing ever closer to the compound with each passing year. The cliff makes the Liu clan feel that they constantly have to look behind them, and they refer to it as the End of the World. LuLing and her siblings often throw spoiled fruits over the cliff’s edge and imagine them hitting the bones of “unwanted babies, suicide maidens, and beggar ghosts” that lie at the bottom of the ravine.
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Many generations of Lius live in the compound. Liu Jin Sen is the oldest of Great-Granny’s four sons and is the man LuLing calls Father. LuLing calls her father’s brothers Big Uncle and Little Uncle. The fourth son, Baby Uncle, whose real name was Liu Hu Sen, was LuLing’s favorite. He was also her real father and would have married Precious Auntie, had he not died on their wedding day.
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Precious Auntie was born in a bigger town called Zhou’s Mouth of the Mountain, about 10 kilometers from Immortal Heart, though the path there is dangerous, especially during the rainy season, when the dry ravine fills with floodwaters. Everyone in the Mouth of the Mountain searches for dragon bones, which can be taken to Peking and sold for high prices as a cure for many ailments. Precious Auntie’s family had been bonesetters for centuries. In addition to the skills of the trade, they also passed down the knowledge about the Monkey’s Jaw, a cave where one can go to find the best dragon bones.
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On one occasion, Precious Auntie tells LuLing about a bone she has that’s covered in strange writing. It probably comes from a turtle, and her father almost ground it down for medicine before noticing the scratches that ran along its sides. Today, this type of bone is called an “oracle bone” and is very valuable, though bone diggers used to file them down before selling them to medicine shops. This type of bone is inscribed with “questions to the gods” that the ancient people thought were important enough to be remembered through the ages.
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Precious Auntie frequently takes LuLing to the Monkey’s Jaw. They go down into the End of the World to get there. Precious Auntie and LuLing would crawl into the cave with only a lantern to light their way. The cave floor contains tools left behind by Precious Auntie’s ancestors. Precious Auntie and LuLing would use the tools to chip away at the earth in the cave to dig for dragon bones. Hours later, they’d emerge from the cave with a sackful of dirt. If they were lucky, the earth would contain a couple of dragon bones.
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Walking home, Precious Auntie would tell LuLing stories about the miracles her father, the bonesetter, would perform for injured, desperate people. She groups her father’s remedies into three categories: modern, to appease the Western missionaries; try-anything, which consists of spells and chants; and traditional, which is the category to which the dragon bones belong.
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Still, despite the bonesetter’s reputation as a great healer, he couldn’t prevent all hardship. When Precious Auntie was very young, her mother and brothers died of a horrible disease. In his grief, the bonesetter spoiled Precious Auntie, his only remaining child, affording her all the opportunities customarily reserved for sons, including learning to read and write. The bonesetter also taught Precious Auntie the practices of his trade. In time, she became knowledgeable about healing, too, and could assist her father’s bonesetting.
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One day, at dinner, Precious Auntie tells LuLing a story about a woman who came to her father and asked him to unbind her feet. Forgetting that she and Precious Auntie aren’t alone, LuLing asks aloud if bound feet look like white lilies, the way romantic books say they do. Mother and the aunts scold her for talking so openly about such a private subject. Precious Auntie pretends to scold LuLing, but in the secret language that only the two of them speak, she tells LuLing that bound feet are knotty, callused, smelly, and look like rotten ginger roots. LuLing fondly recalls this as an example of the ways Precious Auntie taught her to be “naughty” and “curious, just like her.” LuLing considers how the tradeoff for being curious and naughty was that she never learned how to be a good daughter.
LuLing’s story shifts to information she gleaned from a manuscript Precious Auntie wrote, which LuLing only read after Precious Auntie’s death. When Precious Auntie is 19, two new patients come to the Bonesetter. One is a crying baby, and the other is Baby Uncle. The baby belongs to Chang, a rich coffin-maker who earns his fortune by selling overpriced, poorly made coffins. Chang’s wife, who has accompanied her husband, claims that one of these coffins fell on the baby and dislocated its shoulder. Still, Precious Auntie suspects Chang is responsible, recalling how Chang’s wife came to the bonesetter years before with a broken jaw. Precious Auntie gives the baby a mixture of opium, herbs, and dragon bone, and he ceases his crying. Chang eyes Precious Auntie lewdly before they leave.
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Baby Uncle limps into the shop after Changs leave. He explains how his horse got spooked on a journey from Peking to Immortal Heart and stepped on his foot. When Precious Auntie smiles at Baby Uncle, he forgets his pain and immediately decides to marry her. He returns the next day with lychees for Precious Auntie as a sign of his gratitude. He also recites a poem her wrote for her. Later that afternoon, Chang stops by with a watermelon to express his thanks.
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Later that week, Chang and Baby Uncle go to separate fortune-tellers to see how their birthdates line up with Precious Auntie’s. Chang’s fortune-teller informs him that he’ll have a lucky future with Precious Auntie. However, Baby Uncle’s fortune-teller sees only chaos in his future. Baby Uncle gives the fortune-teller more money until he eventually reverses his assessment and predicts a lucky future for marriage between Baby Uncle and Precious Auntie.
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Chang proposes to Precious Auntie first. The fortune-teller arrives at the bonesetter’s shop to laud the coffin-maker’s vast wealth and respected reputation. The bonesetter isn’t crazy about Chang but considers the offer anyway, fearing what will happen to Precious Auntie after he dies. He knows that Precious Auntie is too curious, vocal, and argumentative to interest most suitors. But Precious Auntie stubbornly refuses to accept the horrible man’s proposal, and the bonesetter has no choice but to reject the coffin-maker’s offer. To protect his daughter, he lies and tells Chang’s matchmaker that Precious Auntie can’t bear to leave her helpless father behind. However, the bonesetter’s lie backfires after Precious Auntie accepts Baby Uncle’s proposal the following week.
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After Precious Auntie’s marriage is announced, Chang confronts her at the Mouth of the Mountain and vows to punish her for insulting him. Precious Auntie brushes off Chang’s threats and doesn’t tell her father or Baby Uncle about the encounter.
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Precious Auntie’s wedding is supposed to happen right after the start of the new Dragon Year. A photographer whom the bonesetter treated the month before arrives at the shop to take wedding photographs of Precious Auntie as payment for his treatment. Precious Auntie thinks about her future as she stares into the camera. She feels a mysterious premonition of dangers to come.
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Precious Auntie dons her bridal costume and begins the journey to Immortal Heart, where the wedding will occur. The bonesetter rents mule carts to carry Precious Auntie’s things to her new husband’s home, including her dowry, which consists of opium and the finest dragon bones, and a sedan chair for Precious Auntie to sit in, and four sedan carriers. He also hires bodyguards to accompany them on the trip. Midway into their journey, two bandits intercept the travelers. The larger of the two proclaims himself to be “the famous Mongol Bandit,” but Precious Auntie immediately recognizes his voice as Chang’s.
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The guards drop their pistols before Precious Auntie can comprehend what’s going on. The carriers drop the sedan, causing Precious Auntie to fall to the floor and lose consciousness. When she comes to, the bandits are gone, and the wedding trunks have been looted. The Bonesetter is lying in a ditch, and his neck is broken. Baby Uncle promises to punish the cowards who caused his wife such grief and fires a pistol into the sky. But the gunshot startles Baby Uncle’s horse, who kicks Baby Uncle, killing him instantly. Overwhelmed with grief, Precious Auntie decides that she must be cursed.
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For three nights after her father’s and husband’s deaths, Precious Auntie goes to their corpses and touches their mouths, though the act is forbidden. The women in her household fear that the men’s ghosts might come back to haunt Precious Auntie. When Chang arrives with coffins for the men, Precious Auntie tries to hit him with a fire poker. Baby Uncle’s brothers subdue her and apologize to Chang for her “lunacy.” Precious Auntie’s grief consumes her, which eventually forces the women to restrain her with strips of cloth. Great-Granny forces her to drink medicine that sedates her.
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When Precious Auntie comes to, she’s unbound and alone in the house. She searches for the corpses and finds that Baby Uncle’s family buried the bodies while she was unconscious. At that moment, Precious Auntie resolves to join them in the ground. She goes to the ink studio and heats some ink on the stove. Then, she brings the ladle of boiling ink to her mouth and swallows it.
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The women enter the ink studio and find Precious Auntie flailing on the floor, her mouth a darkened mess of blood and ink. Mother thinks it’s better that they let her die, but Great-Granny fears that Precious Auntie’s ghost will haunt them. Fearing a curse, the women tend to Precious Auntie’s wounds, crushing dragon bones and sprinkling the powder into her mouth. Around this time, they discover that Precious Auntie is pregnant. Precious Auntie recovers, but her face is now so disfigured that nobody can bear to look at her.
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Baby Uncle comes to Great-Granny in a dream and tells her to keep Precious Auntie and her baby in the household. He orders First Sister (Mother) to raise the baby as a Liu, and for Precious Auntie to assume the role of nursemaid. GaoLing, Mother’s actual child, is born in 1916, but the family keeps the birth a secret to maintain the illusion that she mothered GaoLing and Precious Auntie’s child—LuLing. The adults know the truth about the births, but LuLing doesn’t know that Precious Auntie is her mother until Precious Auntie writes the words on paper and shows them to her.
