The Bonesetter’s Daughter is a story about stories. Specifically, it emphasizes the power of storytelling to imbue one’s experiences with authenticity and meaningfulness and the value of sharing those stories to grow and connect with others. Ruth Young (one of the protagonists) works as a ghostwriter, translating her clients’ often jumbled, incomprehensible ideas into polished, coherent stories. Ruth also descends from a long line of storytellers: several years before the novel’s present, Ruth’s mother, LuLing, writes the story of her complicated and traumatic childhood in China. She gives the manuscript to her Ruth, hoping that the story will help her better understand her mother and the family history that has shaped LuLing and Ruth’s lives. Similarly, Precious Auntie painstakingly chronicles her own life’s hardships in order to profoundly reshape LuLing’s reality, concluding her story with the revelation that Precious Auntie is actually LuLing’s mother. Precious Auntie’s story is further significant because it allows her to regain her voice, literally and figuratively. Precious Auntie loses her physical ability to speak after swallowing boiling ink as a failed suicide attempt. She further loses her voice when the social stigma surrounding illegitimate births forces her to relinquish her identity as LuLing’s mother and assume the role of subservient nursemaid. Although Ruth, LuLing, and Precious Auntie come from vastly different places, time periods, and circumstances, their purpose in writing is the same: to give meaning to what is misunderstood, shed light on what is hidden, and immortalize what’s is otherwise fleeting. The Bonesetter’s Daughter thus illustrates storytelling’s power to forge connections and inspire meaning and understanding. Furthermore, it even portrays storytelling as a humanitarian feat, giving a voice to those who have been silence by gendered oppression and trauma.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Storytelling ThemeTracker
Storytelling Quotes in The Bonesetter’s Daughter
In an odd way, she now thought, her mother was the one who had taught her to become a book doctor. Ruth had to make life better by revising it.
“I hope you will still forgive me. Please know that my life has been miserable ever since you left me. That is why I ask you to take my life, but to spare my daughter if the curse cannot be changed. I know her recent accident was a warning.”
Maybe there was a reason her mother had been so difficult when Ruth was growing up, why she had talked about curses and ghosts and threats to kill herself. Dementia was her mother’s redemption, and God would forgive them both for heaving hurt each other all those years.
She recalled that when her younger self stood on this same beach for the first time, she had thought the sand looked like a gigantic writing surface. The slate was clean, inviting, open to possibilities. And at that moment of her life, she had a new determination, a fierce hope. She didn’t have to make the answers anymore. She could ask. Just as she had so long before, Ruth now stooped and picked up a broken shell. She scratched in the sand: Help. And she watched as the waves carried her plea to another world.
That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
And each day, several times a day, Ruth wanted to tell her mother that she was sorry, that she was an evil girl, that everything was her fault. But to do so would be to acknowledge what her mother obviously wanted to pretend never existed, those words Ruth had written. For weeks, they walked on tiptoe, careful not to step on the broken pieces.
She carefully crossed out the last sentences, running her ballpoint pen over and over the words until everything was a blur of black ink. On the next page, the last page, she wrote: “I’m sorry. Sometimes I wish you would say you’re sorry too.”
Though she could never show her mother those words, it felt good to write them.
Her hands would always be full, and finally, she and her mother could both stop counting.
These are the things I must not forget.
In this way, Precious Auntie taught me to be naughty, just like her. She taught me to be curious, just like her. She taught me to be spoiled. And because I was all these things, she could not teach me to be a better daughter, though in the end, she tried to change my faults.
“I am your mother,” the words said.
I read that only after she died. Yet I have a memory of her telling me with her hands, I can see her saying this with her eyes. When it is dark, she says this to me in a clear voice I have never heard. She speaks in the language of shooting stars.
Yet in time I did become less unhappy. I accepted my life. Maybe it was the weakness of memory that made me feel less pain. Perhaps it was my life force growing stronger. All I knew was, I had become a different girl from the one who had arrived at the orphanage.
“There are no such things as curses,” Kai Jing later told me. “Those are superstitions, and a superstition is a needless fear. The only curses are worries you can’t get rid of.”
“But Precious Auntie told me this, and she was very smart.”
“She was self-taught, exposed to only the old ideas. She had no chance to learn about science, to go to a university like me.”
“Then why did my father die? Why did Precious Auntie die?”
“Your father died because of an accident. Precious Auntie killed herself. You said so yourself.”
“But why did the way of heaven lead to these things?”
“It’s not the way of heaven. There is no reason.”
I sailed for America, a land without curses or ghosts. By the time I landed, I was five years younger. Yet I felt so old.
Ruth listened with fascination. It was as if Mr. Tang had known her mother years before. He easily guided her to the old memories, to those that were still safeguarded from destruction.
She understood more clearly why her mother had always wanted to find Precious Auntie’s bones and bury them in the proper place. She wanted to walk through the End of the World and make amends. She wanted to tell her mother, “I’m sorry and I forgive you, too.”
Ruth began to cry. Her grandmother had a name. Gu Liu Xin. She had existed. She still existed. Precious Auntie belonged to a family. LuLing belonged to that same family, and Ruth belonged to them both. The family name had been there all along, like a bone stuck in the crevices of a gorge. LuLing had divined it while looking at an oracle in the museum. And the given name had flashed before her as well for the briefest of moments, a shooting star that entered the earth’s atmosphere, etching itself indelibly in Ruth’s mind.
And side by side, Ruth and her grandmother begin. Words flow. They have become the same person, six years old, sixteen, forty-six, eighty-two. They write about what happened, why it happened how they can make other things happen. They write soties of things that are but should not have been. They write about what could have been, what still might be. They write of a past that can be changed. After all, Bao Bomu, says, what is the past but what we choose to remember? They can choose not to hide it, to take what’s broken, to feel the pain and know that it will heal. They know where happiness lies, not in a cave or a country, but in love and the freedom to give and take what has been there all along. Ruth remembers this as she writes a story. It is for her grandmother, for herself, for the little girl who became her mother.
