Saving Fish from Drowning

by Amy Tan

Imagine that the casting director of Survivor is picking out new members for the show. What a perfect bunch this would be--a pompous animal behaviorist/TV celebrity, a superwoman who towers her husband in every category of their professional and personal life, the husband who tries to prove otherwise, and often abrasively takes the grudge out on others, a demure but beautiful Chinese art curator, her eleven-year-old daughter who yearns to be treated as a grown-up and smuggles a Shih-Tzu puppy across mountains and seas from China, to Myanmar and eventually to the United States, a director at a large non-profit organization who is said to be among "the Hundred Most Influential Black Women of America", a lanky bamboo-growing divorcee, his rambunctious 15-year-old son who seems to suffer from ADD during the entire trip, a self-appointed freedom writer with a hidden agenda, her absent-minded lover, who is continuously tested for love and loyalty sometimes completely in oblivion, an insure gay man who tries to please everyone yet failes to deliver despite good intentions, a hypochondriac who struggles to break out of a nightmarish experience with a close call of murder. What would such an assortment of characters full of potential of personality clashes do in a remote village in the Myanmar rain forest? Well, surprisingly nothing much, according to Amy Tan’s novel, Saving Fish from Drowning.

We need to first look at how they got to No Name Place, the remote village occupied by the Karen tribe who has been persecuted by the government since 1989. The original tour leader, Bibi Chen, a Chinese art connoisseur and a socialite in the San Francisco art scene died of a freak death ten days prior to the departure of the trip that she had so carefully planned for two years for her friends (all of them are mentioned above). Unbeknown to the group, Bibi’s spirit followed them throughout the trip and narrated the story for us, not much different from that of an over protecting mother. The absence of the tour leader did not deter the group from going. While you might find most of the individual group members interesting and possibly can engage in a fruitful conversation with one of them on a long plane ride, collectively they are hopeless. Bibi was efficient, meticulous, sometimes bossy, and the group is anything but. Without Bibi’s first hand knowledge and careful observation of local customs, the group floundered their way in and out of Li Jiang, China, and eventually found themselves deep in the jungle with the Karen people, who have waited for their arrival for hundreds of years.

Given the colorful characters and the exotic location, the story could be so much more. While there were a few hilarious incidents sprinkled throughout the book, such as when Marlena and Esme found themselves awkwardly singing Christmas carol in front of a Chinese documentary crew, the time when Harry Baley, the TV celebrity defecated the holy shrine by accident, and the same Harry, out of desperation, miraculously tamed a group of drunk Burmese police using techniques from years of training unruly dogs… These moments are few and far between. I consider Harry and Marlena the most developed characters in the book, by that I don’t mean likable, just that they are fleshed out to be believable, but the other ten are merely painted in broad strokes, which sometimes are too broad thus render them in stereotypes and somehow failed to elicit empathy and connections with reader. Maybe for a 500-plus-page book, it’s too strenuous to fully devote one’s attention to each of the thirteen characters. However Bibi is unnecessarily over-developed, and the surprised ending brought only confusion instead of closure and answers to her unfortunate end.

On the plot level, it’s a little disappointing too. Again, the distance between the beaten path of tourist’s destination such as Stone Bell Mountain in Li Jiang, China, and No Name Place, refugee's haven, Myanmar, is huge, and it must be overcome by the reader’s leap of faith, a big leap at that. How is it possible that eleven Americans, who must sound and look out of place in Myanmar, managed to disappear without anyone seeing them? How can the eleven of them collectively decided to follow two total strangers who spoke minimum English deep into the jungle on a promise of “Christmas Surprise”? Again, once they found themselves in the confines of the Karen tribe in No Name Place, how did they not break out or at least attempt to break out? Has it ever occurred to them that the noodle that magically appeared before them for dinner was routed the exact same path they had taken? I don’t know whether to take the eleven Americans as defenseless and gullible or kind and courageous to sympathize with the Karen people, who kidnapped them to No Name Place because Rupert was mistaken as their reincarnated savior Younger White Brother. Such is the futile title, saving fish from drowning. How self-appointed and how self-righteous! While the Americans laugh at the Burmese for inventing this phrase to justify their living as fisherman, they unintentionally were doing just the same.

The bits on local cuisine and scenery are highly enjoyable to read, but a 528-page book cannot rely solely on anecdotes such as these. The characters and the plot development could have been much stronger, instead it simply panned out, like an over stretched rubber band losing its elasticity.