Saving Fish from Drowning
By Amy Tan
Copyright 2006
Ballantine Books
Adult Fiction
2
Bookmarks
Spoiler Alert!
One of the best books I've ever read is The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan, although I read that one in
my much-younger years. I saw this, more
recent, novel by Tan and decided to pick it up.
With such an intriguing name, Saving
Fish from Drowning would surely be a book as good as Senses, right? In the end, I decided that my primary assessment was incorrect.
To summarize, Saving Fish from
Drowning is about a large group of friends who travel together to Burma
(Myanmar). They travel without an
important member, Bibi Chen, who planned the trip in the first place but
mysteriously died prior to departure (although she is there in spirit as she is
the narrator of the story).
The book follows the travelers on some interesting (and some
not-so-interesting) adventures, until they are eventually kidnapped by an
oppressed tribe who refer to themselves as “The Lord’s Army”.
It was at about this point in the book that I realized that this was not
merely an “escape from real life” story book.
No. It was, instead, a political
commentary on an oppressive regime, which (I’m assuming) is likely still a
problem in that particular region. I
hate stuff like that. From that point
on, I just sort of went through the motions of finishing the book. I’m sorry, but I typically read to escape; not
to find out more about the horrible things that horrible governments and horrible
religions do to people in this world. If
I wanted to read that kind of stuff I would stick with non-fiction. Or watch Fox News.
It’s not that I want to stick my head in the sand and never know
anything that’s going on; it’s just a survival mechanism, I suppose. To survive, I have to think about the good
things in life instead of suffocating in the bad.
Anyway, so I did eventually finish the book and realize the intent of the
book title. The “moral of the story”, if
you will, seemed to be that even though us “westerners” go into these types of
areas to try to help the oppressed people, it just ends up making things worse for them
(at least that seemed to be the author’s take on things—that we think we are “saving”
them, but instead we are “drowning” them).
I disagreed with the premise and only found some of the story interesting. I also thought the
whole “mysterious death of Bibi Chen” thing (that really didn’t have anything
to do with anything other than to create a narrator for the story), was a weird
distraction. Not one I would
recommend.
