@internrachel @julia1

I just finished Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan (496 pages).

This was another dollar store find. I like Amy Tan’s writing and this book had a really interesting genesis. According to the introduction at the start of the book, Tan was caught in the rain in New York and came across a building marked “American Society for Psychical Research.” That sounded like an awesome place to escape the rain, so she went in and spent the rest of the day reading automatic writing, when she came across writing supposedly channeled from one Bibi Chen, someone Tan had known when she was alive. She contacted the woman who channeled Chen and they talked a lot and that inspired this book.

This book is narrated by Bibi Chen, post-morten, as she follows a tour group she helped organize before her death comprised of 12 of her friends. They went to China for a bit, then on to Burma where they were kidnapped by a separatist tribe in the jungle when they mistake one of the tourists for the reincarnation of their mythical savior, Little White Brother. There’s a whole big media circus that follow and eventually the group is rescued, even though the idiots never actually realized they’d been kidnapped (they thought they were only stranded in the village when the rope bridge over a canyon went down). Because Bibi is dead, she can kind of see/hear everyone’s thoughts so you get to see the events through the eyes of many different characters. Tan is a great writer and the story is really interesting and you can picture everything perfectly.

The problem was, I didn’t like any of the characters. The women were obnoxious enough, but I fucking hate the men. HATED. It wasn’t like Tan was trying to make them all into awful misogynists, but she did a great job of making them into believable, common American men, which unfortunately means there is a lot of banal sexism in them as a matter of course. Like, one guy just automatically ascribes nefarious motives to women’s (especially his wife’s) reactions to everything, imagining they’re trying to undermine him or are trying to emotionally punish him by withrawing from him when actually they’re just confused by what just happened. And another guy…well, he pissed in a stone sculpture of a vulva at a holy site in China. That should tell you everything you need to know about how he treats women. But they were all so naive, ethnocentric, and condescending, even while congratulating themselves on how open-minded, adventurous, and generous they are. I know that’s such a common attitutde in America (I’ve met more people like that than I can count), but it was just so irritating. By the end of the book, I wanted the Karen tribe to just push them over the canyon and into the river and be done with it.