Quotes of the Day

With her own life in turmoil, Amy Tan was invited by friends in 2000 to accompany them to Burma. "Why not?" she thought. "It's a beautiful country. Great art, great culture. But then I started reading about the military junta, the human rights problems, Aung San Suu Kyi, the boycott. I could cancel the trip, but what good would that do? I could go, but would that do any good either? That led to the question of how any of us can make a difference. And how do we decide?"

That led to Saving Fish from Drowning, the latest and most radically un-Tanlike of Tan's novels. Instead of examining personal relationships, this time she takes on two of the more pressing moral issues of the age: how to do good in the world and whether it matters. Her previous novels — The Joy Luck Club (she also co-wrote director Wayne Wang's 1993 movie version), The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter's Daughter — were all best sellers focusing on the bond between mothers and daughters, the latter often Chinese-American like Tan. Uncharacteristically, Saving Fish is mostly about politics, and it's set mostly in Burma, not China or Tan's native northern California. It's also unsettling, provocative and, at the same time, both her funniest and her most serious book.

Tan did go to Burma. And Saving Fish is about a group of American tourists who venture to the country, renamed Myanmar by the junta in 1989. While on a day trip into the jungle from their ritzy resort, the Americans are kidnapped by Karen tribesmen who believe that one of the travelers, a 15-year-old California boy, is a mythical figure who will rescue the tribe from persecution by the junta. "The Younger White Brother was here, and as he had promised during his last visit on earth, he would save them," Tan writes of the Karen perspective. "He could manifest weapons. He could make the tribe invisible. They would then … walk openly without being shot, until they reached a patch of land, the promised land."

The tribe is so hospitable that the Americans do not realize they have been kidnapped, thinking they're stranded merely because a bridge is out. They settle into a primitive but largely idyllic existence, despite a few cross-cultural miscues. (The delicious crunchy things turn out to be fried insects; the Karen believe the Younger White Brother is carrying the "Lost Important Writings" — actually a paperback of Stephen King's Misery.) Meanwhile, the tourists' disappearance ignites a global media frenzy, which friends back home hope will pressure the junta to find them — and which the junta manipulates to burnish its image. The situation is ripe for satire, and Tan pours it over her tour bus of fools: the television dog-show host who thinks diplomacy is a lot like pooch training, the academic couple who can't stop intellectually one-upping each other, the dangerously do-gooding heiress. Saving Fish from Drowning (the title comes from a Buddhist fisherman's rationalization of his craft) ends without clear winners. And Tan neatly frames the dilemma: To help the oppressed, do you use a carrot or a cudgel?

"I'm not very polemical," says Tan from the San Francisco house she shares with her lawyer husband Lou DeMattei. "I just wanted readers to have a better understanding of moral complexities. I wanted to examine, for instance, the notion that people must die in order to make things better." She cites a controversial 1996 British television exposé of abuses at Chinese orphanages. "Right away the orphanages were closed, adoptions discontinued, cleft-palate and other special surgery stopped. My husband and I worked with some of those orphanages, so we know what was at stake. Does publicly humiliating China save lives? Or is China more effectively motivated by other things, like trade agreements?"

How did a writer known for parsing personal dilemmas get interested in the political kind? The answer may lie in the inner turmoil Tan faced just before fate led her to Burma. For years, she had suffered bouts of depression, which she thinks runs in her family (her grandmother, a merchant's concubine in prerevolutionary Shanghai, committed suicide in front of Tan's mother). By 2000, her anxiety had become debilitating. "On the street I was afraid I'd be stabbed in the back," she recalls. "I thought somebody would break into my house and kill me there. I couldn't write. I couldn't walk. I had severe numbness in my feet, to the point where I was looking into getting a motorized wheelchair."

Her affliction turned out to be Lyme disease, which she caught in the U.S., probably from an insect bite, though she doesn't know how. Her illness, which went undiagnosed for four years, can cause emotional problems. "I'll never be cured completely," she says now, 21/2 years after beginning antibiotic treatment. "I have 16 lesions on my brain, and that's where the bacteria go to have a picnic. I have seizures. I have a sleep disorder. But I'm so much happier now. I'm so grateful for what I have. I can walk. I see things I don't want to take for granted ever again. I try to do more in life."

Saving Fish is one result of Tan's new energy, and the next is an opera based on The Bonesetter's Daughter. Her collaborators are librettist Michael Korie and composer Stuart Wallace, whose 1995 opera Harvey Milk, about the assassination of San Francisco's first gay city supervisor, won wide acclaim. They are aiming for a 2008 debut in the U.S. or China. Meanwhile, Tan is starting to think about her next novel. "I'm not sure what it will be about, but it will incorporate music, because that's my obsession right now. One of the things I do in thinking about a novel is find a fascinating place to set it, and then go from there. I think I've found it, a spot as close to paradise as any I've ever seen. But I can't tell you where it is, or it'll be spoiled."

Is it in China? Or perhaps Burma, a country she can't seem to get out of her mind? "If there's one thing I wanted to do [in Saving Fish]," she says, "it's to remind people that there is this country, now called Myanmar, where a military regime is causing great suffering. People are being tortured, raped and killed. I could have laid out the problem calmly and directly in a nonfiction book, but that would have been what Americans call 'a bummer.' So I chose fiction. And comedy. Sometimes only the subversiveness of comedy can do justice to the extremes of horror." Especially in the hands of a writer who knows the value of life.

• DONALD MORRISON
• Amy Tan shuns family dramas for political dilemmas in a wry look at tourists held hostage abroad