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Ruth feels guilty about using her work as an excuse not to visit her mother LuLing, who lives nearby, and her mother encourages this reaction: "What I should pay you, five dollar, 10 dollar, then you come see me?" But Ruth has reasons to keep her mother at arm's length. Her father died in a hit-and-run accident when she was two, leaving her the sole spectator and victim of her widowed mother's bad temper and ominous threats ("Maybe I die soon!"). But now Ruth realizes that her mother is behaving erratically, even for her, and seems to be mentally fading away. A doctor confirms Ruth's fears, and she understands that she must act as "mother to the child her mother had become."
While trying to straighten out LuLing's chaotic house, Ruth comes across a sheaf of papers written in her mother's graceful Chinese calligraphy. She recalls that her mother had given her a few such pages earlier, which are stuffed in a desk drawer. Ruth hires a translator and vows to read the whole batch of what her mother remembered to write down before she began to forget.
LuLing's story is the vibrant heart of The Bonesetter's Daughter, conveying her childhood in the mountainous, remote Chinese village called Immortal Heart and her love for her nursemaid Precious Auntie, whose father was a locally renowned healer of broken bones, and whose face had been horribly disfigured. How this happened emerges slowly but grippingly, as does the secret of the terrible curse that LuLing believes she carries from Precious Auntie into her second life in America, where she drills the fear of the curse daily into the conscience of her daughter Ruth.
In the final pages of the novel, LuLing tells her daughter, "I'm worried that I did terrible things to you when you were a child, that I hurt you very much. But I can't remember what I did... I just wanted to say that I hope you can forget, just as I've forgotten."
For all Tan's remarkable ability to inhabit imaginatively other places and times, to render the feel of manufacturing ink sticks in the 1920s or running from the invading Japanese in the 1930s, LuLing's closing words are, the author says, a close transcription of something her own mother, late in life, said to her. "That's exactly what a child wants to hear," Tan says, "and what I as an adult needed to hear from my mother."
The child Amy, born in Oakland, Calif., in 1952, went through a tumultuous life, including, during her 15th year, the deaths of her brother Peter and her father John of brain tumors within six months of each other. She survived her enraged mother's decision, holding a knife to Amy's neck, "to kill me first and then kill herself." She entertained rebellious crushes on druggy, inappropriate boys as a way to drive her frantic mother further up the wall.