There are some major similarities between two books I read back to back - Amy Tan‘s, “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” and Liz Trenow’s “The Forgotten Seamstress.”
My sister recommended “The Forgotten Seamstress.” I learned about “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” from a “best books” list in The Week magazine. “The Forgotten Seamstress” was a page turner. Somehow I knew it would be before I even started reading it. “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” was an interesting read, especially for the insights into Chinese culture, but it wasn’t a page turner for me.
Main characters in both books are daughters who are dealing with their relationships with mothers who have dementia. Daughters in both books are living with men they aren’t married to; they’re trying to figure out their level of commitment to each other. Both are cleaning out their mothers’ homes and dealing with the accumulations of a lifetime.
As these women deal with all the stuff, they find themselves wondering what to keep, what to throw out. Items bring back memories. Some items don’t bring specific memories but you know there must be a story somewhere. Can we come up with the real story?
Both books speak to the importance of talking with our relatives and learning their stories – before it’s too late and everything is gone. I think of Mom and her reluctance to tell her stories. When we pushed her to share and were met with reluctance, I sometimes teased it would be better if we learned it from her instead of having to figure it out ourselves and get it wrong. We can make up some good stories but we’ll never know if we got it right until we see her on the other side.
Maria is an orphan who lands a job in the sewing room of Buckingham Palace before World War I. She and the teenaged Prince of Wales have an affair. One thing leads to another and she is confined to a mental institution – for decades.
Many years later Caroline is cleaning out her mother’s home and finds a beautiful quilt. The quilt becomes a character in the story as the author unfolds the relationship between the quilt, Maria, Caroline, and Caroline’s parents.
The quilt brings to mind all sorts of analogies – the threads that tie us together throughout the generations. The patchwork of experiences that make up our lives. Just as a quilt is made up of layers, our lives have many layers and sometimes there’s a secret in amongst the layers, just as there was in this quilt.
This story made me think about the crazy quilt that Celia Cathcart Holton pieced. Ruth Holton has it. Was it made out of family fabrics? Were there stories behind the swatches? Are there messages hidden in the stitching or inside the quilt?
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Mother-daughter relationships are a major theme of Amy Tan’s books. As Ruth Young’s widowed mother LuLing succumbs to Alzheimer’s, Ruth discovers there’s much about her mother that she never knew. I like the cultural aspects of Tan’s books – learning about the Chinese culture and the adjustments to life in the United States.
Ruth and her mother LuLing had a tumultuous relationship. After her mother was totally “lost” to Alzheimer’s, Ruth pondered her relationship with her mother and realized that all along her mother “simply wanted to be essential, as any mother should be.” (p301) Amen to that!
Some reviewers talk about the voicelessness of women – how and why they lost their voices. Others mentioned the ghosts from our past. – how our pasts affect our present and future.
In an interview Amy Tan said she started “thinking about how incomplete and fragile our memories are. We find bits and pieces of our own past or those of our parents and ancestors, and we try to reconfigure these fragments in order to understand ourselves: how we came to be who we are. “ (372)
More from Amy Tan in that interview - “What is the past but what we choose to remember? They can choose not to hide it, to take what’s broken, to feel the pain and know that it will heal. They know where happiness lies, not in a cave or a country, but in love and the freedom to give and take what has been there all along.” (367-8)
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