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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Bonesetter’s Daughter, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Secrecy and Misunderstanding
Memory, Culture, and the Past
Storytelling
Women’s Solidarity
Summary
Analysis
LuLing Liu Young explains the things she “know[s] are true.” Her husbands, who are both dead, were Pan Kai Jing and Edwin Young. Her daughter, Ruth Luyi Young, was born in a Water Dragon Year. However, there’s one thing from her childhood she can’t remember.
This opening passage establishes memory as a central theme. LuLing’s mention of two late husbands suggests that she has had a troubled, unhappy past.
Themes
In a flashback to her childhood, LuLing wakes up in the room she shares with her nursemaid, Precious Auntie. She wakes and finds Precious Auntie scribbling something on a scrap of paper, but it’s still too dark in the room to see. Precious Auntie can’t speak and communicates with LuLing by writing on a little chalkboard and sharing sounds and gestures. She calls LuLing by a special nickname, “Doggie.”
Precious Auntie’s method of communicating via writing introduces the theme of storytelling. LuLing’s flashback underscores how important the past is to her. That a nursemaid raised her also introduces the novel’s interest in relationships between women and the kind of support they give (or don’t give) each other.
Themes
As Precious Auntie begins the day’s chores, LuLing goes through her aunt’s “box of treasures” and pulls out a beautiful ivory comb with a carved rooster at either end. She asks Precious Auntie to wear it, thinking it will make her pretty and make LuLing’s mother like her more. Her aunt gestures toward her face to say, what’s the point? A fire disfigured the lower half of Precious Auntie’s face many years ago, and it was after this accident that Precious Auntie became LuLing’s nursemaid. The rest of LuLing’s family thinks Precious Auntie is hideous, but LuLing doesn’t see her this way. She’s also the only one who can understand the way her aunt communicates.
LuLing’s compassion sets her apart from the rest of her family. She’s different from them in more ways than one, since she’s being raised separately by her nursemaid, Precious Auntie. This scene further establishes the importance of storytelling: words and storytelling allow LuLing and Precious Auntie to communicate and connect despite Precious Auntie’s muteness.
Themes
Precious Auntie tells LuLing many stories, including ones about Precious Auntie’s father, a Famous Bonesetter, and a made-up story about how she burned her face when she used to be a fire-eater. In another story, LuLing’s aunt claims that a star fell from the sky and burned her mouth.
Precious Auntie tells fantastical stories to make light of whatever horrific accident scarred her face. However, her stories also keep the actual cause of her scarring a secret from LuLing.
Themes
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Today, Precious Auntie tells LuLing there’s no time for stories and leads her to the ancestral temple to pray. In the temple, there are many scrolls with couplets that scholars have written as gifts to her family, whose ink they’ve used for 200 years.
The ancestral temple underscores how important honoring the past is in LuLing’s culture, since it’s a place devoted to showing respect to deceased ancestors.
Themes
Precious Auntie takes the piece of paper she wrote on earlier and shows it to LuLing. With her eyes, she tells her: never forget my family name, the name of the bonesetters. But in the present, when LuLing is an elderly woman, she finds that she can’t remember the name, no matter how hard she tries. LuLing thinks about all the special things she’s lost over the years: the jacket her sister GaoLing gave her when LuLing left to live at the orphan school, or a baby dress that Luyi outgrew. She’s since learned to hide the things she loves in the special chest.
LuLing mourns the sad truth that even the most critical memories fade over time. In her old age, she struggles with not being able to uphold her promise to Precious Auntie to remember her name. Since LuLing is an old woman in the novel’s present day, it’s reasonable to assume that Precious Auntie has long since died. This scene’s emphasis on loss also suggests that LuLing has lived a difficult life full of much suffering since the time during which her childhood memory takes place.
Themes
Back in the present, LuLing remembers the special chest that morning when she puts away a birthday present from Ruth: a pearl necklace. When she opens her own “box of treasures,” moths fly out. Inside the chest is a fabric of knitted holes: almost all the fabric’s embroidered flowers are gone. Despite having lost almost everything that ever mattered to her, the worst thing LuLing has lost is Precious Auntie’s name. She pleads with Precious Auntie’s ghost to visit her, asking the ghost if she recognizes who LuLing is: her daughter.
The moth-eaten fabric in LuLing’s special chest symbolizes how time erodes memory. Time has even damaged the remnants of LuLing’s past that she has tried to preserve in her special chest. The destruction of these items is especially tragic for LuLing, whose life, it seems, has been defined by loss: not only has she lost people who are important to her, but she has lost, too, objects that might aid her in remembering them. This moment is also important because it establishes that Precious Auntie is LuLing’s mother, though she fails to explain why she refers to her mother as “Precious Auntie,” which is a peculiar detail that likely contributes to LuLing’s inability to remember their family name: she can’t remember the name because she never used it to refer to her mother in the first place.
Themes
