Saving Fish From Drowning is a 2005 novel written by Amy Tan. It is Tan's sixth and most recent work. The story follows the trials and tribulations twelve American tourists face when they embark on an expedition to explore China and Burma. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving_Fish_from_Drowning)
I read a couple of good and bad reviews about this book right after I read a few pages of it. But I cared less about those not-so-good comments since I was captivated by Amy Tan's humor and that Asian philosophy. She's definitely gentler than Anchee Min. Both of them are, without a doubt, wise and sensitive. However, Min is more political while Tan is more affectionate. Nevertheless, I love them both. That's why I decided to share some quotations from the book, which I believe would convince people why this 474-page novel didn't bore me at all.
"That was the advantage of being dead: no fear of future consequences. Or so I thought." "Reading the roster of my achievements, I should have been bursting with pride. Instead, it struck me as nonsensical." "Nothing filled me with the satisfaction I believed I would have at the end of my life. I could not say to myself: "That is where I was most special, where I was most important, and that is enough for a lifetime." I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world, paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated as soon as I passed over it." "A shiny silver scarf was wrapped into a puffy bow around my lacerated neck. I looked like a turkey with aluminum foil, about to be put in the oven." "That was the legacy of my mother's side of the family, insufficient excess, too much that was never enough." ""You see respect is lasting. Fondness is passing, a whim for a season or two, only to be replaced by a new fancy....""
"But then I discovered art. I saw for the first time nature and pure feelings expressed in a form I could understand. A painting was a translation of the language of my heart. My emotions were all there - but in a painting, a sculpture. I went to museum after museum, into the labyrinths of rooms and that of my own soul. And there they were - my feelings, and all of them natural, spontaneous, truthful, and free. My heart cavorted within shapes and shadows and splashes, in patterns, repetitions, and abruptly ending lines. My soul shivered in tiny feathered strokes, one eyelash at a time. And so I began to collect art. In this way, I was able to surround myself with the inexpressible, to exult in the souls of others. What a lifelong debt I owe to art!"
"Passionate people create too many problems: They are reckless. They endanger others in their pursuit of fetishes and infatuations. And they self-agitate when it is better to simply relax and let matters be."
"But in art, lovely subversive art, you see what breaks through in spite of restraint, or even because of it. Art despises placidity and smooth surfaces. Without art, I would have drowned under still waters."
"Heidi was young, cute, and a little neurotic, a combination that would become in a short time less young, less cute, and more neurotic."
"Your situation and form in life are already determined before you are born. If you are a buffalo suffering in mud, you must have committed wrongs upon others in a previous existence, and thus, you deserve this particular reincarnation. "
"She had heard that many Americans, especially those who travel to China, love Buddhism. She did not realize that the Buddhism the Americans before her loved was Zen-like, a form of not-thinking, not-moving, and not-eating anything living, like buffaloes. This blank-minded Buddhism was practiced by well-to-do people in San Francisco and Marin County, who bought organic buckwheat pillows for sitting on the floor, who paid experts to teach them to empty their minds of the noise of life."
"For a man who rapes and murders little girls, what is a satisfactory punishment? Should he not be turned into a beast of burden who lives in mud and is whipped every waking hour so that he might learn what suffering is and thus become a better being in his next incarnation? Or should the villain be paraded about town to the jeers of a crowd, as they do in some countries, placed in a burlap bag, tossed over a cliff, and then dismembered so that he will have to walk sans penis in hell? On the other hand, as has been described in both Christian and Chinese hells, would it be more just if he were consigned to a vat of oil, one that boils eternally and in which each moment is as unbearable as the first dip of the toe, so that his horror is endless, without any hope whatsoever of redeeming himself?"
"With a limited diversity of life, there is greater diversity of purpose."
In China, there is a saying made popular after the revolution: Women hold up half the sky. In the Naxi Autonomous Region, women have always held up the whole sky. It is a matriarchal society, where the females do the work, handle the money, own the houses, and raise the children. The men, meanwhile, ride on the backs of shooting stars, so to speak. They are bachelors, boyfriends, and uncles, roaming from bed to bed at night, not knowing which children they have fathered. They take the animals out to graze early in the morning, they bring them back at dusk. In the mountain pastures, they roll their cigarettes and smoke, and when they call the animals, they lure them with love songs. They sing at the top of their lungs, which extract oxygen much more efficiently than those of most Americans...The men do poetry. To hear a song sung in the mountains is always poetry."
"What place do freedom and responsibility have when you're plagued with budget cuts, conniving upstarts, and competing charities? No one had vision anymore. It was all about marketing."
""Run, run," Heidi whispered to the piglets. "You're doomed.""
"The biggest boy tool a running leap onto the back of a water buffalo that was resting on the side of the road. He wrestled the horns of the implacable beast, then gave it a mighty kick in the side, before declaring for himself another victory. The other boys imitated him, getting a running start to vault themselves onto the buffalo and tumbling off its spine like gymnasts at hillbilly Olympiad. Had the water buffalo been so inclined, it could have risen to its mighty hooves and easily trampled or gored the boys in a second. What had this buffalo done in a past life that he must now serve happily as trampoline and vaulting horse?"
"She knew her precautions were useless. Death would come of its own accord, and she could not prevent it. Yet she still could not stop herself from trying, and she hated how she had become, conscious more of dying than of living."
"Only a week before, they had been ordinary nine-year olds, playing chinlon with their caneballs, swimming in the river, and taking care of their younger siblings. But the day had come when their parents consigned them to the local monastery to serve voluntary course of time, from two weeks to several years, as all boys of Buddhist families did. Their heads were shaved during a family ceremony, their locks caught on a piece of white silk, and upon promising that they would obey the rules of Theravada Buddhism, they took off their clothes, donned the simple sloth of the monks, and became sons of Buddha. This was their initiation into becoming human."
"For poorer families, this was the only way in which their sons could receive an education. The well-to-do families collected their sons after two weeks, but the poorer boys stayed on longer, if they could."
"Oh, but being American has less to do with one's proficiency in English and more with the assumptions you hold dear and true - your inalienable rights, your pursuit of happiness. I, sad to say, don't possess those assumptions. I cannot undertake the pursuit."
"Death was not a loss of life, but the culmination of a series of releases. It was devolving into less and less. You had to release yourself from vanity, desire, ambition, suffering, and frustration - all the accoutrements of the I, the ego. And if you did, you would disappear, leave no trace, like the mist at dawn over the lake, evaporating into nothingness, into nibbana."
"I was appalled at the idea. Evaporate? Would that happen to me? I wanted to expand, to fill the void, to reclaim all that I had wasted. I wanted to fill the silence with all the words I had not yet spoken."
"Constancy is its own satisfaction, said one of the older ladies, the predictability of days, the serenity of seeing the same loom and spools, the same co-workers beside me, the same wooden walls and high roof, with only occasional rain tipping the roof, like the thrumming fingers of a god, which was a small but welcome intrusion."
"What bloody good was human adaptability if people weren't willing to change? Wasn't that why no penal system really worked to prevent crime, why people went to psychiatrists for years without any intentions of overcoming their obsessions and depressions? Humans had this extraordinary fondness for their own peccadilloes. That's why you couldn't change a Republican into a Democrat and vice versa, why there were so many divorces, lawsuits, and wars. Because people refused to adapt and accommodate to others even for their own good! Precisely so! When it came to their own needs, humans, and women especially, were more territorial about their bloody psyches - their so-called needs - than dogs were over their raw meaty bones."
"I realized then that we miss so much of life while we are part of it. We fail to see ninety-nine percent of the glories of nature, for to do so would require vision that is simultaneously telescopic and microscopic."
"I saw our village was already on fire. The thatch of the houses was burning, the rice sheds, too, black smoke rising. I saw my family and other villagers crawling on knees and hands toward the soldiers. My husband, my daughter, her husband, my other daughter, the four sons of my rice-pounding sister, her husband, who was still looking back to see where she was. I saw some of them fall flat onto their faces. I thought they had been kicked. One by one, they fell. One by one, I shouted, Ai! One by one, I was leaving them. And even if I had tried to swim back, the stream was too fast, and it carried me away, like an empty boat. "
"I was going to tip myself over and fall to the bottom of the river. But then I heard them, Loot and Bootie. They were laughing like the tinkling bells of a singing shawl. They were still on the pallet, spinning in an eddy. After I reached them and checked them twice for holes, I cried and cried for I was so happy, and then I cried and cried again for I was so sad."
""What the hell was that about?" Dwight whispered to Roxanne. "It almost sounded like English. Did you understand any of it?" Roxanne shook her head, then added, "Nothing beyond Great God and Cheez Whiz.""
""We've come to this beautiful place," Roxanne narrated, "and we've learned that within beauty, there is tragedy.""
"The only thing certain in times of great uncertainty is that people will behave with great strength or weakness, and with very little else in between."
"Alas, in ever community that proposes to do good, there are always a few who do good mostly for themselves."
"I often wished I could give her the umph in triumph."
"Accepting help was like taking drugs. It would be addictive and in the end leave her worse off than before...."
"But how did you know whether your intention would help or whether it would only lead to worse problems? Sanctions or engagement? How could anyone know which approach would work? Who could guarantee it? And if it failed, who suffered the consequences? Who took responsibility? Would anyone be around to care?"
"Sympathy wasn't enough. You had to be that person and know that person's life and hopes as your own."
"She was stronger than that. It wasn't a failure. She simply had not come out of the jungle yet. She needed perspective. She needed to revise her life before she could revise her book."
There surely are more things one could learn from reading the book. Indeed, it was a great journey to self-discovery. Until now, I couldn't decipher how one would save a fish from drowning. I could be that fish. Who knows?
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