How should Ruth cope with her mother’s progressive dementia and with her own complex set of insecurities? Ever since she
had been a little girl Ruth had parented her
mother, translated her Mandarin, and resisted her mother’s attempts to instill in her an ancient Chinese world view. Even Ruth’s Mandarin was marred by an American accent and Ruth had been unable to read her mother’s memoirs because they were written in exquisite but indecipherable Chinese calligraphy. Dreams in which ancestral
ghosts take the starring roles so that they can manipulate the decisions of the living people by means of threats and curses didn’t make sense to the first generation American daughter even though she had frequently been the sand-writing oracle of her mother’s own ghost, Precious Auntie. They didn’t make sense until she read her mother’s translated story. Slowly Ruth could unravel the knots of fear and pain that had hidden the truth and damaged the relationships between three generations of women. Finally she was free to examine her own heart and to choose to open it to her lover. Amy Tan's book is set in California at the end of the story but she successfully manages to push the reader through the emotional upheavals of murder, suicide, war, greed, love and hatred by her clever use of flashbacks in the form of the written memoirs of the women who had been unable to speak for themselves. The author juxtaposes the story of the old world and its ghosts with the conflicts created for Ruth by her American lover and his daughters. As Ruth learns the truth of the past, she is able to find and accept who she is now. Tan leaves the reader without a clear resolution but with the distinct feeling that the ghosts will stop their intrusions and that Ruth, who is a 'ghost-writer' by trade, will, indeed, find her own voice in the present.