Bone is Fae Myenne Ng’s first novel set primarily in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The novel narrates the struggle of immigrants and their children to discover their original identity colored by American values. In other words, the conflict between traditional Chinese and American values is projected throughout the novel. It can be argued that Bone is a fantastical narrative of a Chinese family trying to rediscover and preserve their Chinese identity in a foreign land. Their situation is further intensified by the demands of American society to internalize its norms and tendencies in order to survive in this new land. Given the kind of dilemma they are facing, tragedy befalls them when the middle child named Ona commits suicide.
The framework of the story is circular and its central plot delves into the internal adventures of the Leong family. Mah, Leon, Nina, the narrator Leila and her boyfriend are stunned and petrified by Ona’s suicide and desperately try to find out the reason for her act. The novel ends close to where it began with Leila trying to find every different clue that possibly led to her daughter’s suicide. She recalls all the events before and after the heartbreaking family tragedy.
Leila manifests her Chinese-American hybrid values in her communications with her parents exclusively with her surrogate father and her dealings with Ona’s suicide. “Because [she is a]…first generation American, the process of [her] self-definition inevitably involves considerations about what it means to be both Chinese and American.” The way of understanding herself and her position within her family is demanding, since “there is no historically defined Chinese-American woman.” Kafka defines Leila’s journey of self-definition through hybrid Sino-American cultural values as one of “journeying from ‘ambiguous awareness’ to ‘self-affirmation'”.
Dealing with Ona’s suicide becomes, for Leila, a process of confrontation with her own identity. Both Liela and Ona Ona were burdened with the same demands to mix and integrate Chinese and American cultural values.
After Ona’s suicide, “Leila divides her time… between the past in Salmon Alley with Mah and the future in the Mission with Mason.” Attempts to integrate her own past and present in accordance with her Chinese and American values are not a simple or easy process for Leila, whose “identity becomes a site of struggle between her past and the her future, without a self-affirming present”.
In fact, Leila “walks into the no man’s land between what you can leave behind and what you can take with you.” Leila has to go through a present and a future that offers her the opportunity to discover her own identity, that is, being a Chinese-American woman. She never fully denounces her Chinese heritage, though she rises above her ambiguous original identity to discover an identity in which she can fully understand and accept her Chinese-American hybrid values. It can be safely said that Leila’s process of self-definition as a Chinese American is purely an act of individualism through which she allows herself to preserve her family and her Chinese values.
Leila’s act of self-definition takes place at the end of the novel through her “invention of a new language… Leila’s neologism ‘backdaire’, the novel’s last word.”
This single word that Leila’s coins symbolize the process of integration of Chinese and American values. The novel ends on a note that hints that she found a middle ground between Chinese and American values,” she states.[ing] a self that transcends split personality by resisting reduction to a single ethnic identity.
Leila’s search for self-definition arises in the context of an entire family trying to uncover Ona’s suicide. In particular, the way that Leila’s mother, Mah, and her younger sister, Nina, try to cope with Ona’s suicide, further epitomize the intricate mix of Chinese and American values that make up her family. On the one hand, Mah represents traditional Chinese values while at the same time she behaves more like an American than a Chinese.
On the other hand, Nina largely symbolizes American values with very little effort to stick to her parents’ traditional Chinese values. Evidently, “one of the themes Ng addresses in his novel is immigration” (“Fae Myenne Ng”). Mah has high hopes for his three daughters and their lives in the United States, and takes a general view of immigrants by describe their attempts to find a life in America, that is, Mah embodies “the paradox that the immigrant generation often saw the American dream in their children because their margin of survival in this country was not much better than their bleak chances.” in the old country.”
For Mah, Ona’s suicide implies not simply the loss of a daughter, but also the fact that the mother cannot arrange for her daughter a better life with promising prospects. Ona’s suicide marks the end of the American Dream and possibly nothing short of a nightmare for her surviving daughters. It certainly wasn’t the future she had envisioned for her daughters in the United States.
Mah blames herself for Ona’s suicide, as she “thinks the bad luck started with her poor choice of men: her first marriage to Lyman Fu, and especially her extramarital affair with her boss. Mah’s relationship symbolizes the rejection of Chinese values for her.” “”she rejects the terms of her role as a green card wife when she seeks self-fulfillment beyond the given parameters of that identity” (LeBlanc). That is, Ma becomes somewhat Americanized and treats her own Americanization as the result of suicide of Ona.
Mah reels with guilt stemming from her extramarital affair and the license of personal and sexual freedom she implicitly granted her daughters. Her own illicit behavior contributed both to Ona’s tumult over her relationship with Osvaldo and, ultimately, to her suicide.
Leila is not a stereotypical submissive when she shows her reaction to her father Leon’s purchase of speakers at a Goodwill store. She says, “I hate it when I get catty like this, but once I get in the mood, I can’t stop” (19). She is completely nonconformist and acts with an American sense of individualism or daring, whereas in traditional Chinese culture the role of the eldest daughter in a Chinese family would restrict her to responding submissively and shyly to her father’s actions. Shortly after, when Leila takes León to the social security office, he tells an employee: “People tell me. I never speak English well. They tell me” (56).
Leila’s little Chinese character is also shown by her mother. Talking about how Leila doesn’t hug or kiss Ona when she’s crying, Mah tells her, “Where did you learn such meanness?” (137). Mah is enforcing traditional Chinese family loyalty, while Leila has privileged her own feelings; she has learned such “meanness” or individuality growing up in America. Similarly, towards the end of the text, when Leila shares with the readers her desire to move out of the family’s neighborhood of Salmon Alley, she talks about reaching out to Mason and wanting her own life, not wanting to care about Mah or Leon or anyone else. another person. . The stereotype of the obedient and submissive daughter is denied again. Leila obviously denounces the traditional Chinese values of obedience and responsibility to fulfill her wishes.