The Fragility of Memory: Alzheimer’s and Narrative Reconstruction

Introduction: Memory, Identity, and the Erosion of Self

Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) is a profound meditation on the fragility of memory, the inheritance of trauma, and the power of storytelling as a means of reconstructing identity. At its emotional core lies the depiction of LuLing Young’s gradual decline into Alzheimer’s disease — a condition that transforms memory from a source of continuity into a symbol of loss and disintegration. Through the dual narrative structure of the novel, which intertwines the perspectives of LuLing and her daughter Ruth, Tan explores how the erosion of memory destabilizes personal and cultural identity, and how writing functions as an act of preservation against oblivion.

Alzheimer’s, in Tan’s narrative, is not only a medical condition but also a metaphor for the broader processes of forgetting that haunt individuals, families, and diasporic cultures. As LuLing loses her grip on language and memory, her daughter is forced to become both caretaker and translator — not only of words but of the fragmented history that defines their lineage. In this way, The Bonesetter’s Daughter becomes a story about how memory, even in its decay, demands reconstruction through narrative. It suggests that storytelling itself is an act of resistance against the dissolution of identity and history.

The Disintegration of Language: Alzheimer’s and the Loss of Voice

Language in The Bonesetter’s Daughter functions as the primary marker of selfhood and coherence. For LuLing, who immigrates from China to the United States, language has always been precarious: her Chinese roots and fractured English define her as an outsider in both linguistic and cultural terms. When Alzheimer’s begins to erode her mental faculties, this already unstable linguistic identity collapses further. Words — her last means of maintaining a coherent sense of self — slip away from her, leaving behind fragments of speech, disjointed memories, and incoherent repetitions.

Tan portrays this linguistic disintegration with painful intimacy. LuLing’s speech becomes increasingly confused, her once vivid recollections reduced to incoherent phrases or misplaced emotions. The decline of language mirrors the decline of memory: as words vanish, so too do the connections between the past and the present. For LuLing, this is not only a personal tragedy but also a cultural one. Her voice, once a vessel for ancestral stories and moral lessons, is silenced by disease, severing the link between generations.

This loss of linguistic coherence is deeply symbolic. In Tan’s work, language is never a neutral medium; it is the foundation of identity, culture, and emotional connection. When Alzheimer’s destroys LuLing’s ability to speak meaningfully, it enacts a second kind of exile — one that occurs within the mind itself. She becomes a stranger not only in a foreign land but within her own consciousness. Her broken sentences and forgotten names are the textual symptoms of a mind dissolving into silence.

Ruth, in turn, is confronted with the impossibility of communication. As her mother’s language deteriorates, she becomes the interpreter of a vanishing world. Yet paradoxically, it is through this loss that Ruth begins to understand the urgency of preserving her mother’s story. The deterioration of language becomes the catalyst for storytelling — a call to reconstruct, through narrative, what illness threatens to erase.

Memory as Inheritance and Disappearance

Memory in The Bonesetter’s Daughter is both inherited and endangered. It carries the weight of family trauma, historical dislocation, and personal grief. LuLing’s memories — of her mother Precious Auntie, of wartime China, and of her own guilt — form the psychological architecture of the novel. Yet these memories are unstable: distorted by time, fragmented by repression, and finally obliterated by disease. Alzheimer’s, in this sense, externalizes the fragility of all human recollection. It exposes memory as both essential to identity and terrifyingly transient.

The novel’s structure reinforces this theme. Tan interweaves two narrative voices: Ruth’s contemporary life in California and LuLing’s memoirs, written in Chinese decades earlier. As LuLing’s mental faculties fade, her written story becomes her only coherent legacy. The memoir operates as a safeguard against the total erasure of self — a textual extension of memory that survives even when the mind that created it does not. Ruth’s act of translating this memoir is thus not merely filial duty but a ritual of remembrance and restoration.

The tension between inherited memory and individual forgetting mirrors the intergenerational dynamics of trauma. Ruth inherits not only her mother’s stories but also her silences, fears, and unresolved guilt. In this sense, the novel illustrates the psychological phenomenon of transgenerational trauma: the idea that emotional pain and memory can be unconsciously transmitted from one generation to the next. Alzheimer’s complicates this inheritance. As LuLing forgets, Ruth must remember for both of them. The disease forces the daughter to become the custodian of the family’s collective memory — to reconstruct, from fragments, a coherent narrative of their shared past.

Table 1. The Transmission and Erosion of Memory in The Bonesetter’s Daughter

The table illustrates how memory moves through generations, alternately preserved and endangered, culminating in Ruth’s reconstruction of the family’s fragmented identity.

Writing as Reconstruction: The Memoir as a Site of Healing

The act of writing — particularly LuLing’s memoir — lies at the heart of Tan’s exploration of Alzheimer’s and narrative reconstruction. Faced with the inevitable loss of memory, LuLing turns to writing as a form of preservation. Her memoir is both confession and reclamation: an attempt to fix in words what she fears will be lost to time and disease. In doing so, she transforms writing into an act of defiance against the silence imposed by illness.

Through this written narrative, Tan examines how the written word can serve as a prosthetic memory — a substitute for the biological processes of recollection. Writing externalizes the internal, making memory tangible and transmissible. For LuLing, who feels her identity slipping away, the act of writing offers a final assertion of control. It allows her to define her own story before the disease defines her through absence.

Ruth’s later translation of this memoir extends the process of reconstruction. By engaging with her mother’s words, she not only preserves LuLing’s life but also reconstructs her own fractured understanding of their relationship. Translation becomes a metaphor for healing: it bridges the gap between the living and the fading, between the unspoken and the articulated. Ruth’s emotional evolution — from frustration and resentment to empathy and acceptance — parallels her linguistic journey from incomprehension to understanding.

In this sense, The Bonesetter’s Daughter participates in a broader literary tradition that links memory, illness, and writing. Alzheimer’s becomes the catalyst for storytelling — a force that compels characters to record, interpret, and reconstruct. Writing transforms decay into creation, absence into presence. Even as LuLing’s mind deteriorates, her words endure, anchoring her identity within the narrative Ruth continues to tell.

Alzheimer’s as Metaphor: Forgetting, Migration, and Cultural Displacement

Beyond its psychological and familial dimensions, Alzheimer’s functions as a metaphor for cultural amnesia. Tan’s depiction of memory loss resonates deeply with the experience of migration, where displacement from one’s homeland often results in the erosion of cultural memory. LuLing’s Alzheimer’s thus mirrors the collective forgetting experienced by diasporic communities — the gradual fading of ancestral languages, customs, and histories under the pressures of assimilation.

For Ruth, who straddles two cultural worlds, her mother’s disease represents the collapse of a living link to her heritage. As LuLing forgets names, places, and traditions, Ruth witnesses the literal disappearance of her family’s cultural identity. Her mother’s fading mind becomes a metaphorical map of a culture erased by migration and modernity. In translating her mother’s memoir, Ruth is not only rescuing a personal history but also reconstructing a lost cultural narrative — one that binds the Chinese and American elements of her identity.

Tan’s portrayal of Alzheimer’s also challenges Western medical perspectives that treat the disease purely as degeneration. Instead, she infuses it with philosophical and emotional meaning. Forgetting, while tragic, also opens the possibility of renewal. As LuLing forgets, Ruth learns to remember differently — not as an archivist of facts, but as an interpreter of meaning. Memory, the novel suggests, is not simply about accuracy but about continuity: the persistence of connection even in the face of loss.

In this way, Alzheimer’s becomes a paradoxical teacher. It dismantles the illusion of permanence, forcing both mother and daughter to confront the impermanence of identity, culture, and time. Yet within this dissolution emerges a new form of understanding — one grounded not in factual memory, but in emotional truth and narrative reconstruction. The disease, while erasing, also reveals: it exposes the fragility of human identity and the resilience of storytelling as a mode of survival.

Conclusion: Memory, Loss, and the Persistence of Narrative

The Bonesetter’s Daughter transforms Alzheimer’s from a story of decline into a meditation on the endurance of narrative. Through the intertwined experiences of LuLing and Ruth, Amy Tan reveals that memory, even in its fragility, can be reconstructed through the act of storytelling. The novel portrays memory not as a static repository of facts but as a dynamic process of reinterpretation — one that persists even when the biological machinery of recollection fails.

Alzheimer’s, in Tan’s hands, becomes both tragedy and revelation. It dismantles the coherent self but also exposes the deep interdependence between memory, language, and identity. As LuLing’s voice fades, Ruth’s emerges; as one mind forgets, another remembers. This cyclical process transforms loss into continuity, silence into story. Through translation, writing, and empathy, Ruth transforms her mother’s fragmented memories into a narrative that reaffirms their shared humanity.

In a broader sense, The Bonesetter’s Daughter suggests that all human memory is precarious — susceptible to distortion, decay, and erasure. Yet it also insists that meaning can be rebuilt through the creative power of narrative. The novel’s structure, shifting between first-person memoir and third-person reflection, embodies this reconstruction: a dialogue between forgetting and remembering, between the written and the remembered, between the individual and the collective.

Ultimately, the novel offers a vision of healing that transcends the boundaries of illness and time. Memory may falter, but storytelling endures. Even as LuLing’s mind is consumed by Alzheimer’s, her words — written, translated, and retold — preserve her essence. Through Ruth’s act of narrative reconstruction, the novel enacts its own resistance to forgetting. It becomes a living archive, not of perfect memory, but of imperfect love — a testament to the enduring power of language to remember when the mind can no longer do so.