A touch of Alice in Wonderland pervades this surreal journey through the horrors of military-ruled Burma

Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan. Putnam, New York, 2005. P472

Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club, The Bonesetter’s Daughter) has written a seemingly light comic novel with real political weight. Saving Fish from Drowning (a title that comes from a Buddhist self-justification for eating fish) might not be to everyone’s taste, but those who stick with it will find the author’s good intentions shining through.

The tour group has been a narrative inspiration dating back to Canterbury Tales and Journey to the West. Tan uses the misadventures of a fictional group of travelers as her framework for revealing Burma’s real-life agony. It all begins with a ghostly narrator—appropriate for Burma, the land of multicolored ghosts. Bibi Chen, a recently deceased San Francisco art dealer, comments on the progress of the China-Burma tour she had been meant to lead, with post-mortem omniscience and scathing wit.

The travelers are a m?lange of well-off “been there, done that” types from America, the kind of art-focused museum-tour globetrotters who consume culture without savoring (or understanding) it. They start off in China’s Yunnan Province, inadvertently desecrating a local shrine and provoking an elaborate curse which sets in motion their abnormal/paranormal experiences across the border in Burma.

The tourists’ glossy obliviousness to their surroundings and each other is a major theme throughout Saving Fish. “People can be so mean and not even know it,” observes the tour’s youngest member, a sulky teenager named Esme, and that is pretty much how these solipsistic pilgrims act, even the inexperienced, undercover human rights activist among them. They are vaguely aware of a tourism boycott of Burma but decide that it doesn’t apply to people like them.

Bibi Chen explains. “In Burma, despite the sad reports, it is still quite possible to enjoy what is just in the right hand: the art, first and foremost, the festivals and tribal clothing, the charming religiosity of taking your shoes off before stepping into a temple. That’s what we visitors love, a rustic romanticism and antiquated prettiness...”

The travelers are blind to Burma’s dark side until it is literally thrust in front of them in the form of limbless human minesweepers. That happens when the group is captured by a delusional clan of ethnic Karen who believe that a card-trick-playing boy on the tour is the “Younger White Brother” come to rescue them from persecution by Burma’s military.

Yes, the Karen characters have their problems with reality too. Only the Chinese-American ghost narrator knows all and tells all. Tan’s characters in the book tend toward caricature (a lecherous British dog trainer, cheroot- smoking twin child deities called Loot and Bootie, and a hotelier who propitiates “the Nat in the liquor cabinet”). The effect is often a mixture of Beyond Rangoon and the old American sitcom Gilligan’s Island.

It may seem offensive to some that Tan chose to portray a real country and its real problems in such a frivolous way. But halfway through, during the rather hospitable Karen hostage-taking scene, Tan starts to drive home her political points.  A Karen grandmother’s account of the abuse endured by her forest clan reads like an amalgam of various human rights group reports. An American public relations consultant hired by the regime comes up with the slogan “The New Burma is Myanmar” to promote tourism for the generals’ profit. And so reality intrudes on the novel just as it penetrates the tourists’ comfortable bubble.

One can resent Tan for wrapping Burma’s pain in a silly pop-culture package, but if she had concocted a fictional country for her travelers’ tale, there would be hundreds of thousands fewer devoted Tan fans who would know about what actually goes on in “the New Burma.” Tan deserves some praise for bringing Burma’s truth to her immense audience, and for seeing past the colonial romance of (in Bibi Chen’s words) “Victorian parasols, stern pith helmets, and fever dreams of sex with the natives.” If nothing else, Saving Fish from Drowning should make some of the art-and-culture tourists who continue to patronize Burma have second thoughts about their choice of destination.