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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.

 

Edith Mirante is director of Project Maje, an information agency on human rights and the environment in Burma, and author of Down the Rat Hole: Adventures on Burma’s Frontiers (Orchid Press).