She’s a major presence, however, among such varied traveling companions as Chinese-American matron Marlena Chu and her preadolescent daughter Esmé biologist Roxanne Scarangello and her younger husband Dwight Massey (a behavioral psychologist) a florist who produces specially bred tropical plants and his teenaged son, an ardently liberal rich girl and her sexy lover, a gay designer pressed into service as de facto tour master, and several others-the most interesting of whom is TV celebrity dog-trainer Harry Bailley (who has eyes for Marlena, and whose name slyly alludes to that earlier portrayal of motley travelers who discover one another’s unbuttoned humanity: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). Its narrator is Bibi Chen (whose relation to the story’s complex provenance is discussed in a brief prefatory note): a 60-ish California art collector/dealer and sometime travel guide, whose unexplained violent death limits her to joining the members of an American art tour “in spirit” only. Tan’s ambitious fifth novel is a ghost’s story (though not a ghost story), about an American tourist party’s ordeal in the Southeast Asian jungles of Myanmar (formerly Burma).
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