Deep in their bones

SAN FRANCISCO — Deep IN the womb of the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, a famous novelist is giving a world-class mezzo-soprano a piece of her mind. Dressed in loose-fitting black pants and a matching T-shirt, lots of heavy, silver jewelry and eccentric-looking orthotic sneakers, Amy Tan makes explosive, diagonal slicing movements with her arms. "My mother used to do this," says Tan, tapping into her past. "Now you try."

Charged with playing the role of the mother figure, LuLing Liu Young, in San Francisco Opera's adaptation of Tan's 2001 novel "The Bonesetter's Daughter," which will have its world premiere here Saturday, the glamorous Chinese opera singer Ning Liang nods her head. Then she removes a stiletto heel, hops lightly onto a chair in her knee-length pencil-line skirt and mimics Tan's slashing gesture while making, through clenched teeth, a noise that sounds like tearing flesh. "Szzzt!" the singer intones, swiping the air savagely with her shoe. Tan looks pleased. "You're good at crazy," she tells Ning. "I don't need to coach you."

Five years ago, when this 56-year-old, Bay Area- and New York-based author embarked on the process of transforming into an opera her book about an American-born Chinese woman's relationship with her aging immigrant mother and ghostly Chinese grandmother, little did the first-time librettist imagine that she'd be working directly with the singers. "I had no idea how opera was made," says Tan, best known for her candid excavations of mother-daughter relationships in such bestsellers as "The Joy Luck Club" (she also co-wrote Wayne Wang's 1993 film adaptation) and "The Kitchen God's Wife." "I was mystified by the process."

But because so many moments in the opera draw directly on episodes from her life, Tan has become increasingly concerned with helping the performers understand the emotional content of the scenes. "I was writing 'The Bonesetter's Daughter' at a time when my mother was losing her memory, and it's essentially a story about what needs to be remembered," she says.

Just as Tan's mother suffered from dementia in her later years, so in the opera LuLing raves about being an eyewitness to the O.J. Simpson murders. (Tan's mother similarly suffered delusions about being present at the scene of the crime.) And just as Tan's mother threatened her daughter with a knife when Tan was 16, so the opera includes a scene in which LuLing's own mother, a ghostly figure called Precious Auntie, threatens her daughter with a "dragon bone," a mysterious Chinese totem that serves as one of the narrative's main symbols of the past.