“That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies, but in small secrets” (Tan 157). In Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Ruth Luyi Young lives by keeping secrets from others, starting from her own mother, LuLing, to her longtime boyfriend, Art. Ruth is mentally pressured to be secretive with her loved ones to avoid conflict. However, this actually causes her to be distant from them, disintegrating the trust in her relationships. Her miscommunication of feelings led to secrecy and loss of trust. She does so by keeping personal thoughts to herself, writing secrets in her diary, and ignoring her problems with Art.
Throughout her life, Ruth is always picked on by LuLing. LuLing often points out Ruth’s flaws and never congratulates
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Ruth was starting to feel that Art wasn’t appreciating her enough while Art tells Ruth that she never accepts help offers from anyone and makes her life harder than it is. When she has countless amounts of errands to run, she never asks for anyone’s help. She always depends on herself, spending more time for work than her love life. She wondered whether Art still loved her or not, but she did not this this situation seriously, as “she wasn’t the type of to get into conflict over things that were ultimately not that important” (Tan 49). She never discussed her struggles to maintain everything by herself to Art. In fact, she could never properly explain her love for him, which causes Art to believe that she’s avoiding him. “In all these years we’ve been together”...”I don’t think I know an important part of you. You keep secrets inside of you. You hide”…“Why do you keep pushing me away?” (Tan 388). The main reason why she has a hard time doing this is because she never showed love to anyone directly with anyone in the first place. It was impossible for Ruth to tell Art that she loved him when she could barely say the same thing to her mother. Though Ruth does not believe that discussing such matters with Art is critical, it is actually separating them