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Amy Tan
Author, The Joy Luck Club and The Opposite of Fate
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Good Lit Series Director
Amy Tan's novel The Joy Luck Club catapulted her to literary stardom, and subsequent fiction has earned her a permanent place in the Bay Area's writerly firmament. Recently Tan published her first collection of essays (and musings), The Opposite of Fate, and sat down to discuss the book, her life of writing and involvement with the film The Joy Luck Club, as well as her own battle with depression and other crippling effects of Lyme disease.Barbara Lane: While there has been a lot of tragedy in your life, The Opposite of Fate is not a tragic book. Nonetheless, you have had these enormous family and personal issues that seem to have really shaped the writer you've become.
Amy Tan: When I was growing up, I used to have a lot of questions very basic questions: Why do things happen, how do things happen, how do I make things happen? Some of these questions came about because so many strange things would happen in our lives, and they are the questions that continue for me to this day. Many of us have these underlying questions, and they come up, in particular, when we have tragedies or great joy. We meet the love of our life or we lose the love of our life and we have to ask ourselves: Why did this happen? This brings up, in my family, notions of fate, because of my mother and what she believed. But it also raises questions of faith, because of my father and what he believed. He was a Baptist minister at one time, as well as an engineer. I was the child who was caught in the middle of these two sets of beliefs, having to assess which one I should believe. My mother, it turns out, believed not just in fate but in all possibilities. She would believe in the Christian faith as well as the Buddhist faith, ancestor worship, curses, reincarnation. In fact, she used to say to me things like, "I must have known you in a prior life, because why else would you have come back to torment me so?"
So I always had this notion of these other beliefs. If I said something that she thought was an echo of somebody she knew from her childhood who was now dead, she would think that I was that person reincarnated. And she would say, "How did you know? Why did you say that word?" or, "Why did you say you didn't want to eat that particular dish?" convinced that she could just drag this truth out of me, that I was really a ghost. These were the kinds of things that propelled me to ask questions, and it has become a very important part of my fiction. People look at most of my fiction and think that what I'm writing about simply is mothers and daughters. But I'm also writing about the sets of beliefs my mother had, and the beliefs I have this balance and how it has evolved into who I am today.
Lane: How did you walk that tightrope between the Baptist faith and the Chinese fate? How did you negotiate that, and how did your parents negotiate it with each other?
Tan: My mother kept her beliefs subverted to my father's, because he was a minister and she wanted to be the appropriate wife. Here was a woman who had been married before. I never knew that. I didn't know she had three daughters from a previous marriage, let alone other children who had died in China. I didn't know that her husband had abused her, that he had had her thrown in jail for leaving him. I didn't know that my mother and father had this affair. All these different secrets were part of her coming to America and starting over again and being the wife of a minister. My mother did believe in some of the faith that my father had. She particularly believed in the possibility of miracles, when my father and my brother both came down with brain tumors. But the other things came out after my father died, and I was shocked when they came out.
For one thing, her belief in ghosts suddenly emerged. She would talk about them, would want to contact them. I thought that she had gone mad, but also: What would my father have thought? This was blasphemous to try and speak to ghosts. She would call upon me to be the receiver of the messages, because she always believed that I had this gift. She got a Ouija board and would have me sit there with my hands poised over this planchett, the little pointing device, over the letters A through Z, the numbers 1 through 9, Yes and No. My mother would say things that were very poignant. Keep in mind that I was a 15-year-old girl, very angry over what had happened to my father and my brother. This was after they died. My mother would say, "Are you there ? Do you miss me? Do you still love me?" Angry as I was, I knew the words that my mother needed to hear, so I would point the planchett to Yes. She would cry and would be so grateful to hear from them. Eventually, though, she would turn to practical questions like, "What I should invest in: IBM or U.S. Steel?" I would have to come up with answers, so I would always push it to whatever letter would give her the idea the quickest, the shortest word: IBM.
Lane: You also manipulated it for your own ends, didn't you?
Tan: Oh yeah. It was a wonderful sense of power. Finally I, who had been so controlled by my mother for so many years, controlled by her emotions, her threats to kill herself, her need to move every year, suddenly I was in control because of this supposed power I had with the spirit world.
Another time she asked the Ouija board: "Amy treat me so bad, what I should do, send her Taiwan school for bad girls?" I just pointed No.
Lane: You went to 11 schools, and after the death of your father and brother, your mother picked up stakes and moved you all to Montreux, Switzerland. Why?
Tan: The way you describe it makes it all sound very logical, planned and orderly. It wasn't that way at all. She was looking for advice on what she should do with the rest of her life, and she got it one day while she was washing dishes. She looked underneath the sink and picked up the cleanser she was using, Dutch Boy cleanser, and she said out loud there in the kitchen: "Holland ! Holland is clean. We are moving to Holland." You laugh, but she actually sold our car, sold our house, sold the furniture, stored everything else and we packed up our bags and moved to Holland. We even sailed on the SS Rotterdam to get there.
Of course my mother had no plan; she didn't know what city we would live in, where we would go to school. Again, I thought, My mother is crazy. But this time I was glad, because we were in Europe. Eventually, because she couldn't find a place to live in Holland, we ended up going to Germany and buying a VW Bug. She bought a handbook of schools and addresses and we started simply driving south. One day we got to Montreux, Switzerland, where we found a private school with two openings for day students and a room in a chalet, the newest house on the block, built in 1850. It was for rent for $100 a month. It was the classic Heidi chalet, with the half door that opens and the cuckoo clock in the foyer and the feather tick bed and the mullion windows overlooking Lake Geneva and the French Alps. One hundred dollars a month!
Lane: And it was your relationship with what she perceived to be an unsuitable boyfriend in Switzerland that precipitated the threat of murder with a meat cleaver, right?
Tan: Yes. You have to understand that my mother had this terrible relationship with her first husband, who was basically foisted on her. But she willingly went along with it. She always felt that she had made these mistakes in life because she didn't have a mother to give her good advice; her mother had killed herself. She was there to be my guiding light and I wasn't paying attention. This is a mother whose advice to me, when I was growing up, on issues having to do with sex, went like this: "Don't let a boy kiss you, because if you do you can't stop and then you'll have a baby and you'll put the baby in the garbage can and the police will come get you, put you in jail, and you might as well just kill yourself right now." That was her advice. The advice, first of all, meant that kissing was so good you wouldn't be able to stop. The only other thing I knew of that was that good at that age (I was 11 at the time) was licorice, so I knew kisses were as good as licorice.
I went from being this very innocent girl who went to church every single day to being in Switzerland and going wild. It's 1968. I am an angry teenager. I've started smoking, and now I have a boyfriend and he is an older man. He is 22 years old. His name was Franz and he was perfectly romantic, he had frizzy hair and to me he was just so handsome. He smoked constantly, Gaulois cigarettes; he had permanent stains on his teeth and his hands. His father had been a Nazi, which was not good, but he totally disavowed his father, so that was good. He was a rebel, his hero was Che Guevara. He was a college dropout, he was reckless, and best of all, he was a German army deserter. I just thought that was so wonderful. I found out later that he hadn't deserted from the regular army, he had actually escaped from the mental hospital; but it was still very, very romantic. And he didn't have a job, being a deserter. He was very industrious, however. He spent the entire day, hours and hours, in cafes, playing table foosball. It's a rectangular table with rods, and with very dexterous turns of your wrist you could get a ball into one side or the other. I sort of believed that, had there been an Olympics of table foosball, he would have won the gold medal. But they didn't have anything like that, so he was the unofficial foosball champion of Montreux, Switzerland.
Why my mother didn't like somebody like that, I just don't understand. She would yell at me and say that I was ruining my life, and she obviously thought I must have kissed him and couldn't stop. "I swear to God," I told my mother years later, when I was in my forties, "I never did anything more than kiss him." She still didn't believe me.
Lane: Didn't Franz show up in a biography of you somewhere?
Tan: I was at a bookstore once to do a reading and somebody was introducing me. I was at the back of the store and happened to glance at this wire bookshelf crammed with those yellow and black booklets. I felt guilty, because I was remembering that when I was an honors English student I had actually used these CliffsNotes to write incisive papers on Ulysses, Lord Jim and "Hamlet." So there I was, about to go out and read as a published writer, and I thought I should give apology to my fellow authors Jim Joyce, Joe Conrad and Bill Shakespeare, may they rest in peace, because all the guys that are in CliffsNotes are, of course, dead. But suddenly, I saw one that was familiar. I pulled it out and it said The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. I was horrified. The very first thing I thought (and I swear this is true): But I'm not dead yet. I opened it up and one of the first things I saw was this description of Franz. It was a biography of me, and it said that I had had a relationship with an older German man. Doesn't that sound like the guy was 55 or something? Then it said that this guy had close connections with drug dealers and organized crime. And I thought, Wow, is this possibly describing Franz's friends? I mean, he was friends with these Canadian hippies who smoked hashish, but I don't remember them being that organized about it.
This is what happens when you get published and people take bits of your life and they amplify it and make it a little more important that it actually was.
Lane: They don't only take bits of your life, but they take your work and they describe nuances and what you really meant and what a certain number or a certain image symbolizes, which apparently is quite often a surprise to you as the writer.
Tan: I always had this question when I was in high school or college: Did the writer really mean everything that was said in the CliffsNotes? In school, you are supposed to analyze symbols, themes, structure to the nth degree. You, the student, have to weed these things out and you have to ask yourself, did the writer really intend this? I found the answer when I read my own CliffsNotes. There I am reading things about all these wonderful intentions I had and all these great symbols I put in my book, and I got to one of them the phrase "invisible strength." This is a quality that I gave to a character named Waverly Jong, who is a Chinese chess champion. Her mother is so proud of her. She feels her mother is her ally and her adversary, and her mother has given her this invisible strength. According to Cliff, invisible strength referred to something like the power of foreigners and women under some kind of suppression and about three or four other things. I read that and I thought, Wow, really impressive. You read this and you think, God, she's brilliant. But I just had to chuckle to myself, because the truth of that phrase invisible strength referred to something my mother often said to me. It was a Chinese saying, and she would say it in Chinese whenever I was whining or complaining, and it meant roughly, No one wants to hear you make a big stink over nothing, so shut up. The actual word-for-word translation goes like this: "Loud farts don't smell, the really smelly ones are deadly silent." So that is what invisible strength was. Cliff did not get that at all.
Lane: Speaking of your mother's sayings that you cherish, I understand that a version of "Mother Tongue," one of the essays in this book, was used for the advanced placement SAT which totally delighted you, because reportedly you got a 400 on your English SAT.
Tan: No, I think it was 420. Nothing in that SAT would have ever predicted that I would have become somebody who made a living out of the artful arrangement of words. I was always discouraged from going into anything that had to do with verbal areas. In fact, when I was starting at the age of six, a psychologist came to the school and started doing IQ tests. I was part of a longitudinal study on inner- city kids and how they did over the years; she followed me for the next six years and administered the same test. From the age of six she told my father and mother that I had what it takes to become a doctor but that I should steer away from anything that had to do with written language other than, I guess, writing prescriptions. This pronouncement at that early age stayed with me all those years, until I was in college. If anybody asked me, "What are you going to be when you grow up?," without even thinking I said I was going to be a doctor.
The other side thing I was supposed to become was a concert pianist.
Lane: This was your mother's urging; you'd be a doctor and a brilliant concert pianist, just on the side.
Tan: Exactly. I started piano lessons when I was five and I started playing Bach at that age. A lot of people think I'm exaggerating, but this was no exaggeration. If you were to do something like take piano lessons and your parents were to sacrifice and work overtime to give you the lessons and the piano, you had to practice once a day and devote yourself and show your gratitude by doing something with it. You weren't supposed to just sit around and play honky-tonk music to have a good time. You would play in a great hall and make your parents proud.
There was a little girl on the "Ed Sullivan Show" that I hated. Her name was Ginny Tiu. I met her recently in Hawaii; she is a wonderful person. But I hated her when she was eight years old, because there she was on "Ed Sullivan" playing "March Militare" and playing it perfectly, and she just looked so pert. She was doing her song and my mother would say, "See, if you practice hard enough you could be there on Ed Sullivan Show.'"
Lane: At one point in your life, you were in academia, going for a Ph.D. in linguistics at UC Berkeley, so you did sort of enroll on that path for a while. What was it that made you leave?
Tan: I loved linguistics; I would have continued with it. But there were two things. One, I was becoming a little bit concerned that people who were leaving this program at UC Berkeley were not finding any kind of work except for perhaps part-time in a bicycle repair shop. And this was one of the best programs in the country at the time. Deborah Tannen, who wrote You Just Don't Understand, was a classmate of mine. And we've hooked up since then; she was one of the few people to finish and actually get a job.
But something terrible happened that year. As I was mulling around about what I would do with my life and feeling very lost, a friend of mine our best friend at the time, Pete, he actually was our roommate for a while was going to UC Berkeley, and he was in the computer sciences in its infancy. He wanted to create things that would benefit people who had disabilities. Here was a person who really wanted to do something useful in the world, whereas I wanted to do the equivalent of academic crossword puzzles, because I really had no idea what to do with it, except I loved the solitary study of linguistics.
Pete moved into an apartment one day and somebody must have seen him moving in. They broke into his apartment that night and they tied him up and they killed him. We had to attend to the trial for the next nine months. They did catch somebody, and it was the most amazing nine months of my life, because in that period I found the answers to so many things. Some of it came to me in the way of dreams, but it was also Pete's notion of wanting to do something good for the world.
He had once said to me, when I was flailing, "Why don't you work with some disabled kids? You know a lot about language development." I said, "I don't know anything about working with kids." Besides, I wasn't that fond of kids why would I do that? After he died, what I did was apply for a job working with disabled children. The women who interviewed me said, "You are way overqualified academically and you are way underqualified in any kind of practical knowledge of working with these children." I said thank you very much and the interview was ended. Then I heard a voice; it could have been grief, it could have been psychosis, it could have been Pete, it could have been myself, saying, Just tell her why you want the job from the bottom of your heart. I did and I got that job and for the next five years I had the most amazing lesson in humanity. Here I was, working with young children, birth to five, and their parents. These were parents who had just been told that their children had something seriously wrong with them. Imagine, you have spent years thinking of this perfect, beautiful child whom you will love and who will grow up and do all these things you've dreamed and now you have this child and your child is beautiful but something is wrong. When do you start making adjustments to that dream?
I would see these parents in the throes of their grief, and I can tell you I don't think there is anything sadder than a parent who feels so helpless because some of these children also were going to die. My job really was to be with the parents and to assess these kids in terms of language skills, but not in the way that we traditionally think of language. We think of it as verbal communication. But perhaps if it's a child who will never speak because they simply don't have the muscle ability, the cognitive ability if you touch that child there is a response. That is a kind of a communication. Emotions are all part of that. That was so much a part of the lesson that went into my becoming a writer. And that was a huge turning point for me.
Lane: You mentioned your mother's belief in ghosts. Following Pete's murder, you got some supernatural sorts of messages.
Tan: I look at that period in so many different ways. I can honestly say that there are times in your life when you can believe in the supernatural, or you can believe that it's grief, you can believe it's delusion, you can believe that it's the wishful thinking. People have that oftentimes after someone has died. But whatever it was, it was so transforming to me.
I had, for example, dreams every night after Pete died. These were dreams in which I was shown some aspect of who I was. I had a problem that I couldn't solve. A lot of it had to do with fears, lack of confidence, indecision. In these dreams Pete would say, "We are going to learn how to fly" or something. He would start flying and I would say, "You don't understand. I'm not dead I can't fly." And he said, "Oh, no, no, no you just step over here and you rent these wings for a quarter and you can fly." I said, "Oh, that's how it works." I put the wings on and I would be flying and all of a sudden I would say something like, "I can't fly; these are plastic wings," and I'd start to plummet and I knew I was going to die. Then I'd say to myself, "But I was just flying a second ago" and then I'd be flying again. Then I'd say, "But they are only 25 cents" and I'd be falling again. And then I'd say, "But I was just " and I'd be flying again.
At the moment I would realize this, in my gut, viscerally, and in my head and my heart, I would hear his voice saying, And now you see it is your beliefs that enable you to do what you can do. I knew that he wasn't saying that if I believe I can fly in real life, I can fly; it was that I had to believe in myself, and whenever I stopped believing in myself I was going to fall. It was such a potent, felt lesson that it stayed with me. Every night I would have a lesson like that, so that by the end of the nine months I had changed in my thinking, my way of looking at myself. It wasn't that I was a perfect, completely transformed human being who didn't have any fears or insecurities left, but I could see them and I could laugh at them and I knew where I had to put on the brakes and turn around and go a different direction.
Continue with Part 2 >>
