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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
Lane: Your mother suffered at the end of her life from Alzheimer's disease. At her death you learned, from your half-sisters, your mother's real name (she had been called Daisy ) as well as your grandmother's real name, which you never had known before. What is the power in a name?Tan: The name. I felt it at the moment I heard it. Her name was Bingzi, and I never knew this had been her real name. The name was the one that her mother chose for her when she first came into the world. The name is your first gift. And your name is also often what's left; it's the name on a tombstone or the name in the obituary. And nobody else, after a while, knows anything about you except that name. It's your toehold on the world, it's symbolic in all the ways you can think of, when you think about what it means to be someone who lived on earth. We are all here for a certain amount of time and we all have these questions about mortality as well as immortality, what is the possibility of immortality, and for a lot of people it is simply to be remembered. So the name was very important, to finally learn what her given name had been. I was overjoyed and it was so relevant that I learned this on the very last day of her life.
Lane: When you found out that your books had made it onto the approved multicultural list for the state of California, you reportedly were not very happy about that. Why?
Tan: For one thing, every time you think of required reading you think of all the books you hated to read. You also think that all the books were by people who were dead. I found out, from people who told me why they had selected my books, that you had to pass certain criteria that made it educationally worthwhile. In other words, there was this certain criteria and they would exclude other books that they thought were similar but somehow didn't measure up to some educational, sociological value. That went against everything that I thought I was doing with my books. I didn't want to have them be educational or sociological, I just wanted people to immerse themselves in an imaginary world and be seduced by the characters and become them and experience those emotions. So it was very disheartening for me.
At the same time, I didn't feel that one should choose one book over another simply based on this kind of ethnic comparison. All the other books by Asian Americans are all different voices. There was also people saying, Amy Tan has helped to bash down the barriers for other Asian-American writers and for writers of color. And I felt, It's a nice thought and I thank them for giving me credit for that, but I was sitting in my room in pajamas just doing a very self indulgent thing. I wasn't thinking about bashing down doors for anyone. I'm happy to help support people in any way and if I've done something actively, then I'll take credit for it. But I hadn't, when I was writing that book, honestly.
Lane: That's interesting, because you are implying, too, that there was sort of a political correctness in that decision to include you – or there was a perception that there was something politically correct about your work.
Tan: That's right, and I often am afraid of required reading leaning too much toward deciding what in literature is politically correct. That is the first step, to me, of a kind of literary fascism, where you can only have certain things depicted, especially things that have to be positive or enhancing of a culture. I've had, by the same token, people criticize me for including images of spitting in China, as though we don't want to include those kind of backward images. You have to say, "Are you saying that nobody ever spit in China?"
"No, but we shouldn't do that."
You'd have people deciding what is appropriate, especially for literature they called "ethnic literature."
Lane: What comes to my mind is Alice Walker and all the heat she took for her depictions of African-American men. And people were very angry because only positive portrayals of African-American men were considered acceptable.
Tan: It's happened to many people who are not of the traditional mainstream. It happens a lot to gay writers. Gay writers have a mandate to write about sex in a certain way, to always mention AIDS in a certain context. The same is true for any writer who even talks about anything from a different cultural group. You have this pressure, and what you also get are splinter groups. One group may say, "That's great, you had the mothers speaking the broken English like your mother did." Other people rail against that and say, "No, you should have people using the full muscular power of the English language and showing that they really are very intelligent people." I want to say, "Wait a minute. Are you saying that people who speak broken English are not showing their intelligence? I think that is your intelligence not picking up that people are saying very valuable things." This is the mistake I made when I was growing up, thinking my mother had nothing useful to say because her English wasn't perfect. For that reason, very deliberately, I want to include that English. I want somebody falling in love with a character who does not speak well and saying, I really like this person and what she has to say.
Lane: You write how you thought that your mother didn't get along with people because she was hard to understand – and then you went to China with your mother and she still didn't get along with people.
Tan: It was worse than that; she got into more fights. That's when I realized that English had only been holding her back.
Lane: You mentioned loving the solitary nature of linguistics and then a little later you talked about sitting in your pajamas in your room writing. But you also were involved in a very collaborative process when you co-wrote the screenplay for The Joy Luck Club, and it seems like you had a great time doing it.
Tan: I did, much to my surprise. I'm very solitary in my work habits. But I found two really wonderful people; we just clicked in our work modes. One was Wayne Wang, the director, who is completely respectful of writers and understands ways to do things at a very subtle level; he's got a very gentle hand. The other is a screenwriter named Ron Bass; at the time I met him he had recently won an Oscar for Rain Man. He's one of the busiest screenwriters in the business and he knew this book, it seemed to me, better than I did. He had outlined the whole thing, scene-by-scene-by-scene, minute-by-minute. I found that he would become a great teacher for me in this art called screenwriting, and he was willing to do it. He broke everything down so that basically all I had to do was take these pieces and put it into the format and then fax it to him, have him comment on those ten pages, then I would rewrite, and together we would rewrite everything over and over again. We worked very quickly. This is what I also loved about working with Ron; there was no throw the spaghetti noodle on the wall and see if it sticks. He was ready to just go in there and do it.
Lane: Have you toyed with a script since then of one of your other books?
Tan: We've talked about doing a movie together. In fact, we had a contract to do a second movie, and I feel very guilty about this. Because with movies, a great deal of the movie is made not in Hollywood, so to speak, it's made in lawyers' offices. You spend six months hashing out the tiniest details and eventually, if you've made it, you have a contract and then you get the green light. The studio's happy, everybody is happy, and you are ready to go.
I had let this thing go for six months thinking, Surely it's going to fall apart, because we asked for what was impossible. We asked for all the penalties to be lifted off of Wayne for going a very small amount over budget (because if it rained, acts of God, he was getting fined for this); total creative control from start to finish; final edit; marketing decisions – everything. Nobody gets that, and we got all of it, and they said, "We are ready to start." I realized then, I had to say, "I don't want to get married again." I felt terrible. But I am a fiction writer, not a screenwriter.
Lane: But you are also in a rock 'n' roll band. You mentioned your early life, going to church every day and doing everything that was expected of you. Summers you'd go to the library, and a vacation wasn't really a concept that your family bought into or exercised, so this whole idea of being a dominatrix singing "These Boots are Made for Walking," was kind of fun.
Tan: Well, at first it was horror. It wasn't my idea, you have to realize. In fact, the blame for that goes squarely to Kathi Kamen Goldmark, who came up with this harebrained idea. She used to be a media escort for writers who came in town, which meant she was the person who took everybody to their appointments and was in the car with them talking about everything in their life. A lot of them found out that she was in a band. And they said, "Oh, you're so lucky." She came up with this idea that she would put together a group of people who wanted to play a one-time-only deal at the American BookSeller Association. Surprisingly, a number of people said yes. And those who said no really regret it to this day. They come back to Kathi and they beg.
If you ever want to get into this band, you must never, ever say to Kathi, "I'm really, really good." This is not a band that is about your musical talent. This is a band that is about having fun. So everyone in this band is a lot of fun. And they don't take themselves too seriously: Dave Barry, Stephen King, Ridley Pearson, Mitch Albom, Matt Groening. We've had guest people; Al Cooper was our first musical director. We had Warren Zevon with us for a number of years, dear Warren. We played with Bruce Springsteen. He wanted to be in the band, but we said, "You know, you have to write a book first."
Lane: But Bob Dylan can be in the band now, because Bob Dylan has just written a book.
Tan: Exactly, but I think he might say to Kathi, "But I'm really good." And that's what would keep him out of the band.
This was started 12 years ago. It was only supposed to be a one-time deal, and I am completely convinced that we are going to be doing this at our assisted living centers. We are performing in about two weeks. We are going to the heartland: St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit. We've learned to do this for charity so that nobody could get too mad at us when they've paid money to hear us.
Lane: So you are going before the election to these states?
Tan: This is a charity for a wonderful organization called America Scores: non-partisan literacy programs for inner-city school kids aged 8 to 12, and it combines soccer and poetry. It's close to the election, and we happen to be in these states, and I suppose if people asked us what we felt about certain issues, we might offer an opinion or two.
Lane: Here is a very poignant audience question that refers to the work you did with disabled children and their parents: "I'm one of the parents you referred to in your comments. My daughter Shoshanna, now nearly 30, was one of the children whose life and expectations for herself were so impacted by your early work for her. What comments would you have for the kids who have grown up to face the issues of disability in a world still so limited by low expectation?"
Tan: Shoshanna herself is one of those shining examples that kids can look to. She was a kid of whom people said, "She is going to be in the profoundly disabled class and she'll never learn to speak and she'll never learn to do anything." The reason I knew she could do something was that she had a very bad temper. She was a very willful little girl, even at age 18 months. She knew what she wanted. She's done what she wanted; she's graduated from college. She is incredible. I can only say that I learned from those kids about not being aware actually of disabilities, of people's limited perceptions – you as a person need to know what motivates somebody to do something, what their strengths are, and not keep asking for the same thing that's broken. I also take great strength from that now, because I have a disability. I have found myself thrown into that world, and so it's something that makes it easier to deal with, knowing that you can call upon different strengths and you can, through a lot of self-determination, find what your strengths are and still live your life as fully as possible.
Lane: You've suffered from depression, and you've been very open about that and talked about taking medication – and shed some light on that for those that feel there is still a certain stigma attached. But, more recently, you had a horrendous period of your life where you had hallucinations and unbearable exhaustion, and found that you had contracted Lyme disease – and you had to diagnose it yourself.
Tan: I was infected in 1999 and it wasn't recognized. I was somebody who was always very healthy. I'd never even had the flu or a cold in about 15 years, and I became increasingly anxious. I thought it was psychological, it was stress. I had issues with my joints – a frozen shoulder on one side, frozen shoulder on the other side, back pain, knee pain, stiff neck. I couldn't concentrate that well. I was getting tired. Then, as you mentioned, these bizarre things: the hallucinations. It wasn't until much later, after going through many different tests, that I saw something on the Internet. Doctors hate this, because the Internet is where you catch the terminal illnesses – which is any illness that is on the terminal. But there I saw my rash and my symptoms, and I decided to go to a Lyme specialist. I didn't ultimately diagnose myself; I had a very strong hint, and I went to a wonderful doctor in San Francisco. We are very lucky that, in spite of the perception that Lyme is not here in California, we have one of the best Lyme disease specialists, Ray Stricker, who did diagnose me. He ran the appropriate tests and I was very positive and started treatment. I recovered about 90 percent.
I am so grateful to be able to think again. I was somebody who was unable to leave the house alone. I had such a terrible sense of anxiety, because I would go out and I would suddenly be lost. I wouldn't know where I was. But I have some things that will stay with me. I have neuropathy, which makes it difficult to walk. At one point I thought I would be in a wheelchair. That's the reason for the funny shoes; they are orthopedic shoes, and they do enable me to walk – and I'm determined now to walk many miles in Bhutan. I have set my goals differently these days; I can struggle through pain and limitations if I find the right motivation. I also have seizures. I can't drive. I have to be careful if I do certain things and I'm by myself, but I'm not going to let that limit me in certain ways. I just have to adapt my life in other ways. One of my adaptations has been to have a constant companion, my dog. And I have trained my dog to do certain things to help me, to not walk into streets when I'm not paying attention, or to get help from my husband or to let me know that what I see in front of me is in fact not real. The hallucinations, by the way, are seizures; they are called simple partial seizures, and they are very typical in people who have seizures. The seizures are caused by lesions in my brain that were caused by the Lyme disease. In effect, I have Lyme disease for the rest of my life because it was caught late.
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