by Amy Tan
Around the time this photo was taken, during another lakeside outing, a rich man who liked to collect pretty women spotted my widowed grandmother and had one of his wives invite her to the house for a few days to play mah jong. One night he raped her, making her an outcast. My grandmother became a concubine to the rich man, and took her young daughter to live on an island near Shanghai. She left her son behind, to save his face. After she gave birth to a baby boy, the rich man’s first son, she killed herself by swallowing raw opium buried in the New Year’s rice cakes. “Don’t follow my footsteps,” she told her young daughter, who wept at her deathbed.
At my grandmother’s funeral, monks tied chains to my mother’s ankles so she would not fly away with her mother’s ghost. “I tried to take them off,” my mother told me. “I was her treasure. I was her life.” She also tried to follow her mother’s footsteps. Since that time she was a small girl, she often talked of killing herself. She never stopped feeling the urge.
My mother could never talk about the shame of being a concubine’s daughter, even with her closest friends. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said once to me. “People don’t understand. A concubine was like some kind of prostitute. My mother was a good woman, high-class. She had no choice.”
I told her I understood.
“How can you understand?” she blurted. “You did not live in China then. You do not know what it’s like to have no position in life. I was her daughter. We had no face! We belonged to nobody! This is a shame I can never push off my back.” By the end of this outburst, she was crying.
On a trip with my mother to Beijing, I learned that my uncle had found a way to push the shame off his back. He was the son my grandmother had left behind. In 1936 he joined the Communist Party—in large part, he told me, to overthrow the society that had forced his mother into concubinage. He published a story about his mother. I told him I was writing about my grandmother in a book of fiction. We agreed that my grandmother was the source of strength running through our family. My mother cried to hear this.
I look at that photo often, and it’s safe to guess that my grandmother never envisioned that she would one day have a granddaughter who lives in a house she co-owns with a husband she loves, and a dog and a cat she spoils (no children by choice, not bad luck), and that this granddaughter would have her own money, be able to shop—fifty percent off, full price, doesn’t matter, she never has to ask anyone’s permission—because she makes her own living, doing what is important to her, which is to tell stories, many of them about her grandmother, a woman who believed death was the only way to change her life.
A relative once scolded my mother, “Why do you tell your daughter these useless stories? She can’t change the past.” And my mother replied, “It can be changed. I tell her, so she can tell everyone, tell the whole world so they know what my mother suffered. That’s how it can be changed.”
I think about what my mother said. Isn’t the past what people remember—who did what, how and why? And what people remember, isn’t that mostly what they’ve already chosen to believe? For so many years, my family believed my grandmother was a victim of society, who, sadly, took her own life, no more, no less.
In my writing room, I go back into the past, to that moment when my grandmother told my mother not to follow her footsteps. My grandmother and I are walking side by side, imagining the past differently, remembering it another way. Together we come upon a tomb of memories. We open it and release what has been buried for too long—the terrible despair, the destructive rage. We hurt, we grieve, we cry. And then we see what remains: the hopes, broken to bits but still there.
I look at the photograph of my grandmother. Together we write stories of things that were and shouldn’t have been, or could have been, or might still be. We know the past can be changed. We can choose what we should believe. We can choose what we should remember. That is what frees us, this choice, frees us to hope that we can redeem these same memories for the little girl who became my mother.
• thinly disguised memoir •
Through the miracle of publishing, I have had three of my childhood fantasies fulfilled.
First of all, the six-year-old in me was astonished to find that I had been encapsulated in the humor section of Reader’s Digest. More precisely, several excerpts from my books have been used in the “Quotable Quotes” section.
You have to realize that Reader’s Digest was the only magazine to which my parents subscribed, and that was because it contained “Word Power.” This feature elevated the value of the magazine from frivolous entertainment to valuable education. With “Word Power” as our passport, our family had access to better opportunities. We could replace weak, monosyllabic words with inflated polysyllabic ones and thus rise like helium balloons above the masses.
Another method of achieving success was to submit entries to “Life in These United States” and “Laughter, the Best Medicine.” If an entry was selected, that could bring both publication and payment of fifty dollars—fame and fortune in one fell swoop. Here’s an entry I submitted, a joke my father often told after a dinner attended by many guests:
“One day, a minister came to our house for dinner. He enjoyed the wonderful dishes my wife had spent all day cooking. He said to me, ‘John, I want to thank your wife. How do I say the food is delicious?’ So I told him, ‘La-sa hau chr.’ He then went into the kitchen and told my wife, ‘La-sa hau chr.’ And she said, ‘Well, if you don’t like it, just throw it in the garbage!’ ”
I tried to explain to Reader’s Digest that La-sa hau chr meant “The garbage tastes good,” but that particular bilingual joke never made it to the “Best Medicine” section.
A second childhood fantasy was fulfilled when I made it into a “Women We Love” issue of Esquire shortly after I was first published. I had my picture taken by a Famous Photographer. This was a great achievement to the fifteen-year-old version of myself, who still inhabits a portion of my body, which in my memory of adolescence was lumpy, distorted, perhaps even bordering on disfigured. When that issue of Esquire appeared on the stands, I wanted to track down all the boys who’d been at school with me at Peterson High in Sunnyvale and show them: “See? That’s me. Bet you’re sorry now that you never asked me to dance.” Pathetic, I know.
My third and crowning fantasy-come-true was an appearance in Playboy. Years and years ago, I used to fret that my Maiden-form held no maidenly forms. I would press my palms at chest level to inflate my pectorals isometrically. I bought creams that promised to increase the bust by at least one or two inches. Nothing worked, and like those who’ve bought useless Viagra-like pills nowadays, I was too mortified to file for my money-back guarantee. So imagine my surprise when I appeared in Playboy as a dominatrix in black leather and chains.
All right, so I am only one tiny character in a cartoon of the entire band The Rock Bottom Remainders, humorously rendered along with Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Barbara Kingsolver. But through the cartoonist’s sweep of the pen, certain aspects of my persona have been generously enhanced, no surgeon’s knife necessary. At last I have a figure with eye-popping cleavage good enough for Playboy.
None of these realized fantasies has altered my life that much. When I was much younger, I thought they would. Oh, sometimes I do get recognized. Most often this happens when I am at the pharmacy to pick up the kind of prescription you would not want to announce at a family barbecue. On one occasion, I was in the waiting room of a medical specialist’s office, about to be seen for a routine but loathsome medical procedure.
“Amy Tan?” the receptionist blared. “You’re here for a sigmoidoscopy? Did you have your enema yet? Here, take this, and go in that bathroom there. . . . Say, aren’t you Amy Tan, the author? Sure you are! You wrote that movie, The Happy-Go-Lucky Club, I saw you in a magazine. Hey, everybody, say hello to Amy Tan.”
This, folks, is as good as it gets. Fame and fortune. The American Dream.
The American Dream also comes with a contract t
o write a memoir. Many people think that this is what I have written in my novels, memoirs disguised as fiction. They tell me, “I don’t blame you for divorcing your husband. I divorced mine for the same reason.” They ask after my two imaginary children. They tell me they can give me a referral to a top-notch naturopath who cures multiple sclerosis. They ask if I would like to write an article for a chess magazine, since I was, according to my stories, nearly a grand champion.
Now that I’ve written several memoirs disguised as fiction, some readers assume I may be running out of material. After all, how many times can you write your autobiography? Some of these people offer to give me their stories. They tell me they grew up in a family that was horribly afflicted with tragedy and scandal, disease and death, tears and heartbreak. A few of these strangers have also generously suggested that we split the royalties fifty-fifty. Although it’s their story, they concede that I’ll be doing most of the writing. They already know who should play them in the film version.
I remember being at a book signing in Houston where a man slipped me a scrap of paper on which he had inscribed what I at first mistook to be a Dadaist poem: “Father hanged, mother murdered, uncle shot, baby son drowned, wife insane, me, almost died twice, all horrible ways. Want to write about me? Call me. Let’s talk.”
Now, if you were traveling alone in a strange city, would you phone this man and say, “Hey, great ideas, come on over to my hotel so we can get going on them”?
Most of the offers are sincere. I know this. Most people don’t even want the fifty-fifty split. They just want me to tell their story, and they need a writer to put the words down in a way others will understand. They want people to know what they have been through. They want witnesses, because it’s lonely to go through life with your heartaches. They are people who believe that they can find some sort of redemption, if only their story is told to the world, if only they can get it off their chest.
I feel terrible that I cannot help them. The problem is, I’d never be able to borrow from a stranger’s life to create my stories. What’s my reason for writing the story in the first place, if not to masochistically examine my own life’s confusion, my own hopes and unanswered prayers? The metaphors, the sensory truths, the questions must be my own progeny—conceived, nurtured, and fussed over by me.
This is not to say I’ve been writing autobiographically, at least not in the sense that most people assume. If I write about a little girl who lives in Chinatown and plays chess, this does not mean that I did those same things.
But within that story is an emotional truth. It has to do with a mother who has helped her daughter see the world in a special way. It is a world in which the mother possesses rare magic. She can make the girl see yin when it is yang. The girl sees that her mother, who is her ally, is also her adversary. And that is an emotional memory that I do have, this sense of double jeopardy, realizing that my mother could both help me and hurt me, in the best and worst ways possible. So what I draw from is not a photographic memory, but an emotional one. When I place that memory of feeling within a fictive home, it becomes imagination. Anything can happen. The girl may shout back at her mother and tell her to go to hell. The mother may say, “I was wrong. I’m sorry.” The possibilities are endless, but one is chosen. And as I write that possibility, it becomes a part of me. It has the power to change my memory of the way things really happened.
For me, writing from memory is more about remembering my psychological place in the world at different stages of my life. Where did I fit in my family, or why didn’t I fit. It is about remembering my evolving sense of life, from thinking life was magic, to believing it was random and meaningless, to coming around to thinking it was magic all over again. My memory, then, is entirely subjective. And that, I think, is the kind of memory that is simultaneously the most unreliable and the most authentic element a writer can infuse into her work.
For as long as I can remember, I have been curious about how I remember. The earliest memory I have is of an event that took place under a tree. I was a year and a half old. And I know I was that age because of the season and the details of the yard and the house. I remember that I was sitting on the cool lawn on a hot day. Around me was a low fence and to my right was a white house with dark doorways that led to naps. My big brother and parents were above me. Suddenly something hit my head. My brother laughed. Although it did not hurt that much, I was startled and cried loudly to voice my displeasure, lest it happen again. After a while, I picked up what had fallen on my head. It filled my entire palm, a fuzzy golden ball.
“It was a peach,” I recalled to my mother.
She thought for a while, and then said that it was not a peach but an apricot, for the parish house in Fresno was the only place we had lived that had a fruit tree in the yard. And this made sense, that it was an apricot, for an apricot would have filled my eighteen-month-old hand in the way a peach would fill my adult one.
There was another time, when I was seven, that I realized that memories were elusive, that you could not will them to stay, and that some you could not will to go away. I was old enough to understand that some things were in my memory like waking morning dreams. No matter how much I tried to hang on to them, they slipped away. And when I tried to find a way to remember them, by, say, writing about them, or drawing a picture of them, the result was not even close. And the result then became the memory that replaced the real thing.
As a child, I tried to develop a number of mnemonic devices. Whenever I felt wronged or misunderstood, I would stare at my hands, the creases in my palms. I would tell myself, I will always be the same person just as I will always have these same hands. I had knowledge that my body would continue to change, although in what ways I did not know precisely. But I stared at my hands and vowed to remember this day, these same hands, and the feeling of injustice I felt in being accused of wrongdoing when it had never been my intention at all.
Looking at my palms today, I can see those splinters from my childhood. I can feel once again the slivers slipping under my skin, hear myself promise never to forget who and what had injured me. I think of those slivers as ingredients for stories. With them, I can concoct thousands of stories, not simply a single bona fide one. The stories I write concern the various beliefs I have held and lost and found at various times of my life. And having now written several books, I realize those beliefs most often have had to do with hope: hope and expectation, hope and disappointment, loss and hope, fate and hope, death and hope, luck and hope. They sprang from the questions I had as a child: How did that happen? What’s going to happen? How do I make things happen?
When I write my stories, I do not use childhood memories. I use a child’s memory. Through that child’s mind, I am too inexperienced to have assumptions. So the world is still full of magic. Anything can happen. All possibilities. I have dreams. I have fantasies.
At will, I can enter that world again.
• persona errata •
Between the time I wrote my first book and today, the Internet accomplished the equivalent of the Big Bang, and the World Wide Web expanded into the Ubiquitous Uncontrollable Universe. As a result, certain errors of fact about me began to circulate and became part of my unofficial biography now often used by students, interviewers, booksellers, and public relations staffs before I come to give talks.
At first, there were only minor mistakes, for example, that I had received my master’s degree and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, which is a fine school and one that I did attend while studying for my doctorate. But the only doctorates I have are honorary, and according to one university president who handed me a diploma, this entitles me to a free parking space in the faculty lot, though solely when I come to give a free talk. To set the record straight, I never finished my doctoral program, and my B.A. and M.A. degrees came from San Jose State University.
As the Internet became more widespread, so did the errors. They are not quite urban-legend strength, but they have definitely been magnifi
ed. I remember the day I saw announced before a live online interview that Amy Tan had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It then occurred to me that one could actually conduct several lives of different realities, even better ones, certainly with more prestigious prizes. But as the online interview began, I typed in my greeting: “Hi, Amy Tan here, only I never did win that Nobel Prize. Wish I had. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Most often I am aware of the mistakes when I am receiving other honors having to do with being Asian-American or a writer or Chinese or an alumna of one of the colleges I attended. Then I learn of all the other prizes I have supposedly won, among them the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Pulitzer. I was in fact nominated for the first two, so a little exaggeration there is understandable, but the Pulitzer reference is a fluke from the Web, and one that keeps replicating like a virus. It’s embarrassing to start my acceptance speeches with a list of errata, which then seems to show only how truly unworthy I am to be standing on the podium or festooned stage, holding an engraved plaque or crystal bowl.
Some of the mistakes are maddening, like those in a Los Angeles Times piece published in 2000, which I did not read, but which a friend felt his duty to read aloud to me for my own edification; it described me as having a big smile that displayed teeth discolored by my nicotine habit. The reporter must have looked up that old Salon interview in which I was surreptitiously smoking on my terrace and asked the reporter to please not mention this. Whatever the source, I never realized my teeth looked that bad, and if they are indeed discolored enough to be worth mentioning, I must make it known that it is not due to cigarettes. I am proud of the fact that I gave up smoking for good in 1995, and since then I have actually brushed my teeth from time to time and have gone for routine professional teeth cleaning every six months.