The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

by Amy Tan

  At 3:00, we were ready. We’d received lessons on how to swim in the rapids should we fall in, the dogs were in bags, our computers were in backpacks.

  Nancy and I were the ones chosen first to head for the river bank. We put on helmets and lifejackets, secured the dogs, and grabbed onto a rope to ease ourselves down the slippery slope. Below was the Zodiac raft with two more sheriffs in wetsuits. The river looked less turbulent and amazingly, the section right in front of our cabin had become, as the sheriffs told us, the most calm part of the entire river, the perfect place to put in. It was still raining, the dogs and cat were quiet. We took off.

  The rest of our journey over was like a pleasure boating trip, smooth sailing. On the other shore, four sheriffs in wetsuits were on hand, standing in the river, ready to help us out. The minute I got on shore, a man held a TV mike to me and said, “How does it feel to be rescued?” And I missed my once in a lifetime chance to say, “My hair, my face, my nails—I must look a fright!” For those of you non–Tallulah Bankhead fans, that was her line in Lifeboat when she was finally rescued after a near-death experience. The reporter and cameraman did not know, of course, that I was a writer. But he did say we were his best rescue visuals for the day, what with the dogs and cat, the raging river and mountain mudslides, plus the beefy sheriffs in their wetsuits. You couldn’t have scouted a better location for the evening news.

  The sheriffs made three more trips to get John, Jan, Lou, and then the two sheriffs who found us. As the others stepped onto wet land, the TV reporter was there, asking the same questions. At the bridge we found our dumpster had been tossed like a cardboard box, but our cars were intact. The river water was running over the bridge and the bike path. Like tourists at Niagara, we happily posed for John as he shot photos, the devastation now behind us, literally and figuratively.

  Later that evening, the TV coverage of our rescue was shown several times on CBS affiliates, and then also broadcast the next morning on NPR, or rather, they both provided coverage of “writer Amy Tan’s dramatic rescue,” leading Lou, who had twice defied death, to remark that had we died the headline would have read: “Amy Tan and four others killed by mudslide.” This morning the phone calls came from friends who had heard that I had to leave behind my computer (I didn’t), which contained my new novel (just part of it). The book editor at the LA Times heard that I had to be airlifted (rafted does have similar letters in it) and asked if I would write about that.

  Now you know how fiction is written.

  • the ghosts of my imagination •

  Who is the muse?

  I’ve answered this question in many different ways. Sometimes I give the practical answer: The muse is really the personal process by which you synthesize your life with the work before you. It’s memory added to imagination, subtracted by false starts, and multiplied by a fraction of the tons of hard work you’ve put into the mess.

  Other times I say the muse is my mother, the woman who gave me both my DNA and certain ideas about the world. Or I pay homage to my grandmother and say that it is she who inspired me to find my voice because she had lost hers so irrevocably.

  But there is another muse, one I find difficult to talk about. I cannot say who or what it is, although I can tell you what this muse feels like. This muse appears at that point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the language is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and, to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as though the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.

  For me, that spiritual-mental high would be sufficient reason for writing. And while I have experienced it with each book I’ve written, I have never been able to decipher its pattern so that I might repeat it as often as I would like. Whatever it is, I am grateful when it happens, fearful that it may not happen again.

  To illustrate, let me take you on a journey, one that traces the beginning of a story through to its epiphany, its end. The story is The Hundred Secret Senses, which has a lot to do with ghosts, in part because it often seemed to me that ghostwriters were helping me write it. I say this with trepidation, knowing that some people look upon the subject of ghosts as blarney or blasphemy. The skeptic in me can scrunch up my eyebrows and find rational and mundane explanations for everything quasi-mystical that occurred during the writing of the book. But the truth is, those answers feel so utterly lifeless to me, while the way it felt to write leaves me with a sense of wonder, joy, and gratitude, elements I need in abundance. And so, in the spirit of Henry James, let us suspend disbelief as I tell you how my life intersected with my fiction and created this particular ghost story.

  Let us begin with a sense of place. I based my fictional locale for The Hundred Secret Senses on a village in China that I had chanced upon while collaborating on the movie version of The Joy Luck Club. I had been on location in Guilin, a city renowned for its magnificent hills, caves, and waterways. One day, with the actor Russell Wong and my photographer friend Robert, I hired a driver and headed south. We had no charted destination, and took only impulse and lark as our directional guide.

  And so by chance, or maybe not, we wound up in the middle of nowhere, in this instance a hamlet of pristine scenery and stone-stacked dwellings. There were no paved roads, no electricity, no plumbing other than the water that ran through gullies and irrigation ditches, and was brought into the village through hand pumps. The two hundred or so villagers spoke their own dialect, and only the children spoke Mandarin, the mandatory language taught in their school.

  One woman, perhaps in her sixties, asked to have her photo taken with our Polaroid camera. While she surely must have seen herself daily in the cracked mirror nailed to the wall of her unlit room, she had never seen a picture of herself. She said as much. She peered with great anticipation while the film developed, but her smiling face fell into frowns and creases as she murmured what could only be the emotional equivalent of: “Is that what I really look like? I look so old. Look at my poor wrinkled face.”

  The name of the village, as I heard it from the children, was Bei Sa Po. The inhabitants seemed healthy and without evidence of the birth defects we saw in other villages, where the same walleyed facial deformities found among siblings, cousins, young aunts and uncles, along with a phlegmatic expression, suggested that close-knit families had suffered the consequences of generations of inbreeding. These children, in contrast, were bright and energetic. A group of them had built a small palace out of mud, including intricate moats, pathways, towers, and underground hiding places. Each child had his or her own troops, large, shiny black crickets, which were led forth on thin strings into battle.

  Russell, Robert, and I walked through the village and climbed into the surrounding hills. From a higher point, we could see the valley with its stream and ponds, the hills reflected in them, the cluster of stone buildings, and paths that wove irregularly around natural barriers of old clumps of trees, boulders, and turns of the stream.

  At the top of one hill, we found a ten-foot-high stone wall running the length of the ridge. It appeared to be some sort of medieval defense against invaders. Yet why would anyone have invaded such a tiny hamlet? Stepping through an archway, we found another valley, verdant and crisscrossed by stone hedges. We saw only two people tending the vast fields. We continued to walk, and reached another set of hills, and again a ridge lined with a high wall of rock. We stepped through another archway to see the valley on the other side.

  The atmosphere changed immediately, to one of foreboding. Before us were rocky ruins and mountainsides pocked with caves. The skies seemed darker, and indeed, dark clouds had appeared, although we had not noticed them in the other two valleys. The land looked as if it had never been cultivated, with terrain as uneven as an unmade bed, and mossy boulders bursting from the earth. A collapsed hut of rocks in the center of the valley seemed to have been abandoned for hundreds of years. This was a wild place.

/>   Russell and Robert wanted to dash down and take photos. But I begged them not to. I said I had the distinct sense that we had trespassed into a forbidden realm and that something terrible had happened in the very spot where we were standing. Words had an inhibiting effect. I emphasized the unknown consequences of trespassing. I reminded them of a news story we had read recently: A couple of tourists had been killed by bandits in a remote area of China. We turned back and twenty minutes later arrived at Bei Sa Po, just as it began to rain. When our car rumbled down the dirt road heading for Guilin, schoolchildren gathered along the side of the road and cried out to us in English: “Hello, good-bye! One-two-three, A-B-C!”

  On the drive to Guilin, I was thinking that I had to use this setting in my next book. And a year or so later, when it did indeed surface as the fictional village in The Hundred Secret Senses, I further borrowed from the events of that day by casting the narrator as half Chinese, like the actor Russell Wong, and a photographer, like my friend Robert.

  Sometime later, I was enjoying a fine meal with family at a Hakka restaurant in San Francisco, and I decided aloud that the fictional villagers should be of Hakka ethnicity so I could, of course, deduct the meal as research. But then my sister Lijun said from across the table: “Hakka people do not live in that part of China.” She had lived in Guilin for ten years, and so she knew for a fact that no Hakka people lived inland. They were fishermen, not farmers. (Remember this detail: No Hakka people live inland, and certainly not in the remote mountains south of Guilin.)

  I put aside this clash between fact and fiction and went heli-skiing for a week on glaciers in Canada. On the last of the seven days, and in the last hour, I did an impressive three-revolution forward cartwheel without intending to. My skis never released, but the top of my tibia did. It broke off and lodged under my kneecap, severing my nerves at the same time, so that mercifully I suffered little pain and did not even know I had sustained a serious fracture. The helicopter flew me back to the lodge in the wink of an eye, and because ninety-nine percent of all heli-skiers seem to be sports medicine physicians and other jock docs on holiday, I found myself surrounded by a retinue of the medical profession’s finest.

  One of these was Eric, an anesthesiologist, who routinely logged a million vertical feet of heli-skiing every year. My husband and I became friends with him; over the next three months Lou and I saw him at Squaw Valley and in southern California, and we often swapped horror stories of skiing accidents and avalanches. Eric had witnessed a mountain helicopter crash for whose victims he performed triage; four of them died. He had seen avalanches, and he described the sound, the stiff crack as the thick layer of congealed ice and snow separates from its upper half, the train rumble as the slab begins its descent, and then the crash as it achieves the speed of an ice-skating rink tilted sideways into freefall.

  I had often imagined what an avalanche might be like, I told Eric. A close friend of ours, Steve, had been in one during an outing to which we had been invited but had been unable to go. Eric was like Steve in many ways. Steve was nicknamed “Jock Doc” because he was a sportsman first and a physician second. He was the ultimate risk-taker, a guy who scuba-dived among sharks and windsurfed in the crushing waves of Maui. And while he often tended to victims of horrendous accidents, curiously, he was afraid of death. One warm spring day, while cross-country skiing in an out-of-bounds area with his wife of nine months watching from above, he triggered an avalanche. A beacon for being located in case of such disaster was in his backpack. It was not turned on.

  Steve had done everything right, another friend told me. He tried to swim through the avalanche, pushing himself up in the leaden ice floe with a butterfly stroke to gain his way to the top. When he was tumbled down, he managed to cup his hands in front of his face and push the snow away from his nose, doing this within the second before the snow congealed into the consistency of concrete, trapping him.

  The medics who arrived at the scene knew Jock Doc personally. He was a friend, and they knew he had the aerobic fitness of a marathon runner. He had made the air pocket—this they knew because they found him with his hands clasped as if in prayer before his face. Most people, they said, would have lasted ten or fifteen minutes tops. Jock Doc, they guessed, had lasted at least forty-five.

  I told Eric that all these years Steve had been gone, I could not stop wondering what he had been hoping, praying, believing during those forty-five minutes.

  Eric said that he himself was afraid not so much of the pain of death’s sword as of life’s ledger. In his mind, the sum total of his experiences had not changed the world one iota. He was an anesthesiologist who worked for plastic surgeons, on elective-surgery cases where the money came from those who had the discretionary income to buy a better face. He was about to turn forty, and he saw himself as one more rubber raft floating in the doldrums; when he was gone, there would be another rubber raft to take his place. I asked him what it would take to prove that his life meant something—a medical discovery, charitable work, children? It’s not too late, I said. You can still choose to do things differently. Eric underscored the false simplicity of my words: “It’s not that simple,” he said.

  I thought about Eric’s spiritual malaise, a common unease that plagues many from time to time, the longing to be special, the fear that one is not. I’ve had the sense that what I do is ultimately meaningless in the larger context of humanity and its pain and suffering. And because I often include in my writing what I feel at the moment, I decided to give my story’s narrator, Olivia, the same unease. Further into the story, I wrote a scene in which an avalanche kills Olivia’s imagined nemesis, a character on whom I bestowed the last name of my friend Steve. As to how I chose this character’s first name, that is another story, another detour.

  Summer arrived, and in July, I tottered off with my surgically repaired leg to Yaddo, a writers’ retreat in upstate New York. Two weeks into my retreat, I took a weekend off to visit my editor, Faith Sale, at her country house in Cold Spring, a few counties away. Poking about her shelves, I spotted her Cornell yearbook, and decided to search for the face of Nabokov, one of my favorite writers. Faith had told me that he had taught at Cornell when she was a student. I plopped open the book on the kitchen table, where Faith sat doing the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. As I scanned the photos of young men and women with their 1950s hairdos, one image stopped my heart. It was that of a young woman whose steady gaze made her appear both defiant and frightened.

  “My God, this one looks haunted,” I said, “as if she’s seen all the tragedies of the world.”

  “Who?” Faith asked.

  I read the name aloud, and Faith gasped. “Ilse was my dearest, best friend in college.” That afternoon I learned she had been brilliant and intense, both comic and serious. Ilse was born in Poland, and when she was five, her father threw her into the arms of friends before a train took the rest of the family away to Auschwitz. Ilse went to live with a Catholic family. She had to hide the fact that she spoke Yiddish as she prayed to Jesus on a cross. After the war, she was sent to the United States. Shortly after she graduated from Cornell in 1958, she checked into a hotel, signed the register claiming that she lived on a street named Tod—German for “death”—then killed herself.

  I was so taken with Ilse’s story that I told Faith I was going to revise the chapter I was working on. I wanted to add this back story. By coincidence, I had named my character Elza, which sounds close to Ilse. I proposed to change it to Ilse.

  “Keep it,” my editor said. Elza was Ilse’s name in Poland, before she changed it to something she thought sounded less Jewish.

  When I returned to Yaddo, everything seemed awash with references to the Holocaust. The CD music that a novelist lent me turned out to be a symphony written by a Polish Jew, who had dedicated it to the survivors of Auschwitz. One day I received a care package of dried fruit from a Jewish friend who said she was on her way to Poland to visit the village where many of her family’s relative
s had been slaughtered. Two nights later, I met a composer who was writing an opera about the San Francisco gay activist Harvey Milk, and he told me how the libretto was progressing. “The producers,” he said, “think the librettist and I are placing too much emphasis on Harvey’s upbringing as the child of Holocaust survivors.”

  When I returned home from Yaddo, I joined some friends for dinner at a poet’s house. I learned that she also taught Holocaust literature, and that she, like my editor and Elza/Ilse, had graduated from the same university, Cornell, and in the same year.

  Details like these, and many others, turned up with the persistence of a polished public-relations campaign directed by Jewish ghosts. With that kind of pressure, how could I not cast a few imaginary parts in the novel for my new imaginary friends?

  I found these links between fluke and fiction to be meaningful, both a code and a carrot on a stick to make me go forward. It occurred to me that I should include tributes to other people, living and dead, as a way to thank them for being part of my life. I got so carried away that I even put in the names of my first pets, turtles named Slowpoke and Fastpoke. They died at the hands of my three-year-old little brother, who wanted to see what turtles looked like with their jackets off.

  Later, while working on the Elza portion of the novel, I realized I had not yet thanked my friend Eric for his contributions, that is, his descriptions of avalanches, his discussions with me about midlife malaise. I opened the computer file that held the acknowledgments page and added his name. A week later, I received a telephone call from his brother, who told me the devastating news that on the morning of March 22, while he was heading to go skiing at Mammoth, Eric’s private plane had encountered a heavy snowstorm and crashed into the side of a mountain. A few days later, as I prepared to write my contribution to his eulogy, I remembered the acknowledgments page. When had I entered Eric’s name there? I opened the computer file and saw the date: March 22. That was also the birthday of Pete, a best friend and roommate of Lou’s and mine, who was murdered in 1976, and the publication date of my first book, in 1989. (When I related this to my writers’ group, one member said: “You know what this means, don’t you? It’s dangerous to be your friend!”)