The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

by Amy Tan

  Lest it seem that my method of writing relies entirely on the demise of friends and pets, let me confirm that I in fact do scholarly research as well. The precise method involves pulling a scholarly text from my shelf, letting it fall open, then examining the pages that face up. I used this very technique to select a period of Chinese history in which to set my character Olivia’s imagined past life. The choice came to me on a day when I was sitting gloomily at my desk. I was stuck, unable to proceed until I figured out what details to put in my fictional village, the one based on the hamlet I had stumbled upon during the filming of the movie in China. I wanted to keep the setting, but I needed a historic period and details that made sense for that region. I had to decide who these people were, what their ethnicity was, and thus, what they did, what they ate, the various minutiae and unusual but verifiable tidbits a novelist must provide for the story to come to life.

  I have a number of Chinese history books on the shelf next to my desk. The one I pulled out was nice and thick, The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence. The page where my thumb inserted itself concerned the Taiping Rebellion. I read on: The Taiping Rebellion started in Thistle Mountain, just south of Guilin. Well, well, well. This was quite convenient—the same location as my fictional village.

  I continued reading: The Taiping Rebellion was led by a man who believed he was the second son of God, baby brother to Jesus. Interesting—a Chinese Christian, like my father. This man, Hong, was a Hakka who first rallied support from the Hakkas who lived in Thistle Mountain. Hakkas! Hadn’t my sister told me no Hakkas lived inland? What an amazing coincidence—the very details I wanted, that corresponded with my setting.

  Now that my fictional village was confidently inhabited by Hakkas, I needed to give it a suitable name. I remembered the landscape of the third valley, the one riddled with caves. I imagined the wind whistling through these caves at night, making the sound of singing ghosts. My morbid imagination, the one gleaned from a childhood of terrors, hypothesized that the caves were the gateway to death. With this image in mind, I pulled down from my shelf a pinyin–English dictionary, the sort of book used by those illiterate in Chinese, which, sadly, I am. I had to rely on my usual point-and-look method. The first entry my finger landed on was changmian. I read the definition: “long sleep, eternal rest, a euphemism for death.” Above this was a separate entry for chang, which means “singing.” I then looked up mian. This can mean either “endless” or “silky.” So there, quite by coincidence, or perhaps not, I had the exact double entendre I was hoping for, changmian, which, depending on how you pronounce the tones, can mean “endless singing” or “death.”

  Much more scholarly research came my way. At one time I was having trouble locating information on limestone formations and a physics term known as the Bernoulli effect. I found myself seated next to a stranger at an impromptu dinner party one night, and I asked him what line of work he was in. He was a geology professor, he told me, and he had written about the rubble of limestone, and he happened to know how the Bernoulli effect might apply to wind erosion.

  Another day, when I needed to know more about the possibility that ancient villages were situated in caves, I received a phone call inviting me to a dinner reception, to be attended by about thirty archaeologists, in honor of the foremost archaeologist in China, the man who helped excavate Peking Man. (That dinner would later inspire scenes I wrote for The Bonesetter’s Daughter.)

  On another occasion, I was writing about a puzzling image that came to mind for no apparent reason: a dark valley filled with hundreds of spires, rocks stacked on end and at oblique angles, in ways that defied the laws of gravity. The image was compelling, but I could not justify its presence. What did it mean? Why should my character come upon the scene? I wrote in circles until a friend called and suggested we go for a walk with our dogs. An hour later, I was on a length of beach I had never visited. My friend and I ducked under a pier, and when we emerged on the other side, I saw a long-haired Asian man stacking rocks, creating the same spires I had just described, dozens of them, each six or seven feet tall. Incredulous, I ran up to the builder of these rocky cairns. How is it that they don’t topple over? I asked. And the man said, “I don’t know. I guess with everything there’s a point of balance. You just have to find it.” That, I knew instantly, was the meaning of that scene, that was why the image was necessary to the story.

  As with the Holocaust references, these coincidences were occurring at first once a day, then several times. The coincidences were oddly exact. How could I not notice them? It was as if in writing fiction I had opened my mind to the realm of all possibilities. Now the collective unconscious had yielded research, contacts, connections, images, and meanings. I was aware that other writers—James Merrill and William Butler Yeats of note—believed that their writings were influenced by sources that were ethereal, mystical, and spiritual in the sense that spirits were involved. Yeats believed the spirits delivered boatloads of images from the other side of the River Styx.

  Then again, perhaps I noticed these “coincidences” because that is the obsessive nature of writing. It creates the boundaries, aligns the details into a story, a framework that guarantees that all the pieces are related to a whole. I reasoned that story-writing was a deliberate derangement of the mind. The story becomes a distorted lens, an impossibly wide perspective. And what appear to be coincidences are simply flotsam in the same stream of consciousness. This was the writerly logic I used to dismiss what was too strange to be believed as anything but the result of a skewed focus on coincidences.

  And what my story still lacked was just that—focus. Thus far, I had a motley collection of anecdotes, historical research, and tributes to friends and family. As is often said in writers’ workshops, the story was not yet felt. Mostly what I felt was pressure. I was six months past my final deadline, the one that was a year past my promised deadline, which in turn was a year past the proposed date of delivery. It was now early May, and since my book was due to come out in October, my now absolutely final deadline was July. By my estimation, I was at least a hundred pages and six months from the end, not counting revisions. In other words, what I would probably deliver to my publisher was bad news and not a book. Before I could do that, however, I received a phone call from my editor with news far worse than mine.

  Faith had just been diagnosed with a rare cancer, considered untreatable, incurable, inoperable, with a prognosis of a few months, according to literature I found. In a shaky voice, my editor, my dear friend and personal food critic, jauntily remarked that she hoped to last through the summer vegetable season. To me, her words made about as much sense as if she had proclaimed that the planets had just collided. It was ridiculous, the stupidest thing I’d heard, as impossible as—well, say, my finishing my book on time.

  An impetuous notion crossed my mind. I would go to New York and be with my editor, take care of her. Another part of me immediately argued against the idea. I had a book to write. She was counting on that as well. Besides, she lived in New York, and that would mean leaving my husband and home. That would require my living alone, something I had never done, in part because I have an inordinate fear of crime, having been held up at gunpoint on one occasion, nearly raped on another, and having had to identify the body of my murdered roommate. Imagine it: living in New York City, Terror Capital of the World, in an apartment by myself, lying in bed alone, dreaming of murder and mayhem, as thieves, rapists, and con men finagled with the locks on my door.

  My editor was thrilled that I might come to New York for the summer. Strangeness begets strangeness, and arrangements fell into place one after another. An apartment was available. There was an airline ticket I had to use before it expired. Every time I thought about going to New York, objects I had lost would reappear. The phone would ring, and it was someone from New York. Two weeks after receiving Faith’s news, I was boarding a plane to New York with a carry-on in one hand and a little dog in the other. I went for no reason I co
uld clearly explain, then or now. I seemed to have no choice in the matter. The ghosts in my fiction and my life—my grandmother, my father, my brother, Pete, Jock Doc, Eric, Elza and her Jewish relatives, the Hakkas of Thistle Mountain—had pulled all the stops to make sure I had nothing better to do than go to New York and finish writing my novel while being with my editor. And while the ironies and coincidences had been plentiful when I was writing my novel, now they were gushing as wildly as a broken water main in the Bronx.

  During the next two months in New York, my normal logic was upended, my senses were amplified. During the day, I went to the doctor’s office with Faith. We went shopping for the freshest vegetables of the season. We argued over the benefits and hokeyness of alternative treatments. At night I went into a dark closet that served as my office and sat at a card table that served as my desk. With my little dog curled at my feet, I pondered the same questions I had had as a child: Why do things happen? How do things happen?

  I thought about luck, fate, and destiny. Like the narrator of the book I had yet to finish, I didn’t know what to believe and thus I didn’t know what to hope. And during this flux of wondering and writing, I found the heart of my story. Except for one day and one night, I don’t remember writing, yet I finished The Hundred Secret Senses in July.

  It was a miracle that the book was done. I was elated. And yet some miracles didn’t happen. Not yet. My friend, my editor, still had the cancer. Each day she had to cross a terrible chasm, a bottomless hole of not knowing what to hope or believe. I tried to imagine what she saw, but I did not have her perspective. My feet weren’t perched on the ledge. So all I could do was remember.

  I remembered those times in my life when I tried to believe that my father and brother would not die. I remembered those times when I desperately wanted to see my friends who had passed too soon. And I remembered also how I didn’t want to hope too much, knowing that those hopes might turn into almost unendurable pain. In spite of what I didn’t hope, the pain was still unbearable, a void so empty, so completely without meaning that it made me hope our existence did not end with the last breath and heartbeat. That same hope now made me remember all that had happened during the writing of The Hundred Secret Senses: how the made-up stories turned out to be true; how the research I needed dropped into my lap; how the ironies and coincidences accumulated, played off one another, forced me to wonder and consider that everything that happens is neither grand plan nor random coincidence. It is a crazy quilt of love, pieced together, torn apart, repaired again and again, and strong enough to protect us all.

  Did the ghosts of friends and family come and serve as my muses? Aren’t ghosts merely delusions in grief? I know now that these questions are meaningless and the answer is absolute. What are ghosts if not the hope that love continues beyond our ordinary senses? If ghosts are a delusion, then let me be deluded. Let me believe in the limitlessness of love, the beauty of contradictions, the miracle that is an ordinary part of life.

  A CHOICE OF WORDS

  She wanted to write a novel in the style of Jane Austen, a book of manners about the upper class, a book that had nothing to do with her own life. Years before, she had dreamed of writing stories as a way to escape. She could revise her life and become someone else. She could be somewhere else. In her imagination she could change everything, herself, her mother, her past. But the idea of revising her life also frightened her, as if by imagination alone she were condemning what she did not like about herself or others. Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.

  • The Bonesetter’s Daughter

  • what the library means to me •

  I wrote this essay when I was eight years old, for a contest sponsored by the Citizens Committee for the Santa Rosa (California) Library. I received a transistor radio as a prize, and my essay was published in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

  My name is Amy Tan, 8 years old, a third grader in Matanzas School. It is a brand new school and everything is so nice and pretty. I love school because the many things I learn seem to turn on a light in the little room in my mind. I can see a lot of things I have never seen before. I can read many interesting books by myself now. I love to read. My father takes me to the library every two weeks, and I check five or six books each time. These books seem to open many windows in my little room. I can see many wonderful things outside. I always look forward to go the library.

  Once my father did not take me to the library for a whole month. He said, the library was closed because the building is too old. I missed it like a good friend. It seems a long long time my father took me to the library again just before Christmas. Now it is on the second floor of some stores. I wish we can have a real nice and pretty library like my school. I put 18 cents in the box and signed my name to join the Citizens of Santa Rosa Library.

  At age eight (foreground), being congratulated for my essay “What the Library Means to Me,” Santa Rosa, California, 1960.

  • mother tongue •

  In 1989, I was invited to speak at a conference, “The State of the English Language.” Upon learning that I would be on a panel with noted academicians and writers, I wrote this apologia the night before. Wendy Lesser of The Threepenny Review later asked to publish it, and subsequently it was included in The Best American Essays 1991.

  I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.

  I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.

  Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The talk was about my writing, my life, and my book The Joy Luck Club, and it was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like “the intersection of memory and imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus”—a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.

  Just last week, as I was walking down the street with her, I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture, and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way.” My husband was with us as well, and he didn’t notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It’s because over the twenty years we’ve been together I’ve often used the same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.

  So that you’ll have some idea of what this family talk sounds like, I’ll quote what my mother said during a conversation that I videotaped and then transcribed. During this conversation, she was talking about a political gangster in Shanghai who had the same last name as her family’s, Du, and how in his early years the gangster wanted to be adopted by her family, who were rich by comparison. Later, the gangster became more powerful, far richer than my mother’s family, and he showed up at my mother’s wedding to pay his respects. Here’s what she said in part:

  “Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off-the-street kind. He is Du like Du Zong—but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong. The
river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn’t look down on him, but didn’t take seriously, until that man big like become a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don’t stay for dinner. Respect for making big celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way. If too important won’t have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn’t see, I heard it. I gone to boy’s side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen.”

  You should know that my mother’s expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads Shirley MacLaine’s books with ease—all kinds of things I can’t begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand fifty percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand eighty to ninety percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother’s English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It’s my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.