Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  And then there are the experiences that were a secret to myself. They may not have been as dramatic as murder, but they may have been dangerous in others ways—to my psyche perhaps. Everyone has them, big and little frights, emotional pain long buried. Invariably I am surprised when they rise up, often when writing fiction. One was shocking: my mother on the verge of killing me. How could I have forgotten that? It wasn’t my conscious choice to forget. My subconscious shoved those memories to the back of the vault, having decided on my behalf that it was best for the sake of my well-being. The protective subconscious soothes: there, there, it’s over, no use dwelling on it. How does it decide what it should hide, what it should protect me from? Maybe it was necessary to forget when I was younger, but surely age and hindsight have removed the danger. Who wants to go back into the haunted house to see chopped-off heads and the ghosts who own them? I do. I want to find those moments that my subconscious has hidden. I am more than curious—and it’s not because I’m a fiction writer who seeks a good story to write about. What’s in there is what made me a fiction writer, someone who has an insatiable need to know the reasons why things happened. In the amygdala are vast stores of disappointments and devastations, pain and wreckage. There are those moments when I was lost in a store or on the streets, and the imagined reason was not simply that I had gone off in the wrong direction. I was unloved and had been abandoned. The bad stuff gave me the emotional reactions I have today—my quirks of personality, my volatility and secretiveness, my sense of shame and indignation, my fears and obsessions, and my expansiveness or constriction of hope. Those memories made my imagination an at-the-ready survival mechanism. I want to know what those experiences were.

  Mind you, my intention is not related to self-psychoanalysis, or to solving in some Sherlock Holmesian way a crime committed against my soul that will enable me to press reset. I don’t want to change myself and be less afraid or more open or more forgiving, or what have you. I like that I am unhappy about certain things, that I have fears others think are unnecessary, or that I privately think about death every day. None of that is unbearable. Those are my idiosyncrasies, my individuality. They are what make me who I am. But I also want to know what the amygdala kept, because therein lies thousands of stories of how I became me. How do I return to my origins?

  Just today I realized the answer, and as Dorothy says in The Wizard of Oz, it was there all along. The fictional mind can take me to what it knows and bring that knowledge to the surface and onto the page. Obviously, I can’t prove how the fictional mind works with conscious and subconscious memory, but I have a hypothesis, and it is based on my intuitions of how it works for me. It has to do with the way the fictional mind allows imagination to bring back free-floating emotions as clues. I am not referring to the kind of fictional imagination that has to do with making up details, as if choosing a paint color from a color wheel. This is the fictional mind that lets go and allows free-form imagination to take over. That freed imagination floats and it conjures up what seems random and not that meaningful, like the odometer that appeared with my seizures. Its modus operandi is to allow “whatever comes to mind.” Instead of sticking to what really happened, it improvises. It requires that I let go of logic, assumptions, rationale, and conscious memory. I am guided by intuitions, and as I put together the story, the origins of those intuitions return, and not just as a distant memory of what happened, but as if I am going through the moments and the heart-pounding suspense as it happens.

  It might begin this way. I first choose a setting, which will serve the fictional world. I can change it later, if I wish. So for the sake of expediency, let’s say it’s a birthday party and that it takes place in a tract house where I lived when I was eight. Family friends have come over, both kids and their parents, and everyone has gathered at the kitchen table where a homemade cake sits, already studded with eight candles that her father will soon light. The table also holds wrapped gifts. (Here, my rational writer’s mind does a quick assessment: eight is a good age for a birthday party. A kid that age wants to appear more grown-up. But it also matters what she gets as the main gift from her parents. Will it be what she wants, what she has hinted to for weeks, say, a doll? If she gets it, it will be proof of love. Or will it be what her parents have hinted would be good for her to have—a pair of school shoes?)

  Oakland, July 1955: I am the big grinning girl on the right, one week older than the girl second from the left.

  As the writer, I consider the options for what the present might be: (A) what she wants; (B) what her parents want; (C) what her parents want, but what they also give her as a second gift, which is what she wants; (D) what she wants, but upon receiving it she realizes she does not want it and must conceal that fact. And so on and so forth. As the writer, I would reject those options. They come from the conscious writer toying with plots, fairly standard ones. Now it is the time to let go and write whatever comes to mind, even if it makes no sense. This is where I find surprising intuition. From here, I improvise for this in-the-moment exercise:

  Eight candles stud a white cake with a girl’s name written in curly letters. The candles are different sizes and colors, fat pink ones, sticklike blue ones, ones with swirls—the motley leftovers from previous birthday parties. Her younger brother points to the yellow one and says he likes that one. Three neighbor girls call out their favorites. Before her father lights the last candle, the red one that looks like a candy cane, he says she should ask herself what God would want her to wish. She nods but she already has a secret wish: to be more popular than another girl in school who everyone likes but who has been mean to her. If her father asks, she will say she wished that her cousins in China could one day come to America; that’s what they pray every day. Her father moves the match to the eighth candle, and she gets ready to inhale. Bang! A big explosion rocks the house and white light flashes in the room. Lightning? Someone outside is screaming. Other voices are shouting. It must be a car accident, says her father. One of the kids yells that Cuba just dropped the bomb, and he runs out. Everyone follows. Only the girl remains at the table in front of a cake whose seven candles are melting into the frosting. She doesn’t care what happened outside. She’s mad. She wants to make her wish. But if she blows out just seven candles, she might die. She slides out the yellow candle to light the candy cane one, then yelps when hot wax burns her thumb. She runs to the sink and runs cold water on her thumb until it stops hurting. As she walks back to the table, she sees a puddle of yellow wax on the linoleum floor and a wavy halo of flames. She stomps on it, as if it were a poisonous snake, squishing it dead. She sees a skim of wax on her toe and a yellow waxy pancake on the floor. She laughs. She peels off the one on the linoleum. Her heart thumps hard. There is a black spot the size of a pencil head. The edges are brown. She tries to rub it clean, but it only makes the burned middle look deeper and blacker. She covers it with frosting, then wipes that away. It looks even darker. She doesn’t want to see the hole anymore. It doesn’t matter that it’s her birthday. Her mother will be mad and that will be the end of the birthday party, the cake, the presents, and her wish. Her brothers will go outside, and the neighbor girls will go home. She starts to cry. She can’t help it. Her lower lip is quivering, bowed out like a cup to catch tears. She lets out loud sobs. This is the loneliest, most miserable she has ever been. Just then she sees a white lady standing at the back of the room, a stranger. Had she always been there? Is she a friend of her parents? Did she see what happened to the floor? An ominous feeling turns her stomach. The white lady looks sort of familiar, but she does not know why. Above her is a crack in the ceiling that has been growing over the last week. Maybe the lady came out of the crack. The lady holds up a little music box and motions her to come over and see what she brought her. She winds the music box to prepare for the music to come out. The girl stares and whispers, “No,” but she cannot will her feet to run away. She knows this lady, but she can’t remember why, only that it’s for a bad reason. Her
arms are weak. She wants to tell the woman to go away. But she is only eight and cannot talk to grown-ups like that. The woman looks impatient, and the girl now thinks that God sent her because she was disobedient to Him. She was going to make a selfish wish and let her cousins starve. The lady is an angry angel. The angel will punish her even more than her mother. She is helpless to change that.

  Nothing of what I’ve just written is taken from my life, except for what I imagine as the setting: a table in a kitchen. I have no idea what will happen next. But somewhere in my deepest memory, I’m sure there is an emotional match to what I’ve just imagined. It feels so familiar. I can follow these clues by simply being conscious now of the feeling in my body, the lopsided weight of a fast-beating heart, the boneless limbs. Even if I never consciously recall the true event, I am already glad to have found the heart of it, what was necessary at some point in my life to survive by making sense of what is before me. Those are the genuine emotions. The fictional mind wandered and found them. The writer can put them into a story that never happened, and yet did in the deepest of ways.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  THE FEELING OF WHAT IT FELT LIKE WHEN IT HAPPENED

  A few years after I started writing fiction, I participated in a workshop called “Finding the Story.” It was led by the late great Gill Dennis and was part of the screenwriters program affiliated with the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, where I attended my first writers workshop. There were about ten of us in the room, strangers to each other. The star participant was the director of an Oscar-nominated indie film. A couple of people had had low-level jobs in the film industry and the rest of us were fiction writers with one or two published stories to our credit. I fell into the latter category. I had recently published my first story in a little magazine.

  The workshop took place in the dining room of a ski house perched on a bluff overlooking a ski run. In the winter, you could slap on your skis in the patio and get right on a slope that took you to a chairlift. I appreciated the location because I was a skier, albeit a mediocre one, and this was my favorite ski terrain. But now it was a warm afternoon in August. The windows were open, and we could see the tram taking summer visitors to the upper mountain. It was an idyllic day, but danger was now in the room. Gill said we were going to do an exercise. “I want you to think of a moment when you thought you were going to die,” he said. “Write that down.”

  Our location in Squaw probably had something to do with my choice. I recalled a time when Lou encouraged me to go down a ski run that he said I could manage, no problem. When I got to the run, I was horrified. It was steep, icy, and full of moguls. How could he possibly have thought I could ski into an abyss? It was too late to backtrack up the hill. Lou skied to the bottom and waited for me. I stood at the top, unable to move. For fifteen minutes, he yelled for me to come down. Finally, I stiffly started. On my second turn, I slipped and went tumbling on my back. My slick ski outfit on ice made it impossible to stop and I was screaming for my mother all the way down, certain I would fall off a ledge or smash into a tree. At the bottom, I was hysterical and when I finally came to my senses, I cursed Lou. Then I puzzled over the fact that I had called for my mother, as I might have when I was a child. That must be a sign that I thought I was going to die.

  When we put down our pens, Gill said in a hypnotizing voice, “Whatever you’ve written, I want you to put that aside. You probably remembered something in which you thought you were doing to die for about ten seconds. But then it was over.” True enough. Gill went on: “I want you to think harder. A time when you really thought you were going to die.”

  I thought hard and came up with something that happened when I was nineteen. I had caught a ride with a housemate who was headed to the community college I attended. I had missed the previous class, one in English literature, so it was important that I be there that day. It was the first rainy day of the fall season, and as we passed over a bridge, the car slipped sideways, my stomach lurched, and the car went on a mindless course, hydroplaning across the center of the road, aiming us into two lanes of oncoming traffic. I closed my eyes, certain I was going to die. The car had no seat belts. Just before we would have collided head-on with a truck, our car slid to the right, fishtailing across three lanes and headed for a light pole. A moment later, I had a terrific headache, and medics were helping me out. I must have been knocked out when I flew headfirst and smashed the windshield. When they took me toward an ambulance, I refused to get in. I had no money to pay for that. I also told them I had to get to my English class. They insisted I go to a hospital. By coincidence, I was taken to the hospital where my mother worked. Her worried face hovered over mine. An X-ray determined that my brain was fine, but my nose was slightly askew, and the right side of my face was swollen. Diagnosis: black eye. I then hitched a ride to class. End of story.

  Again Gill said, “I want you to put that aside and think really hard—a time when you really thought you were going to die.” I remembered a few other incidents, but none worse than my first two. There was an encounter with six black bears on a backpack trip, but that was more humorous than scary. What else? All at once, an overwhelming surge of emotion came up and I was in tears. Gill gestured for me to speak. I sobbed as I released a memory that was as unstoppable as vomit.

  My mother is holding a Chinese cleaver, the one she uses to slice raw beef. She’s coming at me and I’m backing away. We’re in the bedroom we share. She locks the door with the skeleton key in the keyhole, and throws the key to the side. She keeps coming toward me and I keep backing away from the cleaver until I’m flat against the wall. I won’t show her I’m scared. I’m stronger than she is. I can make myself not feel a thing.

  But her eyes are really strange, different this time—shiny, wide open, and it’s as if she can’t see me. That’s when I know she’s crazy, really crazy. She’s so close to my face. I can feel the heat of her breath and the spit from her words. I can’t look at her anymore. So I look out the window on the left side, at the snow on the mountains and Lake Geneva. It’s so beautiful, and it’s such a waste, all that beauty. I’m so lonely.

  And then my mother says in a strange low quaking voice, “I can’t take it.” She isn’t shouting. It is like a growl, which is worse. She says, “I can’t watch you destroy your life with that man. No more waiting. It’s time we be with Peter and Daddy. I kill you first, then John, then me. We all go to heaven together.”

  She invoked their names, Daddy and Peter, and she’d threatened before to kill herself to be with them. Now she wants to take us all. She might actually mean to do what she says this time. And then I’m instantly angry. It never stops—her suicide threats, now her threats to kill me. She can’t take it anymore and I can’t either. I’m shouting, “Go ahead. Do it. Do it right now.” And I realize too late I might actually die. I just egged her on and she won’t be able to back down. She’s breathing harder, pumping up her chest. She’s actually going to do it. It’s in her eyes. I’m going to die. It’s the end and I’m lonely and so sad. It’s going to hurt. But I don’t care anymore. I just want everything to be over. I close my eyes. And then I hear a disembodied voice come out of me—not my voice—and it’s wailing, “I want to live! I want to live!” And I’m so goddamned mad that this voice betrayed me.

  When it was over, I was self-conscious that I had done this emotional striptease in front of a bunch of strangers. They didn’t know anything about me—that I was sixteen when this happened, that my father and older brother had died the year before, that my mother had gone crazy and taken us to Europe to escape a curse, that we lived in Switzerland in a Bavarian chalet with gorgeous views of a lake ringed by mountains, that she had been shouting at me for days over my boyfriend, a German Army deserter, unemployed hippie, who did drugs and was suicidal. They didn’t know that my mother had threatened suicide for as long as I could remember, but that this was the only time she had threatened to kill me.

  I recalled my feeling
that the disembodied voice had a will of its own and went against mine. Did that mean I had had a psychotic break? Why did it say “I want to live” and not “I don’t want to die”? Perhaps my psyche deposited it in forbidden memories, knowing the experience had taken me to the edge? I considered other frightening questions: Would she have done it? She had always been overly protective. Would she have killed me to protect me? It was possible. Did my mother put the cleaver down and gasp in horror at what she had almost done? Did she unlock the door right away and let me out?

  And then I considered that maybe the episode had never happened. If it had, I wouldn’t have forgotten it—not for twenty years. I related this episode to my brother, but he had no memory that anything like that had ever happened. If he had been in the other room, he said, he might have thought it was like all the arguments my mother and I had had. I eventually called my mother and came right out and asked if she had ever tried to kill me with a cleaver when we were in Switzerland. She immediately confirmed it, and without any remorse in her voice. She said she had lost everything, Peter and Daddy, and she was losing me as well. She could not take it anymore. I asked her why she stopped. She said she didn’t remember.

  My mother had had suicidal thoughts ever since she saw her mother die of an opium overdose. She was nine and said she wanted to fly off with her mother. For some reason, she believed she had something to do with her own mother’s death. It occurs to me now that she might have stood up to her mother, as I had to her, or that she had refused to show sympathy for her mother, who was a widow, which was what I had done to my widowed mother as well. Or perhaps my nine-year-old mother had shown fondness for one of the other concubines, which might have infuriated her mother, especially if the concubine had insulted her. Whatever the case, while my mother blamed her mother’s second husband for her suicide, she also blamed herself. She was always looking for answers to why things happened, and by looking for guilt, she found it.