Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  Lijun, my mother’s youngest daughter from her first marriage, said that our mother tried to kill herself to escape her husband, a man named Wang. Lijun also hated Wang for his cruelty and disavowed him as her father. She was rescued by our uncle and raised within his family. Jindo, the middle half sister, remembered our mother’s threats, as well as a few attempts, one that required hospitalization. She was only seven when our mother left China without her. She has never expressed deep anger at our mother for leaving her and her two sisters in China. She understood why she had to leave, she says. She still loved her and dreamed she would come back. She kept our mother’s fur coat, even after she washed it and all the fur fell off. But how could she not have been angry and deeply wounded? During the Cultural Revolution, when Jindo was seventeen, she was sent to work in the rice fields and remained there for the next nineteen years. She slept on a plank in a communal shed, through which water flowed in torrents during heavy rains. She used to picture our mother living in a mansion. While that was hardly the case, my mother’s hard life could not compare to Jindo’s. Our mother later visited her daughters in China several times. But Jindo did not get to know our mother well until she immigrated to the United States. While visiting her in California, she experienced firsthand how easily provoked our mother was and how sharply she criticized people, their habits, their stinginess, their lack of cleanliness, and especially their cooking. She found that our mother could not let go of any wrongs, especially those committed by her first husband. She would recite a litany of his evil misdeeds and would repeat variations of them for hours at a time, intermittently asking us listeners, “Can you imagine?” or “Who can take this?” or “You see why I hate him?” One time, our mother learned that Jindo had used two hundred dollars she had given to her as a gift to pay for her father’s expenses when he came to the United States. To our mother, this was an act of betrayal. She asked Jindo many times, “Did you love him?” And Jindo would say, “Of course not.” After our mother died, Jindo said she knew she should not say anything that might have let our mother know that she had been fond of her father. He was a bad man, she acknowledged, and he did nothing to stop his second wife, the stepmother, from physically abusing his children. “But my father was my father,” she said to me in apologetic tones, “just as my mother was my mother.” She added that even though she now knew our mother had been a difficult person, she still would have wanted to grow up with her by her side.

  My mother was my mother. There were many times in childhood when I wished that were not so. But when I was grown, she was inextricably part of the way I thought and observed, and to wish she were not my mother would be like wishing I were a different person. So much of who I am comes from her genetic traits, as well as from the nightmares inculcated by her vivid warnings, and from my own rebellions against her. I cannot imagine who she would have been nor who I would have been had she had a sunny disposition and not a stormy one with periodic tsunamis. Part of my psyche had been shaped by those slow or fast windups that would lead to her shattering announcement: “I might as well kill myself! Then you be happy.” My father, brothers, and I could never pass off her words as empty threats. She had shown us she would do what she had threatened, especially if she suspected we didn’t believe her. We were her hostages and each other’s witness in endless emotional battles. Sometimes she declared she would kill herself right before our eyes. Other times, she was quiet and sad, and would say that it would be better for her to die now than to let us suffer. When I was six and declared I no longer wanted to play the piano, she went silent, and after many minutes had gone by, she said in a quivering voice, “Why you should listen to me? Soon, maybe tomorrow, next day, I dead anyway.” I became hysterical. I was at an age when getting lost in a department store was traumatic. I begged her not to die and she soothed me, saying she would stay if I truly wanted a mother to guide me through life. Perhaps her mother had said something similar—that she might as well die if no one wanted her advice. Perhaps she didn’t listen to her mother on a few occasions; no nine-year-old child is perfectly behaved. Her mother had had a history of suicide threats and had made at least two serious attempts. According to one report, when my grandmother was twenty-four, she threatened to swallow gold—a common form of death by toxicity among more well-to-do women—because her parents did not want her to marry a poor scholar, the man who became our grandfather. I wonder what emotional tightropes my grandmother made my mother walk. What gave my mother her nature—a pattern of incredible resilience, which could, in an instant, become a furious impulse to hurtle herself into oblivion.

  1960: After my father’s successful delivery of his sermon as a guest minister.

  Growing up, I never thought of my mother as depressed. I believed people suffering from depression were sad, unable to get out of bed, and looking sick and listless. My mother always got up out of bed. She had an excess of energy. I cannot recall her ever having a cold or the flu. The main problem, as I saw it growing up, is that she was negative in her thinking. She saw falsity in people who were nice. She saw slights in how people treated her. She could not tolerate having others disagree with her. If someone in the room received more attention, she took that as rejection. She saw tardiness as lack of respect, a loss of love, and imminent abandonment. Other times, she saw humor in the same. She was witty and could imitate people’s false insincerity with all the perfect nuances, complete with simpering smile. But when a bad thought crept into her mind, it remained there, festering. She could not get rid of it until she expelled it in an explosive threat.

  The threats were a constant in our lives. They may have occurred every day during a bad stretch, or every week, or twice a month, or not at all during a relatively peaceful time. Had I chronicled every outbreak, I doubt I would have found a reliable pattern. It was, in fact, the sheer unpredictability of her threats that made us alternately vigilant and then blindsided. I would look for small changes in my mother’s moods and presume too soon that nothing was going to set her off.

  Tonight I watched a home movie of a dinner party made by friends. My parents appear in two scenes. The first is from 1963, when I was eleven. My little brother, John, stands in the doorway, mute and spellbound in front of the movie camera. My mother arrives next and has on a red dress and cream-colored swing coat. Her bouffant hairstyle has a lovely sheen of white hair. She gives out a dazzling smile and encourages my little brother to smile and go inside. My father arrives next and gives a look of surprise at those already present, and grins as he adds a gift to a pile. My mother is beautiful. My father is handsome. They are happy. The second scene is a year or two later. My brother and I are off somewhere playing with the other kids. My parents are at the same house with about ten or twelve friends, all Chinese, crammed around a dining room table. They are drinking from Chinese soup bowls. The others are ten or fifteen years younger than my parents. The women are well coiffed and wearing party clothes. My mother is wearing a white sweater, the one she wore with her nurse’s uniform. Has she come directly from work? Or did she put it on as a statement? Her hairstyle is misshapen, the result of a bad perm. My mother, who had once prided herself on her Shanghai movie star looks, is now middle-aged, and while still beautiful, she has become frumpy. Everyone looks up at the movie camera and smiles, laughs, waves or calls out a humorous remark. When the camera reaches my mother, she obliges with a smile for a millisecond and then returns to looking down at her soup with a morose expression and slight frown. When the camera returns her way, I am guessing that the friend behind the camera said, “Hey, Daisy, give us a beautiful smile,” because she glowers, stiffening her mouth and shakes her head. Frame-by-frame her expression is dark, angry. My father is still smiling, but he seems tentative, not at all his gregarious self. Something happened. My father might have said something at home and she arrived in a foul mood. Or he might have said something to another woman, complimenting her food or hostess skills. I suspected that a fight broke out as soon as we were in the car
driving home. And then I watched a third clip. It is 1970, about two years after my brother and father died. I was away at college. My mother is standing on a lawn among other celebrants. On first glance, she seems happy. She is smiling most of the time. But then I noticed that people are in clusters talking to each other next to her, behind her, or in front of her, but no one is talking to her. No one has asked her to join in. Without my father, she is lost in a party like this. When the signal is given for everyone to stand for a group photo, she goes to the far end, and as she continues to smile, the man next to her leans across her to talk to someone else, as if she were not there. Later, her sense of rejection would turn into anger and hopelessness. I wondered how she expressed that when she was alone. I had tears in recognizing for the first time how isolated she was, how fragile. I saw it clearly but was too late to protect her.

  Tianjin, 1945: The start of the aff air.

  Growing up, I searched for signs of danger in her face. The bunched-up chin, stiff-lipped smile, and deadly stare. Her quiet demeanor and pretense in not wanting anything to eat, in not wanting to join in on anything. Her sudden turnaround in mood—from argumentative to overly agreeable. Once she got going, there were few stopping points on the way to the cliff. Sometimes she came back to her senses when my little brother, John, became hysterical. But that was when he was a sweet and helpless little boy. When he was older, he simply went quiet in front of her. He once called me in tears after he and I had endured another high-stakes episode: “I’m forty-two years old and she still makes me feel like a kid who’s scared she’s going to do it.”

  Her last attempt came shortly after she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. We were in a restaurant and she was getting worked up over her delusion that her daughter Lijun had stolen from her the starring role in a movie. At the time, a British television company had been planning to make a documentary of my mother’s life, so there was partial basis for the movie star delusion. We had canceled the production when we learned my mother had Alzheimer’s disease. But now we had to play along with the delusion. We assured her there was no way that anyone else could star in it because the movie was all about her. I foolishly added that Lijun was not the kind of person to do such a thing anyway. “No one believes me,” she said. “You all rather believe Lijun.” In that crowded restaurant, she said the dreaded words, “You never have to listen to me again. I kill myself right now.” She shot up out of her chair and ran out the door, toward busy Van Ness Avenue and its six lanes of traffic. She had already stepped off the curb and into one of the lanes when my husband grabbed her and carried her over his shoulder as she kicked and pounded her fists on his back. We put her in the car and took her to the hospital. When a doctor came and talked to her, she became meek. Doctors always made her obedient.

  For the first time she was put on antidepressants, and the effect was noticeable. She talked to a psychiatrist about the tragedies in her life. She would ask him, Why did this happen? She told him the stories I had heard most of my life. “Depress because cannot forget,” she said.

  When my first book was published, my mother was delighted that my stories contained bits of her life, especially the sad events of her mother’s death. She, more than anyone, knew how much of those stories were fictional. But she could also see that she was in those stories—in the mothers’ ways of thinking, in their insistence that the past was important, in how they were strong enough to change fate. Because the stories were fictional, however, she asked that the next book be her “true story.” I had already started another novel but was flailing in getting it to come to life. Why not base the next novel more on her life? What better gift could she give me but her truth? What better gift could I give her than to be her witness and sympathetic companion to the past? She began by reciting the same stories she had told me countless times. So I drew her back to an earlier point in life, when she was still happy. What did her baby son do that made her think he was so smart? Where did she go with her mother? To be useful to me, she would call me often to tell something she had just recalled. She would talk for an hour or even longer. A few hours after hanging up, she would call again, saying, “One more thing.” My fiction had become the conduit for her woes. She was overly generous in sharing all the details of her life, in giving her opinion about people she once knew—what they had said, what she had said, what they did in return—and then she would ask what I thought of this woman she had just talked about. Was she fake? Was the woman being sincere? There were many times when my brain was oversaturated listening to her anger, her grief and fears. But how could I tell her I did not have time to listen when she was telling me how lonely she felt when her mother died? How could I tell her I had to go back to work when she was weeping at the other end of the line?

  Shanghai, 1934: Daisy, age eighteen. “Beauty ruined my life.”

  One day I invited her to the house for a full day of storytelling. I promised myself I would listen without judgment, with absolute patience. I set up a video recorder. When my mother saw the recorder, she became shy. She worried she would say something the wrong way. But soon after she began talking about her first husband, “that bad man,” she seemed to lose awareness the camcorder was even there. She spoke fluidly, openly, and with strong emotion—her clenched fists beating her chest as tears fell. At one point, she came out of her spell and said, “Maybe you don’t want to record next part. I talk about sex things.” I told her she could say anything she wanted. She told me about the early years of marriage: about this girlfriend and that, this lie and that. She told me how she got out of having sex with him. She pretended to have diarrhea. I laughed at her cleverness. She moved about the room and laid out the scene she was seeing in her memory. She pointed to the doorway and said that the bad man was there with a gun. She crouched on the floor, pointing to where others cowered as her husband waved his gun wildly and threatened to shoot them. She heard the gun click, and then he laughed at everyone for being scared. It was a joke. “What kind of joke is that?” my mother said to me. “He just wants to see you jump and kowtow. But you have to take it serious.” The next day, when he got mad at a pig that was slowing traffic, he jumped out of the car and shot the pig. The farmer ran to the pig and was crying over the loss of his valuable property, and then “that bad man” threatened to shoot the farmer, too. “One day he told me he divorcing me. I was so happy.” She mimicked signing a document. “He sign the paper then put a gun to my head and told me I had to sign, too. I said I don’t need a gun. I happy to be divorce from you.” So she signed the document quickly and handed it to him, and as soon as she did, he pushed her onto the bed, told her she was now a whore, and raped her. While telling her stories her voice trembled. She shouted. She cried. She was there reliving her past, the worst moments of her life, the ones she could not forget, with all the fury and fear she had stored in her memory and her body.

  I know that there must be many traumatic episodes in my life that my subconscious has put away. Some I have pushed away deliberately—like the awful-tasting first kiss, or mean things I may have done as a kid, and any of a number of humiliations. I am actually quite good at avoiding unpleasant thoughts. But what about the memories and truly horrific experiences—those that might be similar to my mother holding a cleaver to my throat? Might more turn up if coaxed by the hypnotic voice of a workshop leader, or by even my own willingness to use a pickax to go beneath what is safe? Many painful or poignant memories returned when I started writing fiction. It takes effort to shed self-consciousness, more so than it does to avoid unpleasant thoughts, and effort in itself is anathematic to what I seek. But once the fiction-writing mind is freed, there are no censors, no prohibitions. It is curious and open to anything. It is nonjudgmental and thus nothing it imagines is wrong. It is not bound to logic or facts. It is quick to follow any clues, but it can also be easily diverted to another direction, especially if it detects a secret or a contradiction. But its most important trait is this: it seeks a story, a narrative
that reveals what happened and why it happened. That is the divining rod. It seeks shards and not whole pieces, what was fractured. It combines those relics with imagination and stumbles across the pattern, and some essential part of the pattern lies in the memory of a true experience. It can lead me to the origins of what now causes the knot in the stomach and my limbs to turn cold. Even when I change the facts of what happened to fit a story, its nucleus is the original experience. The story resonates as true. It is the feeling of what it felt like when it happened.

  I’ve been thinking about something that occurred when I was nine or ten. I sense the memory in only the sketchiest outlines. It took place in a car with my family. There was tension that led to something worse than expected. When I think about this vague memory, I notice unpleasant sensations—a tightness in the jaw and throat. I swallow. My limbs go a little weak. It’s like a warning from my subconscious to not go there. And I have not for all those many years. But now, having thought about the nature of memory and physical sensations, I wonder if I can retrieve the original experience by following visceral discomfort—the tightness, the squirminess. I sense that the worse I feel, the closer I will be to the source. It’s like that game of “hotter and colder.” If the tension lessens, I am moving away from the cause. The fiction writing state of mind can be guided by what my body is feeling. Would that turn up the ghost of an actual memory? How would I know?

  It’s time to go into the haunted house. I make one concession: it is both the safety and freedom of experiencing this in third person. My heart is already racing.

  The girl and her brothers are sitting on the backseat of the car, coming back from church. Her mother and father are in the front. It’s hot out and all the windows are rolled down, but that doesn’t help. The breeze blowing on her face feels like heat from the top of the toaster. It is the kind of hot that makes everything hot—she found that out earlier when she went to the car and grabbed the handle. It nearly fried her hand off. Her father had to use the Sunday church program like an oven mitt to open each door. And he had to pull really hard on the front door where her mother sits, and after she gets in, he has to lean in and push hard until it makes another cracking sound and closes. There was something stuck in the joint, something that broke off a while back, and no one could figure out what, except that the door would make stretching, scraping noises, until it went bang, as if someone had hit it with a hammer, and then it would finally open or close. When the girl got in the car, she sat down right away and burned the back of her legs. Her little brother couldn’t stop laughing. He is six, but everyone still treats him like a baby. Her legs stick to the plastic seats. They are soft from the heat. She wonders if the road is burning the tires. Maybe they won’t melt because the tires are rolling and no part of it touches the hot road for that long. But what if the car is not moving—will the tires fry and pop? Her father puts on the blinker, and once they are on the highway, he steps all the way down on the gas and the engine grinds and sounds like it will explode. Her heart jumps, even though she knows the car always sounds like that before it settles into that speed. Her father moves into the fast lane. He puts his bent arm on the window rail and uses his right hand to steer. He is whistling the hymn that they sang in church that morning, “I Walk in the Garden Alone,” which her mother plays at home sometimes in the style of a waltz, which is also how her father likes it. But now she hears her mother say in a hard voice, “Slow,” and her father stops whistling and slows down and puts both hands on the steering wheel.