Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  One day my mother told me once again to not be so li hai. “Be good to your mother-in-law,” she said. “Not for her sake but for your husband. Don’t make him choose. Don’t make him one day regret what he did for you when she is gone.” I instantly knew she was right. In time, my mother-in-law did come to love me, and my husband regretted only a little that I arranged one year for her to spend a solid week with us on a cruise ship to Alaska. As exasperating as she often was, he remained devoted to her, and I told him during the most trying moments how much I admired him for being not just a good son but also a good person. When his mother died at age 101, my husband had no regrets for how he had treated her, nor did I.

  And now, just this moment, I realize why my mother told me to let go. She could not forget my father’s sorrow over what she had forced him to do—to never again see his favorite sister.

  [ QUIRK ]

  Time and Distance: Age Twenty-Four

  1976. My own death seems so remote—like a faraway foreign place—separated from the here by distance of time. Being forty now seems more tangible. Life signs like freeway signs occasionally pop up, I’m getting there and I want to get there faster. Without the stops and turns and detours. I want to be forty and have all those forty years behind me. Forty is secure. At forty, you are a full-fledged being. Not awkward, not groping, not waiting. It’s an arrival point. There’s so much that I don’t know. So much I am not sure about. When will I overcome this feeling that I’ve been foolish for twenty-four years?

  I don’t have too many lines engrained upon my face. I look rather pixieish. Sometimes I wish that as I get older my eyes would become more lined and take on more character. It just looks like I haven’t suffered enough in my life.

  Time and Distance: Age Fifty

  2002. I have a sense of my life as a percentage of what has been used and what is likely left. And I get impatient now when I waste time trying to find lost things, or doing mundane chores, and so when I dwell on the unpleasant, when I give my mind to it. So I will kill those moments—banish them—and try to find the moments that can be relived. That’s the role of imagination. It is like reassembling what has happened. Yet it’s still inaccurate.

  Time and Distance: Age Sixty

  2012. Every day, I think about the fact that I will one day die. Every day I think about the possibility I will lose my brain. Every day I think about deadlines & that I am late & that I might not ever be able to finish because I am no longer able to write. It’s gone. And it is this last daily thought that makes my heart race and my limbs to grow weak. That one is the most immediate and it is the most possible, and it is the one that would most likely cause constant misery, as awful as any paralyzing disease. Because if I died I would not have the anxiety of thinking I will die. And if I had dementia, I would not realize it, or I would cease to care. But if I cannot write, I would have no further knowledge of myself. I would fail to find the clues. My pastimes would be a placeholder—one after the other—with no coherent story, just a bookmark in hundreds of books, partly read, partly written.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  THE DARKEST MOMENT OF MY LIFE

  I recently went caving on Easter Island. Caving is a caver’s term for going into a cave, and true cavers require special equipment because the caves they go into can be a little tricky to get into and out of. I was with people who had that kind of equipment—helmets and headlamps, guano-proof jumpsuits, knee pads, elbow guards, and gloves. I had on regular clothes and nitrile gloves, the kind that nurses use to give you a flu shot. Caving is fun for cavers who have no fear of becoming stuck in a hole or being buried alive. I had a little bit of fear, but I went along because the sun was blazing hot and it was like being baked in a toaster oven. There was no shade other than what was under the van. I figured I would be a lot cooler in a cave, and that’s because I read somewhere that on average caves run about fifty-five degrees year-round. This cave was not average. It felt like I was in a sauna. When you factor in dragging yourself forward using your fingertips, you’re soon hotter than you were outside and this might make you feel you are running out of cave oxygen. The cavers in jumpsuits were really sweating. The next time someone tells you that a cave maintains an even temperature of fifty-five degrees, tell them I said that is a big fat lie.

  The caves that cavers go into are not like those you see in movies—you know the ones, they’re hidden behind fake bushes and open into a cavernous great room, with stalactites that resemble chandeliers, a stove made of rocks, a small pool for bathing children under a skylight, and sleeping chambers on other levels. That is a Hollywood set. I read that a caver’s dream cave has an “advanced” rating, meaning, the passages might twist and turn or lead downward into something similar to a drainpipe, and that your weight and gravity might push you downward into a U-bend that requires Houdini-like flexibility. You wouldn’t be able to back up vertically because you’re constricted like a rabbit being swallowed by a giant anaconda. You know those stories about curious kittens that go into a drainpipe and wind up with just their piteously freaked faces sticking out? The kitten always gets rescued by passersby who cut open the pipe with an electric chain saw they happen to have in the trunk of the car. On Easter Island, no one will open a cave from the outside with a chain saw. For one thing, Easter Island is a World Heritage Site. You can’t even pick up a rock and take it home. A friend tried.

  This is the reason you should always have a caving expert with you when caving—or even two experts, one leading you and one following you, so that you can be either pulled forward or pulled backward, as the better case may be. Our caving expert was named Seth. There were five other people, including myself. Someone who had already come out of the caves earlier in the day let me borrow his helmet with headlamp. When we entered the cave, I was fooled by how spacious it was. It was like the Hollywood set, but without stalactites, because this cave was not limestone. Seth explained that the caves were lava tubes that formed when a volcano erupted and the lava, running down from volcano to ocean, slowed every now and then and developed crusts that eventually became tubes. When more lava flowed it squeezed through the tubes, which is similar to how bowels work, an unfortunate metaphor. The result is a cave that squeezed in and out, with some sections resembling a spelunking version of diverticulitis. This is important to remember because when you are moving ahead in a dark cave and looking down at water flowing and wondering if it will get deeper, you can easily bash your forehead when the ceiling suddenly drops a foot without any warning whatsoever. Never go fearlessly forward into the dark. I went from walking erect, to shuffling forward hunched over, then waddling in a crouched position, and then crawling on my stomach. It was like going backward on some evolutionary scale, Homo erectus to worm.

  When you are in a cave, you cannot help but think who lived in this place thousands of years ago. They had to move around inside the cave in all these postures. I would guess that a hunched position was the most used. Maybe the survival of the fittest meant genetic selection of the shortest or those with early osteoporosis. But that can’t be true. As a race, the Rapa Nui are particularly beautiful and have excellent posture. When I was crawling in a viscous substance, I tried to imagine it was brownie mix and not another kind of oozy substance befitting lava caves being called “the bowels of the Earth.”

  Finally, after what seemed like miles of cave crawling, we reached a dead end with a waist-deep pool. The caving expert was not alarmed. Having consulted maps ahead of time, he had expected this. He suggested we take turns getting into the pool to cool off. We did not have to worry about creatures in the water since this was not an environment that would sustain life, not even plants. But then I got to thinking that it was possible that some species of bacteria could live in such a place. Bacteria always defy expectations. After all, the earliest strains came out of thermal vents and then became the start of life on Earth. Before we Homo sapiens were Neanderthals, we were bacteria. These are the kinds of things I t
hink about when I am in a strange place. I imagine things.

  The cave expert suggested we turn off our headlamps. In a few seconds we were plunged into a lightless state. I had never considered what pitch-black meant, but this was it. This was a deeper darker black than what you would experience going into a darkroom. There was no electric hum, no pulse of the human race. When anyone spoke it felt like the words departed the lips and immediately fell unconscious to the floor, overcome by the heaviness of silence. I felt disoriented. Although my feet were firmly on the floor of the cave, the space we occupied had become formless. My body—not just my eyes—was aware of the total lack of light. I sensed that the body has receptors for light. For one thing, the melanin in our skin cells recognizes UV light. People who are tortured and kept underground in solitary confinement without light often become insane. The body and not just the eyes need light. I was in that lightless part of the cave for only a minute before I realized this was the darkest moment of my life. As far as the body was concerned, there was nothing there. Only the mind could compensate for lack of stimuli.

  I recalled an essay I wrote when I was fourteen called “The Value of Nothing.” The teacher told us to use the next hour in class to write an essay on “anything.” I could not think of anything. I thought of nothing, and that was how I decided to write about nothing. I found that two-page essay recently and had to read it twice to try to make sense of my adolescent existential views. A lot of it read like a motivational speech, as you can see in this partial extract:

  One seldom realizes the true value of nothing, although we are consistently stumbling upon this obstacle … Actually, we shouldn’t find anything of value in nothing since there is no actual physical existence of nothing. It is a psychological state that requires only the thought of the person to make it present …

  There are many moods of nothing. Usually one is absolutely mortified in finding they have nothing to do. But in a completely different, optimistic view, they should show a sense of accomplishment for this is one of the few occasions one knows what he’s really doing. The absence of something leads us to think we have nothing and we develop a sense of insecurity and want.

  Something always comes out of nothing. When we say we have nothing to do, we are simply not applying ourselves to get out of that reprehensible state. Upon closer examination, one can usually find nearly everything man has created came out of the effect of knowing we had nothing. From nothing we have created materialism. There is want for an item and once we have it, we consume it.

  Of course, throughout the ages nothing will continue to follow us. Its end will come with the end of the world. From then, we will know we will always have everything. But, as for the present, as mortal needs and whims for perfection plague us, why not make the most of it?

  The fourteen-year-old mind that thought about that was with me now in that cave. I thought the cave would be the perfect atmosphere for me as writer—no stimuli, no distractions, nothing to capture the attention of the eye. Imagination would be everything. I could simulate a state of darkness by wearing a blindfold before the start of writing each day. I could capture the state of nothingness. It would be like dreaming. Darkness and dreaming were good, expansive, without boundaries. I bet there is a seminar on inner awareness that has capitalized on this idea. Perhaps they even go into caves to experience the freedom of nothingness. “Out of darkness comes enlightenment,” that sort of thing.

  I don’t know how long my fellow spelunkers and I were in total darkness. Time runs differently in the pitch-black. The diurnal body rhythm starts switching to a nocturnal one, and some alteration of the brain begins. Deep darkness condenses time and I suspect that an hour of this could be the equivalent of an entire night. Seth instructed us to turn on our lights and when we did, we saw a cockroach. We should have known better. Like bacteria, cockroaches can live in any conditions.

  All too soon it was time to return to our starting point: the outdoor oven. What had seemed like a mile going in was now much shorter. Fear of the unknown elongates time. We did not know what we were getting into. Now we knew what we were getting out of.

  The caving experience left me thinking about other moments people typically refer to as “dark”—those involving tragedy. Why do we refer to them as dark? Is being in darkness really such a negative experience? If not, is there another metaphor that is closer to how I feel when I am overcome with despair? Is it a sensation that I am lost or falling? What I feel most acutely is a vacuum, of being sucked out alive. I do not picture darkness where my mind is free to imagine all kinds of things. I picture only the one who I have just lost. I picture my mother. I picture my dog. I picture my friend Bill.

  Darkness is no longer the word I would use for despair, not since going into that cave. I now think that the metaphor of pitch-blackness is a good one for starting afresh, for thinking before writing. In darkness, the old forms and assumptions vanish. Time is suspended. Noise is blocked. In darkness, I have only imagination.

  [ QUIRK ]

  Nipping Dog

  [From the journal]

  SAN FRANCISCO, 1977. It’s troublesome to think about the whys and wherefores of all that I do in life. Sometimes I feel like a worried little dog nipping at the heels of sheep to keep them within the pen when the sheep keep roaming day and night.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  THE FATHER I DID NOT KNOW

  On New Year’s Day, 1962, my father wrote his first entry in his new pocket diary: “This has got to be a good year.” My father, the minister, prayed to God for a boost in blessings. He wrote that he got a fresh start for the New Year by cleaning the hardwood floors with a floor polisher he had bought my mother for Christmas. Despite prayer and polisher, by the end of that same day, bad luck was already settling into the floorboards. The next morning, he was too weak to go to work. By the third day, I was found delirious in my bedroom with a 105-degree fever. And then we were both hospitalized for pneumonia, an experience I actually loved—the hospital part, that is. After being pumped full of penicillin, I felt pretty good by the second day, and the rest of my weeklong stay was like a vacation in a fine hotel with constant room service, breakfast in bed, unlimited TV, and visits with my father. We shared a serious illness. We were both special together.

  No one yelled at me, even when I accidentally depressed the call button. Every morning there was toast and little tins of strawberry jam and margarine. The nurses loved me and I cried when I had to go home. I took with me the tiny tins and wore my hospital ID bracelet until it fell apart.

  That memory of our having pneumonia together counts as one of the best of our special moments together. I had a whole week with him. He was not busy going off at night to counsel someone, or concentrating on writing his sermon. I kept the margarine tins and broken hospital bracelet until I went to college and had to throw out most of what I had collected in childhood. Those were among the last I let go.

  Despite a rough start that year, my father continued to express optimism in his annual diaries. He seldom made note of the birthdays of his children. He must have figured he did not need to be reminded of what he knew perfectly well. The tiny space for daily entries was dark with pencil marks that itemized the exact amounts spent for piano lessons, fixing cavities, a dent in the car, a weekly tithe to the church, a weekly check to the babysitter ($20) and the rare new dress for my mother ($4.15). It also included notes of fights with my mother. “Did not sleep until 3 a.m.” Most of his entries concerned sermons he was scheduled to deliver as a guest minister, or the prayers he had selected to deliver as the assistant pastor. “Delivered sermon Come and See. Attendance was low, but sermon went over well.” He confessed to doubts that his service to God was good enough. He reported encouragement he had received from mentors, and ended with a pledge, double underlined, to do more. He noted the names of people he was scheduled to visit to provide consolation or counsel. He wrote about a fight between two boys, who both refused to go to church if
the other was there. Without explaining what he did, he noted in another entry that the problem had been solved. In reading his diaries, I saw that he lived in distinct worlds, the church and home, and he was much more preoccupied and happier with the former than the latter.

  I found my father’s diary for 1967. It measures only two and a half by four inches, so his handwriting is cramped and his entries are sometimes cryptic. From February until June, he made copious notes of my brother’s symptoms of illness, his subsequent diagnosis, the surgery, the coma, the visits by friends, another surgery, my brother’s hand squeezing theirs, and the hopes they placed in one more new treatment. On June 6, he wrote that he could not hold a bowl while having lunch with church friends. “Left arm feels numb.” On June 8, his left pinkie finger no longer worked, leaving missing letters as he typed his sermon. On June 10, he wrote words in Chinese as well as English, including “attack,” and “Dr. Zhivago.” The attacks were likely seizures, and they worsened over the next five days until he was finally admitted to the hospital. His doctor initially diagnosed him with the flu. In reality, he had a tumor in his brain the size of a grapefruit. As with all hardships, he took this as yet another test of faith. He almost seemed glad he had been called upon to endure it and show how great his faith was. He would pass the test and save his son. While he was recovering from surgery, no one dared tell him that Peter had died. By my mother’s request, I had taken over writing the progress reports on Peter and what occurred to both of them following my father’s surgery.