Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  Dear Amy,

  I left I thought there wasn’t any reason for me to stay a little bit longer. I did not wish you to see me crying. It was too hard to control not to cry, my tears just won’t stop coming down, even were at the restaurant eating and all the way coming home. I cry very hard. I felt so ashamed. I wish I could die or there some place to crawl in to hide myself, never want to see anybody.

  You exercised your humanity out of your love at least you should keep your tone softer, but your voices sounded so cruel and cold, both you are highly educated compare with my Peking English you know it is unthinkable too far apart. The accusation coming from both of you at the same time I had little space to defend myself. What’s use! You didn’t like my bug all the time, intervene to your private life that was totally intolerable because of my bad taste of behavior no sense of when and where that I should draw a line that I should do and shouldn’t do. I spoiled everything, so I should say sorry. I promise I’ll never do it again. Then another thing I can’t make my words clear enough to let people know what really mean that also cause the problem and irritate lots of people. I’ve to apologize for this stupidity God didn’t give me such handy wisdom to have disappointed you. I thought I was that bad, thank God for your generosity gave me assurance you were repeatly saying: “We concern for your health, try to unwind my mind—not like idiosyncrasy so I can have strong body and healthy mind. But you put the ax on me too hard, it was pityless! And you have said too much, I don’t know what to believe, which is the truth.

  Peter blinked his eyes three times to say I love you. It was so sudden. Dad and I lost our control, tears flooded our eyes with love, joy, and hope. I never forget it until I die. I understand what is love, so touchy, so gentle and warm.

  I don’t want to make any judgment about Amy. There must be something happen in school—Jr. high, kids are sometimes very cruel. I really don’t know. Only noticed Amy was changed in many ways. She turned away from us. Dad was still alive. Why? Chinese?

  I will not come to disturb you anymore. You don’t have to worry about it. I will understand it very well.

  And I want to thank you for the dinner and the gifts for my birthday, and your thought too. I do not expect anything next time please! When you finish photo, I want it back. They are mine.

  What a waste of my life! No good for anybody! No-nothing!

  Mother

  We heard her express similar emotions many times—and they always had to do with slights, about people not believing her, and her not knowing what to believe. We often heard her say she was worthless. We would assess by her manner whether she might truly try to kill herself or if we would be able to calm her by assuring her that we believed her and loved her. But what she had expressed in that letter arrived days after she had been crying and shaking in distress. Written words have the force of commitment and hers were frightening. When I read her letter thirty-six years ago, I must have panicked, not knowing what she had done after she finished writing. No doubt I called her as soon as I finished reading the letter. Likely she told me not to cry, that everything would be better, that we would understand each other better.

  The seriousness of her mental illness is apparent in those letters. I had experienced the living force of those words, but the letters had captured her disintegration in real time and preserved it. Even in the best of times, she could easily break and come apart. I saw that in her letter to me from Shanghai in 1985, where she was visiting family. Most of the letter concerns a lost radio. When something bothered her, she was unable to let go. It ground in her mind and fragmented into more pieces, and she would sift through those as well, eventually believing she was going crazy.

  Next day I opened my bag I could not find one of the radio. I couldn’t believe I could have lost it, because I picked it up from the table after the inspection and put it into my bag (like yours). I carried that bag on my shoulder, one hand pushed the cart and the other hand pulled the luggage went through the door to outside, everybody (chauffeur, relatives) offered hands to grab my luggage and bags I only took care of my purse, something they also want to take care of my purse (politeness) but I like to hold on my own thing, another thing to take. After the plane arrived I went to wait for luggage, I was so strong I pull every one of the luggage out the turning cart. I became very independent through two years of working for the [husband].

  The radio got lost, I really don’t understand it. I didn’t loose my mind that time, however it bothered me. During my stay between [family friends], it seemed like I accused someone when I couldn’t find my thing. Actually, I was so confused. I worried I lost my mind, so I wanted to think hard to see if I was having bad memory or went crazy. My mind often wandered far away. I usually heard half of the conversation if someone was talking to me sometimes I was thinking that could make me cry, at the time I had to swallow my tear, it wasn’t easy. At John’s wedding my mind was thinking something else and tried so hard to swallow my tear. I think your friend took a picture of me very very sad face. I was so miserable during that period. It’s hard to say I’ll be all right.

  Two weeks later, she was still fretting over the lost radio and now, on top of that, she had also been forced to pay a $110 duty surcharge for bringing in an extra camera for a cousin.

  Every time people go out to foreign country by air and before arriving the stewardess will hand to you a couple of printed paper requested you write down things you bring in, and the other paper is for the information of nationality, age, and address etc. When you enter to show the passport. Then go through the customs. They check the list of things on the paper, sometimes they ask to see, like the radio you gave, (later I couldn’t find the one I showed) I don’t think they took it, and also like Frank he brought in two cameras and one big item—T.V. for someone else tax free. Frank probably didn’t know he couldn’t bring the extra camera, besides he got one item free of duty. The camera should be charged for the duty. They estimated the camera worth 200Y, then use 150% off from 200Y came out 300Y equals $110 less 11Y. If Frank had explained the camera for an America to use in China, later the camera would be taken out of China, situation would be different, may be they will put it down on the paper like if the camera wasn’t taken out then charge for the duty. Anyway it could be worked out better. Now I got the camera that worth twice price though I got part of receipt showed charge of the camera for 300Y, but I won’t be going out of country same way Frank came in. I went to customs of Beijing supposed to be the head. What use I tried. They said, “Too complicated they can’t do.” suggested I write to Canton.

  I was mad inside of me. Frank felt bad about the duty and he needed that $110 to spend.

  There was a counterbalance to my mother’s depressions and feelings of helplessness. It was her persistence, which led to a plan.

  Auntie Elsie wanted me to go to Hong Kong for a visit. I’m thinking it is not bad idea, that means I go to Canton to get the $110 back, I use the money for part of the expense that also makes me feel better, at the same time once again to see Hong Kong … I take time to relax, plenty time to sleep and afternoon a nap.

  It has taken me thirty-six years to understand why she could not let go of that lost radio. I understood when I carefully reread the letter. I had given her that radio.

  [Regarding the lost radio] I felt you love me so much you wanted me be happy to find every way to please me. I understand you deeply, but you work so hard I worry for you. Is it worth? You don’t have to work so hard. Sit all day in front of the computer, squeeze every bit of your brain, it is too hard on you. What other way you would not be stress that would harm you?

  I better stop. Take care of yourself, don’t get hungry, smoke less, drink less (coffee), eat plenty of fruit. Do you like hear?

  Love,

  Mom

  We wrote letters in English when we were far apart. I wrote a book to show her how close we truly were.

  [ QUIRK ]

  Why Write?

  [From the journal]


  CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK, AUGUST 2008. A poet friend quoted another writer— who?— that we write to prolong the time between our two deaths: the physical death of our being when we cease to exist, and the death of us when no one remembers us, which can be weeks, months, years.

  But I don’t write for that reason. Why would I want to be remembered by strangers and those whose memories of me are the misperceptions that people already have now of my work? Inaccurate “memory,” acquired from my writing.

  I write to prolong my memory of life now, to see that I have had thoughts, emotions, ideas, encounters, and experiences. If I cannot remember, it is as if I had not lived those days, and that my life was the barest of details I do remember. By writing it down, it is engrained, and my thoughts continue, are part of some stream and not just discrete bits from the day’s menu, the same off erings, and my eating the same things I liked the last time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  * * *

  LANGUAGE:

  A LOVE STORY

  At night, I resurrect the languages I love that are no longer spoken. I lie in my bed, and next to me is a book, a different one each night. I turn on my side toward my chosen, slip my thumb and forefinger along its spine, flatten the cleft to smooth the pages, and I read. They are words from a language struck dumb by the mortality of all its native speakers. Two nights ago, it was Aramaic origins of the Bible. Last night it was Lyconian funereal verses. Tonight it is Sumerian cuneiforms in the fourth millennium B.C. at that very moment a Sumerian scanned the heavens and saw a star, as glorious and frightening as anything he had ever seen. On a smooth limestone wall, he carved that star, an intersection of light from all six directions: east, west, north, south, heaven, and earth. He named his first written word, Ahn. “God.” I say it with him, Ahn. And now, the illusion arrives, and I no longer see the Sumerian symbol nor the tightly fitted explanations on its linguistic descent. I hear the word, formless, without boundaries, a pulsing life within me. I am Ahn.

  We speak and listen, the Sumerian and I, lovers now, who were strangers to each other when we lived in the past. We say the words that have not been spoken in thousands of years, becoming them, the sense of them, the ecstatic visions and unspeakable torments, the sad half of half-truths, the confessions that died before torture could extract them, all unheard since the smothering death of my Sumerian friend by Akkadian, four thousand years ago, a long time to be silent.

  Night after night, the languages and I are more alive than ever. In this way, I have embraced over eight hundred dead languages. They have told me the weaknesses of their enemies, the prayers said to gods, the plans for victory that were blighted by unexpected weather. They have murmured to me the names for parts of the body, all the ways to say “mouth,” “breasts,” and “belly,” so many of them uttered with bilabials, the sounds made by pressing the lips together. These are the words that pleasure, the way we feel them in our mouths, in the shapes of the words we say to each other.

  But in the morning, the words appear again, clean and mute on the page. And I appear in the mirror, not a bilabial sensation but a sixty-four-year-old shape of flesh and bones, knees and knuckles, that has pressed against many men, against their shapes, against what I wanted, and that is a history not worth recounting. It was time spent. I remind myself that I know the difference between illusion and delusion. It is the separation between desire and belief. I know what separates the past from the present, what lies between then and now. It is but a moment, an easy thing to lose. And the separation between sounds uttered then and the sounds uttered now is silence, not easily broken.

  I put the book on Sumerian cuneiforms back in its proper place: bottom shelf, a gap-tooth space between Scythian and Taino in a bookshelf among many bookshelves, floor to ceiling, on all four sides, and on both windowsills of my bedroom. I have arranged the books in alphabetical order, according to region—that is, how the regions are known today, and not by the names given to them by their Mongol or Ottoman or Babylonian or other conquering empires that subsumed them as collateral property. I did not further order them by their time of decimation. That would have caused me to recall all those pedantic arguments by linguists on what constitutes extinction. The linguists would say that Akkadian, once the language of all the Mesopotamian nations, died around the time the last cuneiform was written, in first century B.C. I once abided by the empirical evidence. But now I allow for another realm of possibilities—my own. Imagine it: there must have been innumerable Akkadian illiterates who continued to chat and lie and scold without benefit of cuneiforms.

  On the other hand, I have taken a hard line with Latin. A language is not alive if it is used only in liturgical text and sacred chanting. A language is not living if its current-day speakers have to be taught the vocabulary, pronunciation, and conjugation, rather than by absorbing it as infants along with mother’s milk. It possesses no signs of life if it is not spoken in daily conversation in all its motley ways: as idle chatter among friends, to haggle over the price of cabbage, to bear strange news of plagues or that an enemy is dead, as is the hero who killed him. When a language has no native speakers, it cannot be resuscitated. It is forever dead. Latin is dead, Latina mortua est, and the Catholics could not save her. Let us grieve for her. Nos eam contristare.

  I cannot fathom the logic of those who claim Latin is still alive because Italian, Spanish, and French are her living progeny. Shall we also count Esperanto? Can we claim Neanderthals are alive because they, like Homo sapiens, evolved from hominids? The sentimental linguaphiles believe that the Aeolian dialect of ancient Greek is not extinct. Modern Greek has made it younger. They should ask the poet Sappho where she bought her lyre. A language engulfed by another should be mourned. The remnants of a language after the bulk has been assimilated and absorbed are not enough to say it survived. The lexicon of a language is not those words on a thousand tombstones. The language is its people and their spontaneous puns, the bad jokes and long-winded stories. It is the particular nuances of languages that allow nefarious politicians to wet them with spittle and wring out the false appearance of truth. Another language cannot serve adequately as a dead language’s translator. It would not be able to fully capture the art of ambiguity, the ironic iconic words, the cadence of words as accompaniment to emotion, the play of one historical pun on another. We should honor the dead and grieve what has been lost and is irreplaceable.

  Without language, written or spoken, who can provide the proper eulogy of the speakers and their culture, its history of beneficence, uprisings, and decline? Can we believe what the Romans said about their enemy the Etruscans? They maligned them as cruel. Imagine it, Flavius: the slaves wear only their loincloths and a hood over their heads, a club in one hand, and the leashes of vicious dogs latched to their ankles. Isn’t it odd that the Romans gave no thanks to the Etruscans for inspiring their own Coliseum entertainment? And no pious Roman aunt had anything good to say about an Etruscan lady. Believe me, Luciana, they are lascivious beyond compare, swaying their hips outside the home, sitting beside their husbands at sporting events, cheering for their favorite lion. Those Etruscan women might be mating with rams, for all we know. How much of history is calumny chipped in stone, with vengeance as the last word and the last laugh. The Etruscans may have been a lovely people, full of humor and comparatively kind to slaves. But there are no Etruscan words to defend themselves from slander. What remains are their status symbols viewed through glass or behind ropes in museums—the gold bangles and necklace with gems, the bronze chariot inlaid with ivory, the terracotta statues in the sarcophagi, the almond-eyed husband and wife lying on their sides, whose mysterious faces look bemused, as if being entertained by the antics of their children or their theatrical dramas of mythology, none of which remain, only shards that suggest they once existed. Out of thirteen thousand linen scraps and marble chunks of words, the only clues of the Etruscan language are the names of borrowed gods and the popular vacation destinations in the afterlife. “The Tomb of Fis
hing and Hunting.” “The Tomb of the Sun and the Moon.” They are not enough to unlock the cryptic code of Etruscan. But I suspect that one day, some farmer—it is always a farmer and his cow—will trip on the head of a gorgon, a statue that stood on the peak of an Etruscan home, and that roofline will lead to the remnants of an Etruscan suburb, where archaeologists will find sufficient script to solve the linguistic puzzle. I imagine that much will be learned by the graffiti scrawled on walls: “Cutu Sveitus, the bastard, died owing me three casks of extra virgin olive oil.” “Lady Thana was an unfaithful whore with two mouths instead of a vagina.” “Mourn Larth not. He is the son of Velthur Pompli, the purveyor of fake gold belts.”