Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  If my mother were still alive, I would make recordings of her speech in a methodical way. I would not ask her to simply say words, like “eye,” “nose,” “mouth,” and “ear.” I would have her speak naturally in the Suzhou dialect, in Shanghainese, in Mandarin, and in English to express hunger, pain, and exhaustion. I would examine which of the languages she used enabled her to express nuances of love or sorrow. I would identify the subtleties that did not survive the migration into English. I would listen to words she might have uttered as a baby to her grandmother, as well as the words her Suzhou-speaking grandmother might have murmured to her when she was delirious with pain after a pot of oily soup overturned and burned her neck. I would listen to determine how words for “hatred” and “betrayal” are colored in the Suzhou dialect, in Shanghainese, and in Mandarin, and at which age—infancy, childhood, adolescence, or adulthood—those words had entered her vocabulary. I would have her relate the same instances of betrayal in English to determine whether I had understood the degree of her anguish. I would have her describe in Mandarin what she felt when she met my father for the first time and to then describe that moment in English. Which language described it more poignantly? I would ask her to describe in Shanghainese, then English, the anger she felt when the tabloids described her love affair with my father as a disgrace to her family. Which one captured her outrage and despair more completely? I would have her describe in Mandarin and then English the moment she agreed with the doctors to remove the feeding tube from my comatose brother. Which language captured her torment more accurately? I would record thousands of hours of her speech and the idioms that stood for hope, fear, and despair—from the Suzhou dialect, into Shanghainese, into Mandarin, into English. I would observe facial expressions and chest beating and note their effect on intent and meaning. I would isolate the meanings that would be lost to someone who did not know her.

  I would also record my speech, the baby talk Mandarin I spoke to her in those last months of her life. I would record the baby talk she still understood. And then I would know us through the history of her language, and in the natural and forced evolution of her accents, in her ability to speak in nuances, in her effectiveness in making demands. I would know all the ways I had misunderstood her, all the ways I wish I could have known her, all the ways I could have told her that I knew what she had endured.

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  COMPANIONS IN THE HOUSE

  My husband rises early each morning and goes upstairs to read the newspaper. I scrunch deeper under the quilt, squeezing out more dreams. Tucked into the curve of my lower legs is my four-pound Yorkie, and leaning against my arm is my husband’s rescue mutt, an old dog who will stare at you for a long time, as if he is sending you messages of love. Feed me. Lou always feeds the dogs first thing in the morning, then takes them out to the garden to do their business, and returns them to bed, where they will not stir even after I rise, shower, and prepare for another day at my writing desk. That is their habit, to laze about.

  My office is an alcove next to the bedroom. Sleep and work are separated by six sliding Chinese lattice screens. They are constructed of the salvaged elm and camphor wood of broken furniture a hundred years old. I had them made in Shanghai, where both sides of my family once lived. They were shipped by boat, a voyage of a month, during which time some of the panels swelled with humidity and cracked after we installed them. The furniture maker had warned me this might happen, but I told him it would make them look antique rather than a reproduction. At the top of each screen is a panel with two carved Chinese characters, a different couplet for each screen. Together those twelve characters form the first Chinese poem I’ve ever written, laughably clumsy, but meaningful to me. The heart is like the full moon reflected in a deep winter pond. Spring rain arrives, creativity bursts forth. They are the sentiments of the late friend who taught me about the symbolism in Chinese gardens. I wish I could remember exactly what he said about the moon and the pond, but he meant that I was the kind of writer who felt deeply so that one day I could express what I felt. I try.

  Every morning I hear the grinding of coffee beans. Its scent grows stronger as my husband comes down the stairs. He hands me my mug, and we do our ritual. “What do you say?” he asks. “Thank you,” I answer, and he receives his kiss. There are days when I awake confused because it is quiet and the smell of the house is of unstirred air. And then I remember that my husband is away in the mountains skiing, and I chose to stay home to write. To miss someone is to also miss what is supposed to be the same when you wake up. I’ve lost two dogs to old age and one to illness, and each death left me with such grief I lay mute in bed for days, because I could not bear missing the humor of their habits: their running up and down the stairs barking at ghosts, or lying in a small circle of sun on the porch, or standing still in the garden wearing a pleased look as a breeze pushed the hair from their faces. I planted a dwarf crab apple tree in the garden, and at the base of the trunk are smooth stones carved with their names. I included a stone for my cat Sagwa as well, even though she died long before we had a garden. The tree looks like a small weeping willow and by early winter, the leaves will have fallen off. In the spring, when the leaves return, always all at once, I imagine the dogs running in the garden again. The cat watches. The return of those leaves is both sad and a comfort.

  Our house sits on a hill that overlooks the Sausalito harbor, Raccoon Strait, and San Francisco Bay. At their confluence is an island. We built this house to have the airiness and sensibility of a Chinese pavilion, similar to the scholar retreats depicted in Chinese brush paintings. Giant oak trees flank one side of the house, and from the upper floor, we are at eye level with the branches, where crows and scrub jays perch. They take turns; otherwise, they squabble. I have seen them do that. I sometimes watch a little gray squirrel scampering up and down and onto our roof. I’m not fond of squirrels. They nearly destroyed a little cabin we have in the mountains, after they chewed their way through the eaves and floors, walls and ceilings. They pulled out the insulation to line the nests they made in our shoes. When we tore open the kitchen walls we saw what looked like the Egyptian tomb of a thousand squirrels. The squirrel in the oak trees of our new home does acrobatics among the branches, but it has not destroyed anything, not that I know of. Sometimes it will shrill for hours during the day in a sad weeping tone. A birder friend told me that it was probably defending its babies from a crow or a scrub jay. Those birds will also raid the nests of songbirds, my friend said, as will owls. On several occasions, I’ve heard the night sounds of a great horned owl coming from somewhere in the dark. Hoo-hoo, Hoo, Hoo. The timbre of their call sounds like an oboe and can carry quite a distance, a mile or so. I’ve never seen an owl in our garden, which is good, since it can easily kill a four-pound dog like mine. Then again, just because I haven’t seen an owl doesn’t mean it is not right there. Owls look like tree bark when they’re still.

  One day when it was raining, I came home and saw tufts of down float past my face. Baby bird fluff was falling from the tree branch above me and when it landed on the wet stone steps, it instantly flattened as flowers do when pressed between pages in a book. I took a downy feather inside and drew a sketch to see all its details and to think about the bird it belonged to. Lately, I’ve heard fewer songbirds, and I haven’t seen the squirrel in months. Maybe a crow or scrub jay killed the babies and the mother abandoned the tree. If the owl did the deed, the mother would likely have been killed, too. Despite the carnage, I still think the tree is beautiful, glorious, and strong, over a hundred years old. It has held in its branches many squirrels and birds, maybe owls, as well.

  The living room and dining area upstairs are one big open space, and when the glass sliding panels that run the length of the room are pushed open it feels as if the room is an infinity pool that goes all the way across the water to the island. When we built the house, we kept in mind a Chinese philosophy called feng shui, which concerns principles of harm
ony with nature. The words stand for “wind and water.” The spirit of harmony flows on wind and water; I suppose that is the sentiment. The right alignment of elements can align you with the right forces, and the wrong alignment can affect your health, finances, and peace of mind. The best orientation for a home is one that faces mountains and water. Real estate agents will tell you the same. Beyond providing a terrific view, mountains often figure into Chinese poetry and also four-character proverbs with a historical context—mountain retreats for classical poet painters, for example. They’re chock-full of symbolism and literary references. You can easily imagine the possible meanings: hardship to overcome, a pile of opportunities, lofty thoughts, or the pinnacle as the ideal station in life. Chinese meanings sometimes oversaturate my writing brain and I just want to see nature, the physical appearance of a mountain as a beautiful view, and not as a symbolic opportunity or an obstacle.

  I see this island daily from where I sit in my office, Angel Island, an island of ghosts. During the cold war, the peak was flattened for a Nike missile station. A decade ago, the peak was restored, and now the shape of the island looks like a peasant’s conical hat. Maybe I think that because the island once served as a quarantine station between 1910 and 1940 for immigrants, most of them Chinese. For them, this mountain island was an obstacle. No papers were stamped upon arrival; no boats quickly took them across the bay to their families waiting for them on the shore of San Francisco, the place they called Old Gold Mountain. The arrivals were stripped, inspected for vermin and disease, then interrogated repeatedly, and if their answers differed in even the smallest way from what other family members had said—be it the ages of family members back home or the number of steps in their home—the whole family would be deported. Many were detained for such a long time they wrote poems about loneliness. Station staff used putty to cover the poems, but new poems would appear elsewhere. In turn, more putty muffled those poems. Then poems appeared on other walls, and more putty was applied. Long after the station was closed, the putty fell off one wall and revealed over two hundred poems: elegiac words about seeing sadness in seaweed and fog, couplets about despair, angry poems about injustice or racism. They look like inscriptions on a mausoleum, or messages in a bottle from people who wanted others to know they were there, a human with feelings that were important to express and should be known, now or later, no matter what happened to them.

  One was philosophical:

  Instead, you must cast your idle worries to

  the flowing stream.

  Experiencing a little ordeal is not hardship.

  Napoleon was once a prisoner on an island.

  I wonder if he was deported. Napoleon escaped after a year and took control of France once again.

  At night, the island is a purple shadow against the sky. When there’s a full moon, and the sky is clear and the water still, the peak of the island glows and its body is reflected in the water. The immigrants in those barracks would not have been able to see the glow or reflection. They saw the walls of a prison for two months, for two years, for a period of time whose end was never known until they were told they could enter the United States or that they were being sent back to China. I imagine that a few of them saw that island glow when they were finally able to stand onshore in San Francisco. They must have thought about those still in that prison, a friend, an uncle, son or a wife. And there were some who never went to shore and never returned to China either—like the bride-to-be of a U.S. Chinese citizen. When she was told entry had been denied, she took her wedding dress out of her bag, put it on, and hung herself in the shower. Over the years there were women who claimed they saw her ghost.

  I imagine the lives of those immigrants were monotonous—the same puttied walls, the same stink, the same food, the same cycle of hope then despair and anger. What would happen when the monotony broke? When they leaned against a window, what did they see in the water? To me the water changes from morning to night, from day to day, season to season. It might be glassy or choppy, sapphire colored or muddy gray, never the same. One day my husband and I saw a glinting swath in the water the length of a rich man’s yacht. It was right in front of the island. We said at the same time: What’s that? I guessed it was a school of golden fish. Did anchovies in a tin have that same sheen? Then we discovered it was the sun angled just so. The next time we saw the floating gold we said aloud: What’s that? And then we remembered.

  Did the immigrants notice the golden water between the island and Sausalito? Or did they see the water only as a barrier to reunion?

  Egrets and pelicans fly over the water, and turkey vultures circle high above. In the fall, swarms of geese put on a show over the island, as do the Blue Angels during their precision maneuvers. Raptors begin their migration in October, coasting on the thermals, and there are always a few red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons that take a detour to scan the hill where our house sits. They perch at the highest points of trees. They are looking for little furry animals to eat and can zoom down as fast as a Blue Angel. During autumn, I watch the sky when I let my dogs out to play in the garden. The hawks can land on a little dog and tear it to pieces in seconds.

  In the spring, the hummingbirds return and fly by my office window. A few months ago, I hung feeders filled with red sugar water. I placed a large fake red pansy nearby. It looks like the plastic openings of the feeders. I thought it would be a sign to the hummingbirds that this was the spot where breakfast is served. I checked the sugar water level daily to see if it ever went down. It never did. I changed the sugar water often. I placed a birdbath nearby. One day, I moved the feeder closer to the trees, and immediately a hummingbird flew to the bottle for a long drink. It did not mind my presence. Nowadays, I call the birds with my own birdsong, and they come—the titmice, chickadees, scrub jays, towhees, doves, and hummingbirds. Sometimes the hummingbirds will drink from a little feeder on my palm.

  But really, I should be writing. It’s hard though when the scrub jays are having a fight over the feeders I put out for them in another part of the garden, also within view from my desk. With them, I have been quite successful. They come morning and evening, and sometimes in between. So I often have to tell myself I should be writing.

  On the long bookshelf by the window, I placed photos of people I have loved and who have died. When I look in the direction of the island, I see them as well: my mother and father at different times when they were madly in love; my older brother and me as toddlers; my friend who taught me about Chinese gardens. It is a terrible picture of him in a peasant’s hat—like the shape of the island. He would have hated it, but it is the only one I have that is not blurred, and I do want to remember him. I have many photos of my grandmother. I never knew her, except in imagination, and in that way, I know her very well. The frames for each are different, because I added the photos at different times, and now some of them are falling apart. I should get new ones, but then I think that those frames are like homes that the people in the photos have settled into.

  I also have two small makeshift urns. One is a hollow bamboo branch with an airtight cap. It holds the ashes of a friend who taught me to shoot photos and also to shoot pool. We have a pool table as a result, a sowbelly built in 1909. The other urn is a blue and white porcelain tea canister. It contains the ashes of a friend who taught me to have fun by acting ridiculous. I have been meaning to scatter the ashes of both urns in my garden. But so far it’s never been the right time to do so.

  Every day I thank my husband for the coffee, I watch the birds in the tree, and laugh at the pleased faces of my dogs. I notice the different colors of the water. I look at the photos on my bookshelf and the island of ghosts. I imagine the poets on the island looking out across the infinite water toward me as I look across the water toward them. I imagine my family as the living people they once were and I am with them in their past. Eventually, I write.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to many people—family, friends, and acquaintanc
es—who have felicitously or inadvertently contributed to the metamorphosis of this book.

  For family stories and love: John Tan, Jindo Eng, Lijun Wang, Benjamin Tan, Sieu-mei Tu, Norman and Antonia Tu, Harold Tu, David Tu, Tuck and Jayne Chin, and Sandy Bremner.

  For immersing me in the calm, the ecstasy, and the profundity of music: Michael Tilson Thomas and Joshua Robison.

  For letting me experience the genius manifested in jazz, love, and God: God, Joey Alexander and his parents, and Farah and Denny Sila.

  For teaching me how to draw using a No. 2 pencil coupled with burbling wonderment: Megan Gavin, Joe Furman, and John Muir Laws.

  For identifying me as an early reader when I was six: Dolores Durkin. Thanks also to Colleen Whittingham, who made it possible for me to speak to Dr. Durkin.

  For saturating my writer’s brain with life-altering inventions, future possibilities, illusions and conundrums, genuine science and quixotic theories: Michael Hawley and the E. G. Conference, Lucia Jacobs and the Philosophical Club, Oliver Sacks, Robert Binnick, Carl Pabo, and Kary Mullis.

  For leading me into the curiouser and curiouser world of the cell, the ocean, and the rain forest: Crissy Huffard, Mark Moffett, Mark Siddall, Michael Tessler, and the squishy Chtonobdella tanae.

  For insights into the global effects of Chinese culture, the uniqueness of Shanghai style, as well as my mother’s idiosyncratic linguistic medley: Joan Chen, Shelley Lim, Duncan Clark, and Robin Wang.

  For thoughtfulness in giving me the appearance that I am organized, prepared, responsive, and responsible: Ellen Moore and Marcia Soares.

  For giving this book and its slightly off-keel writer understanding, care, and enthusiasm: the Ecco publishing team—Daniel Halpern, Sonya Cheuse, Bridget Read, Miriam Parker, and Suet Yee Chong.