The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

by Amy Tan

  Anger inevitably blended with anguish, and the helpless and lonely sorrow she had felt years earlier, during the illness and death of my brother Peter, and my father’s death seven months after that, both of them succumbing to brain tumors. My mother had both of them put on life support, and because of that, she told me years later, she had to do the worst thing in her entire life, and that was to take them off life support. “Don’t start,” she advised, “then don’t have to stop. No use anyway.”

  This double tragedy of brain tumors was so horrific that the neurosurgeon himself, in trying to soothe my mother as she poured out endless questions of why and how can this be, simply said: “Mrs. Tan, it’s just bad luck, I’m afraid.”

  That official pronouncement of bad luck then set my mother into a protracted search for the reason we were cursed. Were the rest of us doomed to die as well because of this bad luck? She believed so. Thereafter my brother and I learned to hide our headaches from her, to curb ourselves from saying we were “tired,” which was, of course, an excuse that all teenagers mindlessly blurt to get out of doing whatever they don’t want to do. Tiredness had been Peter’s earliest symptom that something was wrong. We had learned the consequences of saying we did not feel well: being hauled off to the hospital to undergo an EEG, an X ray, and later, once we returned home, being subjected to our mother’s endless and unanswerable questions. We saw her as our tormentor and not our protector against curses. Late at night, months after my father had died, she would moan, “Why? Why this happen?”

  After my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I too was obsessed in knowing why. When did the disease begin? When had her logic become even more impaired than usual? It was important to know exactly when, for in that answer I would also know how much of her behavior, her tirades that had pained and inconvenienced us, her family, could now be viewed as illness and thus with a more sympathetic eye.

  I recalled a Thanksgiving at her house when we had arrived late. It was my fault. I have always had a propensity for running at least forty-seven minutes behind schedule for anything and everything. “Why so late?” my mother said when I stepped inside. She took my tardiness as a personal insult, a sign of disrespect, tantamount to saying I did not think she was worth the time of day. She was sitting in her dining room, refusing to speak. This was the deadly silence we had known all our lives. The dark clouds were practically visible above her steaming head. Static was in the air we breathed. We told her to calm down—big mistake—and her silence exploded into threats to kill herself. There would be no Thanksgiving that year.

  My little brother and I had heard similar threats all our lives. As a very young child, I also must have seen her try to cut her wrists with a knife. I assume this because I tried to do the same when I had a private moment of rage after being sent to bed. I was six at the time. Fortunately, I used a butter knife and was chagrined to learn that running a blade across one’s skin actually hurt.

  My mother’s usual method of near-demise involved traffic. Her last attempt was typical. We were eating dinner in a restaurant, and she was obsessing about a family member whom she believed did not respect her. Lou, my brother, and I didn’t exactly disagree with her; the trouble was, we didn’t wholeheartedly agree. Her anger mounted until she leapt up from the table and ran out of the crowded restaurant with us chasing after her. Just before she dashed into a busy six-lane street, screaming that she wanted to die, Lou grabbed her, threw her over his shoulder, and carried her, kicking and sobbing, back to safety.

  My mother’s threats to “do it” rained so often that I developed an emotional shield. As a teenager, I pretended to be unaffected. She could rant and beat her chest. She could shower her fists on me. My face would remain maddeningly bland, as inscrutable as Westerners have always accused Chinese people of being. When she was not looking, I would walk briskly to the bathroom and have dry heaves. At times, I privately wished she would carry out her word. How peaceful life would be without her. This thought was immediately followed by fear that my secret wish would come true, and then I would be as guilty of murder as if I had killed her myself.

  As my brother and I grew older, we supposedly grew wiser. Yet it did not matter that we were twenty, thirty, or forty. Whenever our mother beat her chest with her tiny fists, we knew what was coming, and were reduced to small children who trembled with fear that this time she might make good on her word.

  As adults, we commiserated in anger and frustration over the fact that our mother could still make us feel manipulated, guilty, and fearful. Later we confided that we had grown to have her same furies. Sometimes, I have sensed the inescapable rush of a geyserlike rage, which soon would drench all reason from my mind and leave me with a self-destructive urge.

  It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I learned that my mother, at age nine, had seen her own mother kill herself. I felt sorry for that nine-year-old child. I could now see that in many respects my mother had remained stuck at that age of her abandonment.

  I recently learned that in China today, a third of all deaths among women in rural areas are suicides. Nationwide, more than two million Chinese women each year attempt suicide, and 300,000 succeed. And in contrast to any other country, more women than men in China kill themselves. I pondered this. Conditions for women in China have changed for the better in the last hundred years, and life in the countryside may not be egalitarian, but is it really so bad that women are willing to down a bottle of rat poison? And why is ingestion still the preferred method?

  More than two million reported attempts. How many attempts are not reported? China as a society is loath to make shameful events public, so the real number is probably staggeringly higher. I found this all strangely comforting, as if in this context our family was practically normal. In Western terms, we were a dysfunctional family. From a Chinese perspective, however, my mother’s urge to kill herself was understandable. It was part of a larger legacy passed from generation to generation, grandmother to mother to daughter. In lieu of the family silver, what was inherited was a suffering silence followed by sudden implosion, an urge to blot out all memory of existence.

  My mother had always bragged about her memory. She never forgot anything. It wasn’t that she remembered just dates or facts and figures. When she remembered an event from her past, especially a traumatic one, it was as though she had boarded a time machine and had been transported to the moment she was remembering. She was experiencing it again as she spoke of it.

  Psychiatrists might call that a posttraumatic flashback, but to me, her memories were gifts. In 1990, before she became ill, I set up a videocamera and had her tell her story. I was concerned she might be self-conscious. And at first, she did speak carefully, looking shyly at the camera. But soon enough, she had gone back to her past and was re-creating it for me, as someone might who is under hypnosis. She was recalling her own mother’s sadness after her husband died of illness, leaving her to care for two small children without any means of support. My grandmother’s young son would take clothes to a pawnshop so the family could have a little money. “Can you imagine?” my mother would say to me, as she told her story. She would repeat this question often, making me work harder to imagine it.

  Later, she enacted a day when her first husband returned home roaring with anger so he could make a big show in front of his friends. It happens afresh in her memory’s eye: He pulls out a pistol and makes her kowtow to him. “What are you looking at?” he bellows to the friends, who stand by the door, their mouths dropped open. They kowtow too. She is looking up at him, at the wild waving of the gun, getting ready to duck in case he shoots. But then “that bad man” begins to laugh. It’s a joke, he made us do this as a joke.

  In another memory, she is holding a baby in her arms, her first son. He has just died of dysentery, because her husband refused to interrupt his mah jong game with the doctor. I said to her as gently as I could, “What did you feel when the baby died? You must have been in so much pain.”

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bsp; She looked up blankly. “No pain, only numb. I said, ‘Good for you, little one, you escaped. Good for you.’ ”

  One time, several hours into one of her stories, she stopped talking and looked at me as if she had just woken from a dream. “Maybe you don’t want this part on TV,” she said. I was amazed to realize she was cognizant of the camera. “This part concerning sex . . .” The camera kept rolling, and she lowered her head to say conspiratorially, “He want sex, I go to bathroom, pretend use my chamber pot. Oooh, oooh, so sick, bad diarrhea. That night, no sex. So many nights, I pretend I go to my chamber pot.” She was laughing when she told me this. The camera caught it all.

  The more I heard, the more I wanted to know. I could not believe I had once taken no interest in these stories she tried to tell me for years. Now I wanted to go back to the past. I wanted to be there with her, to be her witness, to agree with her, “Your life was terrible.” It was not too late to comfort her.

  In 1991, I presented her with my second book, The Kitchen God’s Wife, a story based on her life, one she had asked that I write. She began to read the first page, then said with consternation, “Helen? I never knew Helen in China.” I reminded her that this was not that Helen, this was fiction and the characters were made up. “Ah, yes, yes,” she said, then resumed reading, before soon stopping again. “I never live in pink house in San Francisco.”

  Months later, I asked whether she had finished reading the book. “No time,” she said. Even later, her excuse was this: “Why I need finish? That’s my story. I already know the ending.”

  I saw more things that she could not finish: Half-knit sweaters. Bills she opened but had not paid. Food she had defrosted but had not cooked. Her apartment was becoming untidy, not just cluttered in the way it had always been, but dirty. She forgot to lock her door and the security elevator. She forgot how to go in reverse and dented her car backing out of her garage. She later bashed it again, running into the back of a truck. And even stranger, she didn’t seem very concerned that her car was full of dings.

  I also noticed that my once fastidious mother was looking disheveled. She wore the same clothes every day, a purple sweater, a pair of black stretch pants. She was not bathing. Her hair was dirty and it smelled. One day when I suggested she wash her hair before we went to a dressy event, she commented that the shower knobs were broken.

  I went to the bathroom to check. They were fine. It occurred to me that she did not know how to adjust them. As someone who goes on book tours and stays in a different hotel every night, I know how disconcerting it is to figure out how the water works without getting either scalded or doused with cold water. I turned on the water, adjusted the temperature, and ran a bath for my mother. Then I noticed that she was missing soap, shampoo, toothpaste. Why had she not bothered to buy these things? I made a mental note to do some shopping for her.

  Sometime later, our family was gathered around the dining table for a Thanksgiving different from the disastrous one of a few years before. We were with my husband’s family. The conversation touched on sports, the weather, politics, and then eventually on O. J. Simpson’s acquittal. My mother had a comment to make there. “Oh, that man kill his wife,” she said with great authority. “I there. I see it.”

  “You mean you saw it on television,” I corrected.

  “No!” my mother insisted. “I there. He hide in bush, jump out, cut the knife on that girl’s throat. So much blood, you cannot believe so much. Awful.”

  My mother’s English often left seeming gaps in logic. I frequently served as her interpreter, even in childhood, when I wrote my own letters to the principal, excusing my absence from school. I now attempted to clarify for the others what she meant: “Oh, you saw a documentary on what the lawyers said happened.”

  “Maybe you see documentary,” my mother replied. “I see everything. I there.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. Lou put his hand on my arm. Those around us had grown quiet, sipping wine or chewing turkey in embarrassment. But I couldn’t stop. I had to know what was going on. Did my mother think she had astrally projected herself?

  She was oblivious of everyone’s discomfort. “I hide in bush too.”

  “You saw him get in his car and go home?”

  My mother nodded. “I follow.”

  “How? How did you get to Los Angeles?”

  I couldn’t shake her illogic. “I don’t remember. Must be I drive.”

  “And you were in his bedroom when he cleaned up?”

  She nodded confidently.

  “You watched him get undressed?” I challenged, desperate to make her realize how crazy her line of thinking was.

  “Oh, no!” she answered quickly. “I turn my eyes away.”

  That was the moment I could no longer deny to myself that something was terribly wrong. She was certainly at an age when Alzheimer’s could be a possibility. On the way home, Lou and I agreed we needed to take her to the doctor.

  To get her there would require subterfuge. I told her we were going for a checkup.

  “I already checkup this year,” she said.

  “We need another one,” I said, and then I took the plunge: “I think we should check out this problem with your memory.”

  “What problem?” my mother said.

  “Well, sometimes you forget things. . . . It could be due to depression.”

  And my mother shot back: “Nothing wrong my memory. Depress ’cause can not forget.” Then she started to recount the tragedies of losing her mother, my brother, my father. She was right. Nothing was wrong with her memory.

  “Well, let’s just go to the doctor to check your blood pressure. Last time it was high. You don’t want to have a stroke, do you?”

  A week later, we were in her internist’s office. He asked her a few questions. “How old are you?”

  “Oh, I already almost eighty-one.”

  The doctor glanced at my mother’s chart. “She might mean her Chinese age,” I said. The doctor waved away my explanation. What I wanted to tell him, of course, was the problem with her age, how it had always been a source of massive confusion and exasperation in our family. Her age was no easy answer. Even a person with all her wits about her would have had a hard time answering a question that sounded as simple as “How old are you?” But then I realized I was trying to protect my mother—or perhaps myself—from hearing the diagnosis.

  The doctor posed another question: “How many children do you have?”

  “Three,” she said.

  I puzzled over her answer. The doctor, of course, had no idea what the correct answer was, but neither did I, unless I knew what context my mother was using. Maybe the three referred to the children she had had with my father: two sons, one daughter, though one son had died in 1967.

  “What about Lijun, Jindo, and Yuhang?” I gently prodded, reminding her of her daughters from her first marriage to the bad man. She had been separated from them from 1949 until 1978, so in some ways they had been lost to her as children. When they reappeared in her life, they were “old ladies” by her estimation, not children.

  My mother recalculated her answer. “Five children,” she decided.

  And this was correct in one sense. There were five living children, three from her first marriage and two from her second. The doctor went on: “I want you to count backward from one hundred and keep subtracting seven.”

  My mother began. “Ninety-three.”

  “And seven from that?” the doctor asked.

  My mother paused and thought hard. “Ninety-three.”

  I remember feeling bad that my mother, the one who scolded me for anything less than straight A’s, was now failing miserably. While I knew she had a problem, I was not prepared to see how bad it truly was.

  “Who’s the president of the United States?” the doctor posed.

  My mother snorted. That was easy. “Clinton.”

  “And who was the president before that?”

  My mother crinkled her brow, before
she answered, “Still Clinton.” She was obviously referring to the previous year, not the previous president.

  The doctor did a brief physical, testing my mother’s reflexes, tapping her tiny knees, running his stethoscope over her doll-like body. The test was almost over, when the doctor made an innocuous remark, which I can no longer recall. Perhaps he apologized to my mother for putting her through so many questions, as if she were on trial. Whatever it was, my mother began to talk about O. J. Simpson’s trial and how she knew he was guilty because she had been right there when he killed his wife. And in her mind, she again was right there, as she had been at the Thanksgiving table. She reenacted the scene: how she hid in the bushes, how she saw the blood “spurt all over the place.”

  The doctor gave me his diagnosis that day, although I did not really need to hear it to know it.

  Some months later, I decided to throw a black-tie dinner in a nightclub for my mother’s eightieth birthday. I invited family and all her friends. I hired a professional ballroom dancer because my mother adored dancing. In the invitation, I wrote a note about my mother’s diagnosis. I explained what difficulties she might have, what changes might be noticed in the future. I said the best present anyone could give her was continued friendship.

  I did not know the term for Alzheimer’s disease in Chinese, nor did my sisters. They described it to my aunt and uncle in Beijing as “that malady in the head that affects old people,” in other words, benign forgetfulness. I could tell by my sisters’ attitude that they had no idea how serious this disease really was. To them, it was an illness of guilt, their guilt for having been inattentive, that had caused our mother to become inattentive to the world. My sisters blamed themselves for not visiting her more often. They prescribed favorite foods as a cure.