The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

by Amy Tan

  But lately I’ve started thinking that I shouldn’t take such a laissez-faire attitude. I’ve come to think I must say something, not so much to defend myself and my work, but to support American literature and what it has the possibility of becoming in the twenty-first century, a truly American literature, democratic in its inclusion of many colorful voices, men and women, gay and straight, of all ethnicities and races.

  Until recently, I didn’t think it was important for writers to express their private intentions in order for their work to be appreciated. My domain is fiction, and I believed the analysis of my intentions was the domain of literature classes. But I realize that the study of literature does have its effect on how books are being read, and thus on what might be read, published, and written in the future. For that reason, I believe writers today must talk about their intentions, if for nothing else, to serve as an antidote to what others define as what our intentions should be.

  So why do I write? Because I once thought I couldn’t, and I now know I can. Because I have qualities in my nature shaped by my past—a secret legacy of suicide, forced marriages, and abandoned children in China; an eclectic upbringing that included no fewer than fifteen residences, ranging from tough neighborhoods in Oakland, California, to the snobbish environs of Montreux, Switzerland; a distorted view of life shaped by two conflictin2g religions, the death of my father and brother in a year’s time, and the murder of my best friend. Those elements and others in my life have combined to make me feel that writing provides the sort of freedom and danger, satisfaction and discomfort, truth and contradiction that I can’t find anywhere else in life.

  I write stories because I have questions about life, not answers. I believe life is mysterious and not dissectable. I think human nature is best described in even a long-winded story and not in a psychoanalytical diagnosis. I write because often I can’t express myself any other way, and I think I’ll implode if I don’t find the words. I can’t paraphrase or give succinct morals about love and hope, pain and loss. I have to use a mental longhand, ponder and work it out in the form of a story that is revised again and again, twenty times, a hundred times, until it feels true.

  I write for very much the same reasons that I read: to startle my mind, to churn my heart, to tingle my spine, to knock the blinders off my eyes and allow me to see beyond the pale. Fiction is an intimate companion and confidant for life.

  I write because I have been in love with words since I was a child. I hoarded words from the thesaurus and the dictionary as though they were magic stones, toys, treasures. I loved metaphors and used them before I knew what the word meant. I thought of metaphors as secret passageways that took me to hidden rooms in my heart, and my memory as the dreamy part of myself that lived in another world. I played with my memory of both real and imaginary life the way girls play with their Barbies and boys with their penises. I dressed it up, changed it a dozen times, manipulated it, tugged at it, wondered if it would enlarge and pulsate until others noticed it too. I thought of it as a weapon, a secret, a sin, an incorrigible vice.

  I write because it is the ultimate freedom of expression. And for that reason it is also as scary as skiing down a glacier, as thrilling as singing in a rock-’n’-roll band, as dangerous as falling on your face doing both.

  Writing to me is an act of faith, a hope that I will discover what I mean by truth. But I don’t know what that will be until I finish. I can’t determine it ahead of time. And more often than not, I can’t summarize what it is I’ve discovered. It’s simply a feeling. The feeling is the entire story. To paraphrase the feeling or to analyze the story reduces the feeling for me.

  I also think of reading as an act of faith, a hope I will discover something remarkable about ordinary life, about myself. And if the writer and the reader discover the same thing, if they have that connection, the act of faith has resulted in an act of magic. To me, that’s the mystery and the wonder of both life and fiction—the connection between two unique individuals who discover in the end that they are more the same than they are different.

  And if that doesn’t happen, it’s nobody’s fault. There are still plenty of other books on the shelf to choose from.

  • angst and the second book •

  I am glad that I shall never again have to write a Second Book.

  About two weeks after I turned in the manuscript for The Joy Luck Club to Putnam, a friend showed me a book, whose title I’ve mercifully forgotten, which listed hundreds of major novelists throughout the centuries, with career summaries glimpsed through bar graphs. The graphs, similar to records of annual rainfall amounts, represented the relative critical success of each of the authors’ books, a statistical epitaph of sorts. For some, a flood of sudden success—then unrelenting drought, book after book after book.

  “Isn’t it interesting,” my friend noted, “how many writers went on to write lousy second books?”

  I never considered that the critics might have been wrong. Instead, I stayed up half the night reading that book, and by morning I had decided that whatever those writers had lacked—confidence, stamina, vision, sharp red pencils—I would stock in extra portions. Each of my books, I determined, would outdo its predecessor, increasing in scope, depth, precision of language, intelligence of form, and thus critical acceptance and perhaps even readership.

  Of course, that’s what I determined before I was published, before The Joy Luck Club ever hit the bestseller list, before I attended my first literary luncheon, where a woman asked me with absolute sincerity, “How does it feel to have written your best book first?”

  Shortly after the book was published, I was in New York having lunch with my editor, Faith Sale, as well as a friend of hers, another writer, the author of four books. The friend asked me if I had started the Second Book.

  “I have some ideas,” I said vaguely. I was loath to admit in front of Faith that I had not the slightest idea what I would do next. “I just haven’t decided which one to go with,” I added. “All I know is that it won’t be Son of Joy Luck.”

  “Well, don’t sweat over it too much,” the other writer said. “The Second Book’s doomed no matter what you do. Just get it over with, let the critics bury it, then move on to your third book and don’t look back.” I saw the bar graphs of my literary career falling over like tombstones.

  I was to hear this same doom and gloom, or permutations of it, from many writers. Actually, I cannot recall any writer—with or without splashy debut—who said the Second Book came easily. The Second Book is bound to be trashed, one said, especially if the first was an unexpected success. The Second Book is always a disappointment, said another, because now everyone has preformed expectations. Critics will say it is too much like the first. Readers will complain that it is too different.

  “It’s as though you’re always competing against yourself,” said one writer friend, whose first book met with unanimous praise, quickly propelling him upward to literary heights. The Second Book was compared with the first and received mixed reviews. The third and fourth earned renewed praise, but the first always managed to creep into reviews as the standard. “You begin to hate the first book,” he said. “It’s like the kid brother sticking his tongue out, going, ‘Nah-nah-nah.’ ”

  “The critics are always worse when the first book was really, really big,” confided another writer. “With the first, they put you on this great big pedestal. But by the time the Second Book comes around, you realize you’re not sitting on a pedestal at all. It’s one of those collapsible chairs above a tank of water at the county fair.”

  “It’s like that Mister Rogers song,” said another writer friend, “the one that says, You’ll never go down, never go down, never go down the drain. My daughter heard that song. And after that, she started screaming in the bathtub, scared out of her mind she was going to be sucked down the drain. And then the next day I went to speak at a literary luncheon and overheard some people whispering, ‘Can she do it again? Can she really do it agai
n?’ They put the fear in me. They were saying, ‘Honey, you can go down the drain.’ ”

  Only one person—a reporter on the literary scene—told me not to worry. “The Second Book is nothing,” he said. “Everyone expects it to be weaker than an impressive first book. The real problem comes after the third book. Then the reviews begin: ‘Her first novel was terrific, but now, after two weak efforts in a row, it’s becoming increasingly likely that its virtues were only an aberration.’ ”

  I’ve noticed that first books are often praised for their freshness, their lack of self-consciousness. In my case, “lack of consciousness” may have had something to do with it. And here I am referring not to what I know or don’t know about the craft of writing but to what I didn’t know about publishing. While I was writing my first book, I still believed that “PW” referred only to the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse, and not the trade magazine Publishers Weekly as well. I did not know the importance of a “boxed review.” I had never heard “blurb” used as a verb. When I was told my book was being sold to the “clubs,” I thought that meant as in Med or Rotary. I guessed that first serial rights were a writer’s adjunct to the First Amendment. I am serious. Ask my editor.

  And then the reviews started to come in. They surprised me, every one of them. I read reviews that praised me as having skills that I never knew I had—related to my unusual use of structure and the simplicity of my prose. And I read the critical ones as well, which pointed out faults that I also never knew I had—related to my unusual use of structure and the simplicity of my prose. And then I read one, which I cannot quote exactly, since I threw it away, that said something to this effect: “It will be hard, if not impossible, for Amy Tan to follow her own act.” Shortly after that, I broke out with hives.

  I should explain that I have never been a particularly nervous person or someone prone to psychosomatic illnesses. But while writing the Second Book, I developed literal symptoms of the imagined weight of my task. Each morning, when I was not on the road doing promotion for my first book, I would dutifully sit at my desk, turn on my computer, and stare at the blank screen. And sure enough, my imagination would take off unbidden, unrestrained. And I would imagine hundreds, thousands of people looking over my shoulder, offering helpful suggestions:

  “Don’t make it too commercial.”

  “Don’t disappoint the readers you’ve already won over.”

  “Make sure it doesn’t look like a sequel.”

  “But what about Updike? What about stories that multiply like Rabbit’s?”

  “Seriously, what are the themes that will shape your oeuvre?”

  “What’s an oeuvre?”

  “Forget oeuvre. Don’t even think about themes.”

  “Just don’t make it exotic. That’s too obvious.”

  “Just make sure the men are portrayed in positive roles this time.”

  “No, no, if you think about political correctness, you’re dead.”

  “Think about sources of inspiration.”

  “Don’t think about the advance.”

  “Don’t think about how much every single word on this page is worth.”

  “Don’t think.”

  With all these imaginary people weighing me down, I developed a pain in my neck, which later radiated to my jaw, resulting in constant gnashing, then two cracked teeth, and a huge dental bill. The pain then migrated down my back, making it difficult for me to sit up straight during the long hours necessary for writing a Second Book. And while I was struggling to sit in my chair, with hot packs wrapped around my waist, I did not write fiction: I wrote speeches—thirty, forty, fifty of them, all about the old book, a book that was rapidly becoming the source of my irritations.

  And when I was not writing speeches, I was giving them. And when I was not giving speeches, I was answering telephone calls or responding to letters asking me to appear at a fund-raiser, to give a talk at a university, to blurb the book of a first-time novelist, to donate money to a worthy cause, to judge a writing contest, to teach at a creative-writing workshop, to serve on a panel on the Asian-American experience, to write an introduction to someone’s book, and so on and so forth. For a while, I averaged a dozen requests a day. For a while, I tried to answer them all. I said yes to many. But I also said no to many: No to being a judge for the Miss Universe contest. No to posing for a Gap ad. Thanks but no thanks to the five or six people who offered to let me write their complete life stories, fifty-fifty on the royalties since I was already a proven author. And when I found that I still had no time to write, that fully nine months out of the past year had been spent on the road and in strange hotel rooms, that I had no more than three consecutive days at any given time to write fiction, I started to say no to all of the requests. I wrote long, guilt-ridden letters of apology. And when I had written about a book’s worth of apologies, I moved and changed my phone number.

  In between my bouts of back pain, jet lag, and guilt, I did start writing my Second Book, or rather, my second books. For example, I wrote eighty-eight pages of a book about the daughter of a scholar in China who accidentally kills a magistrate with a potion touted to be the elixir of immortality. I wrote fifty-six pages of a book about a Chinese girl orphaned during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. I wrote ninety-five pages about a girl who lives in northeast China during the 1930s with her missionary parents. I wrote forty-five pages about using English to revive the dead Manchu language and the world it described on the plains of Mongolia. I wrote thirty pages about a woman disguised as a man who becomes a sidewalk scribe to the illiterate workers of San Francisco’s Chinatown at the turn of the twentieth century.

  By my rough estimation, the outtakes must now number close to a thousand pages. Yet I don’t look on those pages as failed stories. I see them as my own personal version of cautionary tales—what can happen if I do watch out, what can go wrong if I write as the author everyone thought I had become and not as the writer I truly was. What I found myself writing was a Second Book based on what I thought various people wanted—something fairy tale–like, or exotic, or cerebral, or cultural, or historical, or poetic, or simple, or complex. Simultaneously, I found myself writing the imagined review that the book was clichéd, sentimental, contrived, didactic, pedantic, predictable, and—worst of all, for the literary writer—a saga, perfect for a miniseries.

  Perhaps these stories would have, or should have, died of their own accord before they could have reached their own happy or unhappy ending. But some of the stories could have been saved, the weedy bits trimmed away, as with any writing, until the true seed could be found, then taken as the core of the real book. It could have been a single image, part of a character, an imagined sound.

  But those books were not meant to become anything more than a lesson to me on what it takes to write fiction: persistence imposed by a limited focus. The focus of a pool player, who sees none of the posturing of the opponent, only the trajectory of the object ball to its pocket. The focus required of a priest, a nun, a convict serving a life’s sentence.

  What I am talking about is idealistic, of course—to think that any writer could really ignore praise, criticism, phone calls, dinner invitations, let alone a spot on the rug, a spice rack in need of alphabetical organization. All these things demand attention.

  So what I did was more mundane. I let the answering machine take my calls. I put on earphones and listened to the same music day in and day out to obliterate my censoring voice. And I wrote with persistence, telling myself that no matter how bad the story was, I should simply go on like a rat in a maze, turning the corner when I arrived there. And so I started to write another story, about a woman who was cleaning a house, the messy house I thought I should be cleaning. After thirty pages, the house was tidy, and I had found a character I liked. I abandoned all the pages about the tidy house. I kept the character and took her along with me to another house. I wrote and then rewrote six times another thirty pages, and found a question in her heart. I abandon
ed the pages and kept the question and put that in my heart. I wrote and rewrote one hundred fifty pages and then found myself at a crisis point. The woman had turned sour on me. Her story sounded like one long complaint. I felt sick for about a week. I couldn’t write. I felt like the rat who had taken the wrong turn at the beginning and had scrambled all this way only to reach a dead end. It appeared that my strategy simply to plow ahead was ill fated.

  Who knows where inspiration comes from? Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of muses. Whatever the case, one day I found myself asking, “But why is she telling this story?” And she answered back: “Of course I’m crabby! I’m talking, talking, talking, no one to talk to. Who’s listening?” And I realized: A story should be a gift. She needs to give her story to someone. And with that answer, I was no longer bumping my nose against a dead-end maze. I leapt over the wall and on the other side mustered enough emotional force to pull me through to the end.

  So what I have written finally is a story told by a mother to her daughter, now called The Kitchen God’s Wife. I know there are those who will say, “Oh, a mother-daughter story, just like The Joy Luck Club.” I happen to think the new book is quite different from the old. But yes, there is a mother, there is a daughter. That’s what found me, even as I tried to run away from it.

  I wish I could say that was the end of writing my Second Book, that I found my inspiration, and the rest was clickety-clack on the keyboard. But no, that happens only in fiction. In real life, I had hundreds of moments of self-doubt. I deleted hundreds of pages from my computer’s memory. And one incident made me laugh out loud. When I was still some two hundred pages from finishing the book, a friend called with my first “review.” It turned out that a woman in a book club in Columbus, Ohio, had stood up at the end of a discussion on The Joy Luck Club and announced with great authority: “Well, I just read Amy Tan’s second book, and believe me, it’s not nearly as good as the first!”