The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

by Amy Tan

  She persisted. “What you remember?”

  I struggled to come up with an answer. “You know, all kinds of things. Like, well, you know, you’re my mother.”

  And then my mother said, in a both sad and angry voice: “I think you know little percent of me.”

  Those words came back to me when, one day in 1985, I received a phone call telling me my mother was probably dead. At the time, I was in Hawaii on vacation and had left no phone number where I could be reached. So it was not until my friend Gretchen, who was with my husband and me in Hawaii, had checked her answering machine back home that I learned that four days had already passed since my mother had suffered an apparent heart attack. She was now in intensive care.

  As I went to a phone booth to call the hospital, I was sure it was too late. She was dead. I tried to imagine her alive, and all I could do was picture her saying those words: “What you remember?” Now I asked myself, What should I remember? What had I lost? What had been my mother’s greatest hopes and fears? What was important to her? I had a surge of remorse and guilt, realizing she had been right all along: I knew little percent of her. What a sad fact.

  With shaky hands, I dialed the number. As I waited to be connected from the switchboard to the nursing station in intensive care, I made a vow to God and whoever was listening, “If my mother lives, I will get to know her. I will ask her about her past, and this time I’ll actually listen to what she has to say. Why, I’ll even take her to China, and yes, I’ll write stories about her. . . .” Soon a nurse would tell me in quiet tones that I would have to speak to a doctor, and the doctor would say, “I’m sorry, but I have some very bad news. . . .”

  All at once, I heard my mother’s voice. “Amy-ah?”

  “Oh . . . Mom? Are you okay?”

  “Yes, fine, fine. Where you?”

  “Hawaii.”

  “Hawai-hee? When you go Hawai-hee?”

  “Listen. I thought you had a heart attack. I thought—”

  My mother cut me off with a huff. “Heart attack. No, no, no, no. I go to fish market, and the fishmonger he try cheating me. Make me so mad. All sudden got a pain in my chest, hurt me so bad, so I drive to Kaiser Hospital. They put me here, ICC, do all kinds test, but turn out I have angina, cause by stress! So you see, that fishmonger, he wrong. Stress me out.”

  I let out an audible sigh.

  Then she asked, “You worry? That’s why call? Yes? Ha, ha! You worry for me!” She was enormously pleased. So there I was, in a phone booth at a shopping center in Hawaii, crying and laughing at the same time. After I hung up, I heard a voice saying, “Hey, don’t forget now. You promised . . .”

  So I did take her to China. I endured three weeks of being with her twenty-four hours a day. Three weeks of her giving me her expert advice, criticizing my clothes, my eating habits, the bad bargains I made at the market. I hated it and I loved it. And when I returned home, I began to write stories about her life.

  At the beginning of The Joy Luck Club, I imagined a young woman whose mother has just died. They are now separated by death, seemingly without a reconciliation. There was never any one great fight that divided them, just life itself over the years, petty misunderstandings, and the desire of the mother to give her daughter advice and the daughter’s desire to find her own way. So what would this daughter remember?

  In the end, the daughter learns something, realizes something, something obvious that has been there all along, and she is ready to take her mother’s place at the mah jong table, on the east, where things begin.

  On the dedication page of The Joy Luck Club, I wrote:

  To my mother

  and the memory of her mother

  You asked me once

  what I would remember.

  This, and much more.

  • to complain is american •

  This is taken from an informal panel at Renaissance Weekend, an annual gathering of creators and thinkers from all walks of life, in which I was asked to address the topic “What’s Bugging Me Lately?”

  I find it disconcerting to be asked to gripe in public. It goes against the tenets of how I was raised. “You shouldn’t make a big stink over nothing,” my mother would say. “Just like farting.”

  Yet I grew up thinking my mother was the biggest complainer I knew. Bad service in restaurants? She would let the whole world know, pointing to the greasy bowl or the sticky chopsticks. “Hey, see this?” she would say loud enough for all the hungry customers to hear: “You expect me to eat with this dirty thing?”

  Perhaps it is because of my upbringing that I would rather foment trouble quietly. Besides, I have little to complain about personally. Life has been good to me, more than good, remarkable in fact, beyond anything I could have ever imagined, and I have a wild imagination.

  But being a writer, I also remind myself that talking about the unspeakable is part and parcel of my work. I can complain. I should complain. Writers do and often should bring up subjects that are uncomfortable. As an Asian-American writer, or “writer of color,” as some would say, I am expected to lash out on a range of social issues. And as an American writer, which is how I think of myself—no hyphenated term—I have the right to express myself on any subject and in any direction I wish. I believe that what makes me an American writer more than anything else is my taking for granted this unalienable right called freedom of speech.

  And so, as an American writer, I have refused, even early in my career when I was still unknown, to have a story of mine printed because the people at the magazine wanted to change one word. One measly word, they said. The word was “shit,” what a character says to his wife. If the editor had said to me, “We’re a family magazine. Can we just have the man look glumly at his wife?” I might have replied, “Sure.” But this magazine editor wanted to replace “shit” with “Christ.” I ask you, Which is more offensive to say in such a context? Why should I let this editor’s interpretations of morals govern mine?

  This may seem petty to you, one word, but I hold it as not just my right but my responsibility as an American writer to reject arbitrary censorship. In a case like that, trivial as it may seem, I stand against editorial tinkering that reflects the larger question of who defines “good taste.” As a writer, I think a great deal about intentions and consequences, about personal responsibility, credit, and blame. These come with everything I write. But they also come up when I am asked a question like this: “What should we do about human rights in China?”

  I am not an expert on the rule of law and its absence in China. But it just so happens that I think about this subject quite a bit, in part because the media often ask me, but even more because I have family in China—a sister who lives in Shanghai, her husband and children, as well as numerous cousins, an aunt, and my mother’s brother, my dear old uncle, who was the Vice-Secretary of Trade Unions, a man who survived the Long March and now enjoys the Long Yarn. When I visit, he loves to tell me about the brave martyrs, some of them his friends, who helped with the revolution. Being a retired official of high standing, my uncle has a car and a driver, and he has escorted me around town in this lap of luxury so that I can conveniently see the sights. Once, when I was to attend a dinner at the residence of the American ambassador and his wife, my uncle tersely told me it was “not convenient” for him to take me, nor was it convenient for the U.S. embassy’s car to come any closer than one block from where he lived. This happened at the time the embassy had given refuge to the dissident Fang Lizhi. You might say that my uncle and I do not always see eye to eye on things.

  The last time I was in Beijing, I was there with my husband on behalf of an American group raising money for Chinese orphanages. Lou and I were to attend a dinner for four hundred fifty people—foreign diplomats, executives of overseas divisions of large corporations, and the cream of the philanthropic Beijing international society. The event, the first of its kind there, was sold out, and the donated money would go toward bedding, clothing, and corrective surgeries
that would not only increase children’s chances of being adopted but also help them survive in a country where central heating is not common, and where the government allotment for each orphan amounts to a few dollars a month. These poor conditions have less to do with governmental neglect than with the realities of keeping 1.2 billion people fed. Lou and I had pledged a sum of money that would enable many children to have surgeries to repair cleft palates, clubfeet, and other birth defects. We had an opportunity to meet some of the children who needed the help. We held them and never felt closer to knowing that our money was going to a very worthy cause.

  At the event, to take place in a hotel ballroom, I was supposed to tell a few jokes before dinner, talk about the children we had met, and thank all in attendance for their generosity. But it turned out that the American fund-raising organization did not have a not-for-profit permit to solicit funds legally in China. Who knows why this information had not come out sooner. It was your basic instance of Americans with good intentions but a certain amount of ineptitude. In any case, people from the Public Security Bureau came to the hotel the afternoon before the dinner and informed the organizers that it would have to be canceled. The American organizers pleaded. The PSB officials were at first adamant, yet after some negotiation allowed the group to hold the dinner—although the banners would have to come down and the ballroom would have to be partitioned, as if this were only a dinner and not a charity event. Any mention of soliciting money was strictly forbidden. This was most unfortunate, and a few people were mightily angry. We coped. The dinner went on as planned. We did not give speeches from the podium, but went from table to table to thank everyone for coming.

  A number of reporters attended the dinner. They saw the event quite differently. The next morning, the Reuters and AP stories went something like this: “Police stormed and raided the hotel, tearing down banners, and prevented the author Amy Tan from going to the podium to speak about the situation of orphanages in China.” By the next day, the story was picked up by maybe a hundred newspapers and television stations worldwide. In one televised report, old footage taken when I was promoting my latest novel ran strategically next to footage of a dying child in an orphanage, which had been filmed surreptitiously by a British crew for another program. With the manipulation of images, it appeared that I was expressing shock and outrage over the condition of orphanages in China.

  Soon after, China shut the doors of its orphanages to prying Western eyes. The monies that should have gone for cleft-palate surgeries, for saving the lives of babies, were held up. The adoptions of Chinese babies by American couples were stopped. And I was banned from returning to China. The fact that real lives had been compromised bothered me greatly. In fact, it angered me. And my anger was directed not just at the officials who closed the orphanage doors to additional help, but at the Western media and those who had taken this event as an opportunity to rail against the conditions of the orphanages in the name of human rights. Their actions had not helped those babies; they imperiled them. What had gone wrong?

  As Americans, we have an inordinate fondness for rights. Our country was founded on them; we enjoy the right to bear arms, to bear children, to bare our thoughts as we see fit. The right to life, the right to choose, the right to die, the right to speak out or remain silent. We argue ferociously for our rights in whatever way each of us interprets them. When we do it on our own soil, we are on solid ground. We have lawyers who can back us up. But when we argue for rights on behalf of people in another country, things get a bit tricky. They don’t always go the way we intend. Doors might slam shut, and who knows what goes on behind them.

  Look at South Africa, some will say. We criticized them for apartheid, imposed sanctions, really put the pressure on. What a success. But China is not South Africa. What works in one country, with a white ruling class, does not necessarily work in another. That’s rule number one in foreign diplomacy school.

  Yet when you are aware of human suffering, you can’t simply stand by and say nothing. As we learned from the Holocaust, indifference is a murderer too.

  So what should we do about human rights in China? My honest answer: I don’t know what we should do. I only know what I should do. I think about my uncle in Beijing, the one who believes China is the most peace-loving country in the world. I think about what I would do if I had to tell my uncle to mend his ways and join me at the U.S. ambassador’s house for dinner with Fang Lizhi. Would it do any good to shout at him, to threaten him, to stop calling him? That would be an effective way to start the equivalent of a war between us. With my uncle, I have to show my concern in subtle ways. I have to win his trust, spend more time with him. And yet I also know he probably won’t change his mind about Fang Lizhi, about other dissidents still in jail, about the cultural destruction of Tibet. He is set in his ways. He thinks I don’t understand China. And he’s right in many respects.

  I hope the politicians know much more. What I can do is give money for cleft-palate surgeries. I can fund fellowships so that foreign journalists can study in the United States and take fundamental ideas back to their own countries. I can provide assistance to Tibetan groups developing self-sustaining industries.

  It’s not enough, I know. But my right to complain and shout doesn’t necessarily do a damn bit of good. In the meantime, I keep asking myself: What do I believe is right? What are my intentions? What are my responsibilities? How can my intentions match the hopes of those real lives I hope to affect?

  • the opposite of fate •

  At the end of June 2001, after a four-month book tour that had taken me to forty cities across the United States, then to a dozen more in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, I returned home to San Francisco. I lowered the shades, crawled into bed, and began the long rest I felt I deserved. I slept for nearly twenty-four hours that first day, and then another twelve to twenty at a time in the weeks that followed.

  Even before the tour, I had been exhausted, always desperate for sleep. Any amount of activity felt overwhelming. Mail piled on my desk, and I had no motivation to sort through the debris. While on the tour, I was plagued with a constant headache, a stiff neck, a heart rate that zoomed to 130 at odd times, as well as middle-of-the-night insomnia and a moldering apathy, all of which I would blame on the constant change of hotels, the frequent-flyer miles, and the emotional upheaval of recently having lost my mother and my editor just two weeks apart.

  Back at home, I told my husband, Lou, that I felt as if something in my body had broken. Something was not right. Weeks went by, and still I did not feel rested. If anything, I was more tired than ever, in part because I could sleep for only two or three hours before being awakened by a sensation I described as “Dolby Digital syndrome,” a constant vibration within my body, which felt as though someone had installed in me a souped-up megabass system for stadium-strength rap music. Unfortunately, such symptoms do not match anything in the standard diagnostic criteria.

  During the day, I could not concentrate long enough to write anything new and found myself looping around and around the same pages I had written months before. Writer’s block too, however, is not a recognized medical malady. Reading had become a similar challenge with my waning attention span. By page three or four of the stories I started, I was unable to recall anything I had read, and had to begin anew. At dinner parties, I often could not keep up with fast repartee. I could not follow segues in conversation. Everyone I met seemed quick-witted to the point of intimidation. I nodded and laughed at the moments when I saw everyone else do so.

  For reasons unknown to me, I was easily overcome with dread when I was alone. Small sounds startled me, made me leap and jerk, then imagine descendants of the boogieman from my childhood. I guessed that I was not acknowledging some deep-seated anxiety, and so off I went to consult a psychiatrist, the first time I had done so in nearly twenty years. The last one I had consulted had been pivotal in my life: he was a taciturn Jungian analyst who fell asl
eep during three sessions, and that had the effect of leading me to replace the sleepy doctor with a more lively fiction-writing workshop. With that, I began to write stories, a whole new career opened for me, and voilà, here I am, able to appreciate the absolute necessity of the doctor’s falling asleep when he did. Had he been more attentive, I might have continued my other course in life. Naturally, I wondered what profound changes in my life the new psychiatrist would bring.

  This psychiatrist remained awake. She listened, and thought I had posttraumatic stress disorder, aside from my long-seated depression. There were obvious elements in my life that might have accounted for that. For one, I had a mother who had often been seized by rages and despair. I had seen her dramatic attempts to end her life on numerous occasions during childhood, and instead of becoming inured to these episodes, I had grown up with an anticipatory angst, what people develop after a big earthquake, unsure as to when the next temblor will come along, yanking the ground from beneath them. As a teen, I had watched my father and brother waste away to skeletons from brain tumors, which my mother feared she, my other brother, and I were destined to have; I would hear this prediction echoed the rest of my life whenever I had a headache. Since we were doomed to die anyway, why not sooner than later? That logic led my mother once to vow to kill me as she pressed a meat cleaver to my throat for twenty long minutes.

  In later years, I accumulated, as others might Hummel figurines, a variety of accidents, assaults, and acts of God. While I was in college, I was a passenger in a car without seat belts that crashed into a pole; I was thrown into the windshield, with the result the rearrangement of my face. While I was in graduate school, a robber pressed the muzzle of a gun against my temple and made me and my co-workers at a pizza parlor lie facedown in the meat locker; he promised to blow out our brains if we made a single sound, whereupon the woman lying beside me began to scream like an actress in a bad horror movie. The next year I entered a bloody room that smelled of nervous sweat, so that I might identify what items had been stolen by whoever had also tortured and killed a former roommate of Lou’s and mine. Lou and I had slept in that same room the night before, and only by chance were we elsewhere the night of the crime.