The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

by Amy Tan

  Just before my first book debuted, I nearly managed to be published posthumously, when I came close to drowning in the Sea of Cortez. I had to be dragged back to shore and have salt water pushed out of my lungs. More recently, after forty inches of rain melted twelve feet of snow, mudslides the size of container ships ramrodded their way down the sides of our cabin in Tahoe, leaving Lou and me stranded next to a perilously rising river. To add to my sense of foreboding, there was the dark side of being published: the overly devoted fans and detractors, three of whom had expressed fantasies of killing me, one of whom had followed me onto a plane to tell me how he would do it.

  In retrospect, it is no wonder I was jumping out of my skin at every little noise. I seemed to be a magnet for danger. Why was I so unlucky? Was this karmic payment for some carelessness in a past life? Were these signs that my demise was one breathless moment away? Or could it be that the reverse was true, that these calamities were proof, deliberately sent, that I was amazingly lucky, as invulnerable to weapons and villains as a comic-book action figure? I have fluctuated between the two views: incredibly lucky, incredibly unlucky, doomed to die soon, destined to overcome all. And until recently, I had accommodated an eventful life with high resilience and a low dose of antidepressants. Why was my body now expressing its outrage at these traumas?

  The psychiatrist wisely suggested that I have a complete medical workup, so off I went to consult with my regular doctor. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it turned out I was merely deficient in one of those vitamins or enzymes without which one becomes nervous, weak-minded, and neurotic?

  A week later, while I was in New York, my doctor in San Francisco called with the results of my blood tests. I was perfectly normal, she told me, except for one thing: my blood sugar was low. Well, no surprise there. I had told her years before that I was prone to “low blood sugar,” especially when I was traveling or under stress. And besides, everyone had occasional hypoglycemia. It was the yuppie disease, and a bag of M&M’s was usually the remedy.

  “This is really low,” my doctor said. “In fact, the number is rather alarming.” Doctors tend to be unfazed when your limbs have nearly rotted off, so I wondered what could be viewed as “alarming.”

  She explained that the glucose reading was 27, a level that in most people would mean unconsciousness or at least inability to sit up and talk, whereas I had walked into her office the day the blood was drawn, and remained both conversant and vertical. My doctor ran through the possibilities that might account for the glucose anomaly, but dismissed most of them, including my having secretly injected myself with purloined insulin or eaten unripe ackee fruit from Jamaica. Finally, I heard her say she wanted to do more tests when I returned to San Francisco, so we could rule out a tumor in my pancreas and possibly my brain. Those two things, she hastened to add, were highly unlikely.

  I remember that I forced myself to sound calm, almost unconcerned, when in truth I was the one who now felt alarmed. Could this be the fulfillment of the curse my mother had feared? At last, it was happening. I could sense it: I had a brain tumor, just as my father, older brother, and mother had had. Mine would make four, and four was the unluckiest number in Chinese, for the si for “four” is homophonous with the si for “death.” Then again, this might not be a Chinese curse but a genetic one, a fate that lay within my family’s DNA, encoded in a cell that was all too eager to turn ugly, proliferate like roaches, and squeeze its nest into the limited confines of my skull.

  Confronted with all this, I did what any person with Chinese curses and bad medical news does these days: I consulted the Internet. While my mother had turned to the supernatural for its infinite wisdom, I found solace within the vastness of the World Wide Web. There I could continue the search for a diagnosis and cure with the help of Dr. Google, who guided me, nonjudgmen-tally, through a universe of astrocytomas and migraines, chemotherapy and miracle cures of charlatans.

  My preoccupation with illness could be only short-lived, for the next day I had to go to the CNN newsroom in midtown Manhattan for a live interview related to the launch of Sagwa, an animated series on PBS based on a children’s book I had written. I had struggled against fatigue to awaken before eight that morning. In the newsroom, I was sitting in a tall director’s chair, earpiece inserted, lavaliere microphone hooked to my lapel, black monitor before me as visual focus so I could pretend to be talking face to face with my interviewer. On the TV monitors to my right, I saw images of pregnant models wearing scanty rave-style clothing that exposed their ballooning bellies from bra line to crotch. It was Fashion Week in New York, and in my opinion, someone had scraped the bottom of the barrel for that one.

  “One minute to live,” I heard a voice say in my earpiece. It was shortly before nine a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. This was the soft-news hour, when hardworking people in New York had already gone to their jobs, when alarm clocks on the West Coast were starting to sound, and mothers between those geographic points were preparing their children’s breakfasts and were eager, I hoped, to learn of a new cartoon that would occupy the minds of their brilliant young progeny.

  I was relaxed, an old hand at interviews, yet something did not feel quite right. People in the newsroom were talking in loud, tense voices. I knew that background sounds gave the impression of fast-breaking news, but this level of verisimilitude was ridiculous. People seemed gruff, even rude. I concluded that these were colleagues who disliked one another and were suffering job burnout. Listen to them yell at each other:

  “What do you mean, you can’t get him on the line? Then go and find him. Quick!”

  “Where the hell is Aaron?”

  “That’s insane! This is absolutely insane!”

  “Go down to the Port Authority, right now—I said right now!”

  “All right, we got live feed! Everybody, here it is.”

  And I saw an image flash onto a dozen screens: a burning building.

  I pulled off the earpiece, undid the lavaliere. From years of doing two-minute television interviews, I knew that just about anything—breaking news on political scandals, updates on O. J. Simpson’s trial, and certainly a local fire with live footage—would be deemed more important than an author plugging her own work. And then I noticed a bizarre element. There was a plane stuck in the heart of the building, and the building itself was not just any building with a city’s downtown horizon behind it. It was one of the World Trade Center towers, and the horizon was the clear blue sky.

  “It’s a commercial jet,” someone confirmed. “We have a witness.” And I realized that the shouting in the newsroom had not been rude exchanges but tension bordering on chaos.

  When another plane hit the other tower, I heard someone murmur, “This is war.” I left my chair and walked to the greenroom, trying to fathom what this meant. What do you do when World War III has erupted and you’re in a newsroom hearing about it? An intern came up to me and said, “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to do this some other day.” I nodded, although I knew there would be no other day, certainly not for this interview, and possibly not for anything else. Another woman grabbed me and said frantically, “Have you seen Aaron? We need Aaron in Hair and Makeup right away.”

  “Okay,” I said, having no idea who this Erin woman was. Was she a paramedic? People were going about doing their jobs, enacting approximations of what they usually did, but making no sense in this altered context. I needed to go home and turn on the news to find out what was going on. But wait—these were the very people viewers turned to for that. To everyone’s credit, no one in the newsroom was racing out the door or hiding under a desk in fetal position. Yet to judge from the stunned faces, the tearful curses, the sky was falling, and we were all going to die.

  Of course, I was not close to death, not like those who worked in the towers and had escaped by accident, or God’s grace, or whatever timely circumstance intervened and delivered them out of harm’s way. It could have been a missed train, a daughter’s earache, a decision to go downstair
s to buy a new pair of reading glasses. As for me, I would be the answer to a trivia question that would never be asked: Which guest on CNN was preempted by the attack on the World Trade Center?

  An hour or so later, I found myself walking along Seventh Avenue, trying to reach home to be with Lou. I was heading downtown against a stream of people moving uptown, their dusty bodies like figures from Pompeii come back to life. We all stopped when the second tower collapsed, descending like a runaway elevator into the earth. In my mind, I rode it the whole way down and felt in my chest the crush of lives.

  For the next six days, while barricaded in our home a mile north of the site, I paced about with tightened sphincter muscles and gritted teeth, waiting for the next explosion, the next wail of fire trucks, the roar of F-16s zooming past our windows and then across the television screen. I felt lucky to be alive, but like those around me, I did not know how long that luck would last. I didn’t know what would come next. The only thing any of us could do was pass the time as fate took its course.

  When I returned to San Francisco, I sensed I had been given a reprieve from terror. The danger was far removed now. Or was it closer than ever? While I was no longer as focused on the uncertain future of the world, I had to turn to the uncertain state of my own body. Another blood test showed dangerously low blood sugar. And thus began a regime of tests to rule out the usual, and the unusual, suspects. There was a terrorist in my body, and I wanted it caught and removed.

  Several times a week, I went to the hospital for tests—giving what felt like liters of blood and urine, as well as undergoing two CAT scans, an MRI, and a forty-eight-hour hospitalized fast. For most of my life, I had rarely gone to a doctor’s office, let alone a hospital, save for an annual Pap smear and mammogram. I had not suffered from any prolonged illness. Flu symptoms lasted no more than twenty-four hours. I always managed to avoid colds, while my husband might catch two or three a year. I had been so confident of my health that I had only the barest of insurance policies, one that cost a few hundred dollars a year, and that accordingly covered only the most basic of emergencies, such as decapitation.

  Now I was paying the price for arrogance about my good health. I had been thrown into the maze of hospital corridors and insurance forms, with every procedure automatically denied by a grand vizier who lived unseen behind an 800 number. To this magistrate of maladies, my symptoms did not exist unless I died from them. So for now, since I was still very much alive, the tests were unnecessary and not covered.

  Some good news came early on. I did not have a brain tumor. There were fifteen “unidentified bright objects” in my frontal and parietal lobes, but that might be nothing more than the residue of age, I was told. So the curse was off, the images of my blank-eyed father and comatose brother receded.

  I found myself wishing for a diagnosis, which in essence meant I was wishing for a disease. As the weeks passed, I grew impatient having to keep my life on hold until the next batch of test results arrived. I had to cancel lectures in Maryland and New York, an appearance for The Washington Post’s book club, a trip to Aixen-Provence to honor Toni Morrison, a fête in New Delhi with Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul—though who wanted to fly in this time of heightened security? Better to stay home, where I could stand on my toes, watching for the demise of the Golden Gate Bridge, waiting for the latest tests results. I was struck by how my sense of danger matched the new national climate. We were all anxious over the unknown terrorist who was awaiting us, in tall buildings, at monuments, in amusement parks. We all delayed going on vacation, taking airplanes, and crossing bridges. If anything, my disease served me well as a distraction from a larger uncertainty. Nonetheless, I wanted to secure a diagnosis, good or bad, and then move on with my life in some place other than a hospital waiting room with unread Golf magazines and elderly patients who looked genuinely unwell.

  What if I had to spend the rest of my life being this lethargic and foggy-headed and not know why? What if I would never again have the energy to hike along the trails of Mount Tamalpais, or ski in races that didn’t matter, or dance like a fool with The Rock Bottom Remainders? What if I had to struggle with each sentence I wrote, feeling as if I were writing with a terrible head cold and lack of sleep? What the hell was wrong with me? The cause had to be medical, for I wasn’t unhappy with my life. I wasn’t the sort who needed a psychosomatic ailment to compensate for a psychic wound. Yet no cause for my illness would turn up. Time after time, the tests came back as disgustingly “normal.” To me, “normal” meant that I had failed the tests. I wanted numbers that were tangibly abnormal, anything that would explain the problems, lead to the correct treatment, and enable me to return to a truer normal, to be oblivious of my state of health. Soon the doctors would exhaust the possibilities, and if nothing was found, they would give me a benevolent look, tell me that I was quite healthy, and that I should discuss this further with my psychiatrist.

  Somewhere in the parallel universe, where everything is absolutely known, was the elusive namable reason. Could the reason be changed? Could I do as Christians did when they went to China in the 1800s and conquer Chinese fate with religious faith? If I prayed for a less serious ailment, could I really change an already given cause? Was it possible to have symptoms to suit a dozen diseases and have God decide later which one, if any, it was? Hadn’t He already decided what I had when He allowed the symptoms to arise? Or was He in charge only of reducing the medical sentence? How did prayer work, anyway? What were you praying to alter or affect?

  And then one day, finally, after so many tests, a promising candidate surfaced as the source of my problems: a tumor on one of my adrenal glands, that set of organs above the kidneys that does not exist in most people’s minds until something goes wrong. A tumor! So my mother was right once again.

  The tumor, on my left adrenal, was a tiny little thing, a tad more than a couple of centimeters wide, called an “incidentaloma” because it was the kind of anomaly doctors find incidentally when searching for other problems. As the specialist explained, if you examine anyone’s body long enough, you will find all kinds of bugaboos: cysts and scotomas, lesions and adhesions, calcification and clogs, thinning and thickening of cells, tissue, and arteries, and skin eruptions as varied as snowflakes, most of which are the usual detritus of commuting, fast food, and the vicissitudes of time. It sounded as harmless as finding loose change and popcorn stuck between the seat cushions in an old movie theater. A small portion of incidentalomas might require cleanup and removal, but for the most part, some degree of body weirdness and decrepitude was expected. And indeed, my doctor told me my tumor was probably benign, given its size, meaning it was probably not malignant.

  In my posttraumatized state, “probably not” was not a reassuring prognosis. After all, did most people nearly die a dozen times? Did most people have three brain tumors among their immediate family members? The answer to both was “probably not,” but look what had happened to me. The specialist went on to suggest a reasonable plan: I could wait and see, then have a CAT scan done every six months to check whether the tumor was growing. Or I could choose to have the left adrenal gland taken out now. Let’s see, I said to myself, which would I rather do—gnaw my fingers down to the bone over the next six months, or convict and sentence the tumor right now, guilty on all counts? Off with its head, I said.

  After the laparoscopy, I was given steroids to help me along until my right adrenal gland kicked back into service. As I recovered from surgery, I noticed that the Dolby Digital buzz and fast heart rate were gone. My doctor and I congratulated ourselves on having found the apparent culprit. But then the hallucinations began.

  The night they first came, I had retired to bed early. Three hours later, I suddenly woke up, as I often did. I glanced at the clock. It was only twelve-thirty a.m. The light in the dressing area was still on, and I was about to get up to turn it off when I saw my husband standing in the doorway. “Lou?” I called out. He walked silently toward me until he reached my
side of the bed. Oh no, bad news. I waited for him to turn on the lamp and tell me who had died. But he said nothing. Was he dumbstruck with grief? “Lou?” I said again, and as I reached for him, my fingers raked thin air, and the figure before me warped and then evaporated.

  I jumped out of bed, certain now that Lou was dead and the vision I had just seen had been his ghost. I ran down the stairs and through the house, my dogs at my heels, calling his name until I found him, very much alive, watching television. So what had I seen? Was the hallucination the residual effect of being on morphine and anesthetized during surgery? Since my release from the hospital, besides steroids, I had been taking nothing more powerful than ibuprofen.

  My doctors did not think the vision was a drug reaction. Yet they could not say what it was. With their kind but concerned looks, did they think I had the dreaded medical malady known as “loose screw”?

  The hallucinations came once a week, then every few days, and eventually, daily. This was especially problematic when I was away from home and staying in a hotel. Since I had had stalkers and death threats, I could not automatically assume that the stranger I thought I saw lying next to me in the middle of the night was a phantom of my mind and not a flesh-and-blood lunatic (on one occasion years before, a real man, drunk and completely naked, had come into my hotel room from an adjoining door). To deal with the hallucinations, I trained my Yorkshire terriers to search hotel rooms before I entered. “Find bin Laden” became my cue, and their game was to dash behind doors and into dark closets, to zoom under beds and behind curtains in search of vermin in their mind and a villain in mine. When the odd people appeared to me at night, I would whisper, “Who’s there?” and the dogs would instantly leap to attention, scan the room, sniff the air. When they settled back to sleep, so would I. That is, I would try to sleep after having seen a corpse lying next to me, or a pudgy poodle dangling from the ceiling, or two girls skipping rope by the side of my bed, or a woman in a white dressing gown standing in a garden, or a carnival barker playing a circus organ.