Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  If my curiosity is innate, it has been greatly enhanced by involuntary apprenticeship to my mother and her school of wonderment. She questioned everything, from fishy odors to fishy explanations, both of which pointed to a faulty character. She saw significance in coincidences, and coincidences in just about any juxtaposition of events. On one occasion, it was my saying a word—so ordinary I can’t recall what it was—at the same time that the head of a rose in a vase fell off its stem. My mother stared at me and said, “Are you my mother?” My grandmother had killed herself in 1925, and the idea that I was her reincarnation made me queasy. I insisted I wasn’t her mother, yet I wondered if I might be. How would a person know who she had been in a past life? You don’t journey from one lifetime to the next with luggage tags. “You don’t have to hide,” my mother said. She continued to give me odd looks throughout the day. “Why you say you bored?” she asked at one point. “My mother said that, too.” She wondered aloud if I was her karmic punishment for not showing her mother enough concern. My mother’s brand of wonderment combined curiosity, nosiness, hypothesis, loose opinion, suspicion, seeing what you believe, and seeking what you hope, including miracles, and the reincarnation of your mother into the form of your bad American daughter.

  Coincidences abound in my life as well. Just an hour ago, as I was writing the above paragraph, my keyboard switched midsentence to writing only in Chinese characters. I cannot read or write Chinese. My immediate reaction was “hackers,” and not “karmic retribution.” I checked for signs of illegal log-ins, changed my password, reconfigured my settings, printed out current drafts, and rebooted my computer. After a hair-raising forty-five minutes, my computer was once again a monolingual speaker of English. I still don’t know why the unwanted translation happened. But I do allow it might have been a little joke played on me by my mother. I would have preferred something less exciting, like a beheaded rose.

  Nature sketching will remain an important part of my life and not simply because of the wonderment it inspires. It allows me to regard imperfection as normal. Fiction writing, on the other hand, does not allow me to ever feel satisfied with what I’ve done. If I thought to myself that a draft of anything I wrote was “good enough,” let alone, “great,” that would be the sign of a neurological disorder (one of my mother’s early signs of Alzheimer’s disease was her lack of concern over an increasing number of dings and dents on her car). When I draw, however, I allow myself to be as sloppy as I want. If I draw birds that are too large and clumsy to fit onto the limits of the paper, I buy a bigger drawing pad. When the next drawing is too big for the new pad, I cut off the crown or tail or wings, and it need not be in an artistic fashion. I once gave a curlew an overly curved bill so that it would fit on the page. It made the curlew look like it had gotten its bill stuck in an electrical socket. I have drawn many free-form arrangements of feathers that would never enable a non-helium-propelled bird to fly. I once unintentionally drew the optical illusion of a branch passing in front of a bird and exiting from behind. I see the imperfections and laugh. They’re hilarious. I post my drawings on the Nature Journal Facebook page. I show them to my husband and friends. I foist them on strangers with the eagerness of a woman showing off photos of her scowling grandkids. I am the girl I was in kindergarten who said to my parents: “Look what I did.”

  I might even show my drawings to my former art teacher. He and I maintain a yearly Christmas correspondence that includes updates on our health, the books we’ve read, and the museums we’ve visited. I’ll send him a drawing or two and remind him about the comment he made on my report card when I was seventeen. I’ll tell him I’m glad I failed to become an artist.

  Fresno, 1952: The poor minister, his frugal wife, and growing family.

  At the age of eight, I learned I had a knack for writing, one with financial benefits. I had written an essay on the assigned topic “What the Library Means to Me” and won in the elementary school division. The prize was an ivory and gold tone transistor radio. There was a reason I won. I wrote what I knew the librarians and supporters of a new library wanted to hear: I was a little kid who loved to read, that I loved the library so much I had donated my life savings (eighteen cents) so that a new library could be built. I knew to mention my age and the amount of my estate. I already had very good intuitions about what pleased people, that is, I knew how to be calculating.

  Yet there is something in that library essay that I would later recognize as an early glimmer of my imagination and my disposition as a writer. It lies in sentences from the middle of the essay: “These books seem to open many windows in my little room. I can see many wonderful things outside.” That was the sign: rooms and windows as a metaphor for freedom and imagination, one being the condition for the other. And there was also the fact that I liked to be alone in my little room. Throughout childhood, my little room—or rather, the little rooms of many successive houses from birth to seventeen—became my escape hatch from my parents’ criticism, where I was safe from scrutiny. I was in a time machine propelled by the force of a story, and I could be gone for hours having adventures with newly sprung skills—breathing underwater with a goddess, answering riddles posted by sages disguised as bearded beggars, riding bareback on a pony across the plains, or enduring cold and starvation in an orphanage. Gruel was delicious, like Chinese rice porridge. I found companionship in Jane Eyre, a girl who was independent minded and brave enough to tell her hypocritical aunt that she was unkind and would go to hell. Jane Eyre taught me that loneliness had more to do with being misunderstood than being alone.

  Throughout most of my school years, I submitted to expectations and gave the appearance that I had conformed. I was a compliant writer, dutifully putting forth what I thought teachers and professors wanted to read. In grade school, good writing was largely directed to punctuation, spelling, grammar, and penmanship. The words and sentences with errors were circled in red. I tended toward sloppiness and the second-language learning errors of my mother’s speech—“I love to go school.” Only a few essays received any comments other than “Watch your spelling.” I unearthed a report card from the seventh grade, which showed that my lowest grade was for English and the next lowest was for Spanish. (I’m glad to report that these grades did not dissuade me from receiving my B.A. in English and M.A. in linguistics.) In college, I wrote essays according to what I knew my professors wanted to read: themes on social class and the cultural shape of the ideal, or the impossibility of avoiding moral complicity as a soldier in battle. I once deviated from the formula for an essay on Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which I disliked for reasons I can no longer remember. But I vividly recall the professor sitting on the edge of his desk, facing the class, and reading aloud my essay, without identifying me as the writer. He delivered each sentence in a mocking tone and would pause at the end of each paragraph to refute what I had said. He angrily concluded, “This student knows nothing about great literature and has no right to criticize one of our greatest American writers.” Thereafter, I did not write essays that offered a true opinion of what I had thought of any book. I became a facile writer, a compliant one. Based on that criterion, I wrote well.

  After I quit my doctoral program in linguistics, I seldom wrote much beyond reports on children I had evaluated for speech and language delays. On occasion, I penned gloomy thoughts, a page or two in loose-leaf binders, some in a journal book. A few years ago, I found some of those outpourings. They had the same kind of glimmerings I had found in my library essay—the metaphors. They were not remarkable; in fact, some were overworked or reaching. But I was excited to see that they contained two common characteristics: dark emotion and a reference to a recent experience. I had used those metaphors at age twenty-five, when I felt I was still young but world-weary. I was impatient to be done with mistakes and bright promises. I wanted to acquire a few wrinkles to show I was not a baby-faced innocent. My worries were too numerous to keep track of on two hands—my fear that I was not suited to the job
I had taken, my preoccupation with the recent murder of a friend, the expectations of marriage, my mother’s constant crises, our financial hardship, and much more, which combined with my inability to articulate what I needed emotionally. When I tried, I was hyperbolic. After a trip to the beach, I wrote in my journal that I was like a sea anemone that retracted when poked and was unable to differentiate between what was benign and what intended to do me harm. After taking photos at a party on the anniversary of a friend’s murder, I grew despondent thinking about the flat surface of my existence; nothing stood out as better or more meaningful. I wrote that my life was “like a series of Polaroid snapshots, those stopped-time, one-dimensional images on chemically altered paper that served as the stand-in for tragic and trivial moments alike.” I later wrote that I was wasting my time doing things that were as aimless as shooting silver balls in a Pachinko machine, and for a reward of more silver balls, which I could use to play endlessly in a simulacrum of success. And then I bemoaned my use of metaphor as a bad habit and avoidance problem. Why couldn’t I say what I needed instead of being the martyr of cooperation?

  My emotions today are not as dark as those of a twenty-five-year-old. But the metaphors still consist of a similar mix of moods and recent experience. They do not follow the definition of metaphors learned in school—one thing being similar to another based on traits, like size or movement. They are not like those packaged homilies, e.g., the early bird gets the worm. Instead, they are often linked to personal history, and some of those autobiographic metaphors are ones that only I would understand. They arise spontaneously and contain an arc of experience. In effect, they are always about change between moments, not about a single moment, and often about a state of flux that leads to emotional understanding of something from my past. Those that are clearly linked to personal history could be described as autobiographic metaphor. Here’s an experience taken from my journal, which I have not yet used for its metaphoric imagery, but which is rich enough to produce one.

  I was swimming in open water, eye to eye with a twenty-five-foot-long whale shark on my right, within touching distance, so close I could see the velvety details of the white spots on its taupe body. As I drifted back to admire the pattern, I felt a light tap on my back and thought I might have bumped into Duncan or Lou until I saw a wall of spots loom up on my left, and all at once I found myself cradled in the small wedge between the velvety bodies of two behemoths. I was so euphoric over the magnificence of what the three of us had created—a primordial womb, a secret place—that I never considered I might have been instantly crushed between them until the sharks slowly swam past me and disappeared into the fathomless deep blue of open water, leaving me alone and unprotected.

  In rereading this anecdote, I recognize the emotions as those I have felt with infatuation during my youth. I recall being attuned to every detail of my lover, feeling the euphoria of our specialness, being unmindful of danger, until I was left suspended with uncertainty over the safety of my heart. Of course, the two experiences—infatuation and whale sharks—differ greatly in the actual degree of danger. The chances that you will get hurt are extremely high with infatuation and they are unlikely with sharks, as I discovered after swimming with them for five days. They remained curious and extraordinarily gentle. One was considerate enough to wait for me whenever I tired and could not swim fast enough to keep up.

  The best metaphors appear unexpectedly out of the deep blue by means of intuition and my infatuation with nuance.

  When I wrote my first short story, I used the image of a gardenia. The story concerned a woman who was struggling to understand the sudden death of her husband. It was heavily influenced by my own emotional experiences with the sequential deaths of my older brother, Peter, and my father. When my brother died, flowers arrived at our house, offerings of condolences in the form of carnations, chrysanthemums, roses, asters, lilies, and gardenias. My father had been the guest minister of many churches, and their clergy as well as the church members had all prayed for the needed miracle. Their floral outpouring of sympathy lined our kitchen counter and dining room table. Some were set on our coffee table in the living room. A similar variety of flowers arrived at our house when my father died six months later. I recall the colorful array of flowers and their mingled scent. I remember thinking about the cost of all those flowers. My parents rarely bought flowers. They were an unnecessary extravagance. The condolence flowers wilted within the week, but we kept them until the petals fell off and the stems rotted and smelled like dead flesh. Life is fleeting. You can’t hang on to it. That was the meaning of those flowers.

  I had once thought gardenias were the best flowers. They had a heavy perfume, creamy white petals, and thick glossy leaves. A wristlet of gardenias was the coveted flower of high school proms. But after my brother’s funeral, I no longer liked gardenias. Their beauty and scent belied their purpose as the messenger of grief. When gardenias arrived after my father died, the smell was nauseating.

  In my story “Gardenias,” I used the imagery of a room choked full of gardenias. The dark green leaves were viewed as stiff and sharp enough to cut tender skin. Their heads bowed as they died and the creamy white petals turned brown at the edges and curled like the fingers of corpses. That was indeed the image I had of them, which was why the smell of them had become as repulsive. They were the same odor of the rotted stems, the odor of dead bodies. Those flowers became the imagery of grief I could not express as a teenager hiding in my room. In the end, my metaphor broke under the burden of meaning so much that I had to abandon the story. But the heart of it—the nature of grief—remains mine.

  I read an article today on the findings of a study on visual imagery, which gave me an insight on why I like to both draw and write. MRI imaging was done on the brains of twenty-one art students and twenty-four nonartists as they drew a likeness of an object before them. The findings showed that the artists’ brains were clearly different, the most interesting being a greater density of gray matter in the precuneus of the parietal lobe, where visual mental imagery is processed. The researchers said no conclusions could be drawn as to whether the extra padding of gray matter was present at birth. But, if that was the case, it would suggest that some degree of artistic skills are innate. The scientists affirmed that exposure to art activities most certainly plays a role, as does the “environment”—for example, having an art teacher who says you have a good imagination. So now I wonder: Did my drawing proclivities in childhood increase my aptitude for the visual and emotional imagery I would later use in my writing? If I draw a bird a day, can I increase the gray matter in the precuneus and further enrich my metaphoric brain? With age, the normal brain loses cells at a faster clip, taking with it the names of common gizmos, the items you were supposed to buy the next time you were at the pharmacy, and the best way to get from your house to that place where you’re going to do the you-know and that’s why you can’t be late. I would like to sock away extra stores of gray matter for a rainy day.

  The study made me realize something about the way I write. When I see a visual image in my mind as a scene, I try to capture it in words. The process shares some similarity to drawing a bird. I look at what I imagine, I sketch it out in my story, and I do constant revisions as I try to capture it more clearly. The imagery I see is somewhat like looking through a virtual reality headset, in which I can turn myself 360 degrees to have a complete sense of the visual imagery around me. That imagery may be incomplete at first. The lawn has been planted, but the flowers haven’t bloomed. I need mosquitoes to show up before it feels real. I put myself in the imagery and I walk through rooms, sit in the garden, and stroll down the streets. I look at every detail of rooms I imagine. If it is not there, I conjure it up. I inhabit the room and experience the noises, smells, and personal details. I work toward emotional verisimilitude in all the details of experience—the way it happened, even though this is something that in reality has never happened. The “good eye” that enables me to draw th
e likeness of a cat is the “mind’s eye” that enables me to write a scene based on the imagery in my head. I sense the good eye and the mind’s eye are linked. I don’t have to wait for scientific research to tell me whether that’s true.

  Drawing of a crossbill eating grit inspired by a photo by ornithologist and friend Bruce Beehler.

  I once did a TED talk on the subject: Where does creativity hide? I did not understand the question or its intent. So I focused my remarks on my own writing, my particular area of expertise, as it were. I traced my origins as a writer to some mysterious confluence of my unknown innate abilities with early life experiences, especially trauma, which had led to the kinds of stories I am drawn to write. The talk I gave went over well enough, but I was not satisfied with it. In fact, I hated the talk. I had never explained what I thought creativity was, and that’s because I could not wrap my mind around that huge boggy box of a concept. It was like being asked those impossible metaphysical challenges, such as, “What is thinking?” While answering, you are thinking about how you are thinking. How do you even begin to parse the vast notion of creativity and isolate the elements and processes as they relate to writing? I kept seeing creativity as a neurological version of a Rube Goldberg contraption, in which one word triggers a thought, which leads to a question, and then three guesses, and some “what if” scenarios, which then plunk you into a continuum of interactions hither and yon.