Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  And then one day, quite by chance, I learned something about the way I think, which in turn told me something else about the way I write. I was at a social gathering of scientists, artists, musicians, and writers. A researcher from a university did a short presentation concerning a potential cure for AIDS. He was on a team that had extracted a piece of DNA from a man who had a rare genetic mutation that made him immune to the AIDS virus. The scientific team engineered a molecular structure, known as zinc finger, which could hold the proteins with this DNA mutation. This was then transplanted into the immune system of a patient dying of AIDS. The patient became not only free of the virus but also immune thereafter. During the break, I talked to a molecular biologist, a pioneer of zinc finger. I asked him how the transplanted DNA proteins had made this possible. Did it change the virus, kill it, or did it alter something in the cells of the immune system that made it impossible for the AIDS virus to attach? He said it was more like the latter. When trying to understand scientific concepts beyond my grasp, I often resort to metaphors. I asked: “So it’s sort of like pouring oil over a boat to keep Somali pirates from getting on board.” He was taken aback. “Yes,” he answered, “but how did you think of that?”

  I, in turn, was taken aback by his question and realized my example was indeed rather odd. I could only answer that I looked for ways to understand things through metaphor. “But why oil and pirates?” he asked. And I answered, “Why zinc finger? How did you come up with that?” His answer was logical: the structure resembled five fingers and had to do with the interaction of zinc ions.

  Later I thought more about our exchange. Why indeed had oily pirates surfaced out of a sea of metaphoric possibilities? Why had I not used, say, cowboys trying to capture greased pigs at a county fair? Something about the image felt familiar, but tracing its source was like doing detective work in disintegrating dreams. And then the connection snapped into place.

  A few months before, I had been at a friend’s ranch in Sonoma. It was a hot summer day, and about five or six of us were sitting in lounge chairs next to a small irregularly shaped pool. Proximity to water may have led us to recall a woman who spoke recently at a conference about her solo voyage halfway around the world. That naturally progressed to the recent rash of pirates hijacking boats. Then someone recalled a terrible story in which Somali pirates boarded a yacht and killed all four passengers. That led us to muse what we might have done to keep pirates from climbing onto a boat we might be on. Guns? Someone joked: We’re from Marin County. We wouldn’t have guns. We threw out more hypothetical solutions—in fact, they had to do with things you might have on board that could be thrown—kitchen knives, boiling water, fishing tackle. I then proposed my solution—barrels of engine oil poured over the surface of the boat, which would cause the villains to slip and fall back into the water. I pictured it clearly—a slick black coating, along with a bunch of now empty oil drums rolling toward the pirates to deliver the hilarious coup de grâce that cartoon characters use to elude the villains. Months after coming up with this antipirate solution, it emerged instantly as a match for my guessing how a raft of DNA proteins keeps the AIDS virus from interacting with other cells. Although a barrel of oil and a scaffolding of ions and proteins are far from similar in appearance, the patient and the passengers share something in common. They are terrified and helpless, facing imminent death and thus desperate for someone to bootstrap a solution, be it someone’s DNA mutation or a greasy ship hull.

  So much of my understanding of myself comes together through metaphoric imagery. One thing is like another. It is not the physical likeness. It is the emotional core of the situation, the feeling of what happens. If you do a Venn diagram of the metaphoric imagery and the situation at hand, the overlap is emotional memory. It has its own story, a subconscious connection to my past. I know it is subconscious because it comes out without my thinking about it. Its revelation is often shocking to me, as if I were seeing the ghost of my mother, bringing me a sweater she had knit for me when I was five. “Look what I did,” she says. I recognize the feeling and what it means. This is why writing is so deeply satisfying to me. Even if the pages I’ve written prove to be unusable for the novel—and that often happens—I have still had the experience of using memory and intuition to write a story. I have found more intersections with the different points of my life. They create a map to meaning, taking me to origins and back again. I can see the pattern of early expectations and promise, and how death threw the patterns and religious beliefs askew, how a pronouncement that I had no imagination was both believed and ignored. Through writing, I dive into wonderment and come up with corpses, whale sharks, pirates, and the head of a rose.

  Despite my fluidity in conjuring up imagery, writing the actual narrative is a laborious and confounding experience tantamount to conducting an orchestra of ghosts or being the caterer for a wedding reception full of thieves and drunks. The narrative comes in halting steps, lurches in a new direction every hour or drifts away. The first chapter is written ten times and will eventually be entirely discarded. The story is hobbled by doubt and piecemeal revisions, and for a good long while, the story is so flimsy I fear it will collapse. The little room is the storeroom of memorabilia: boxes of old diaries, both mine and my father’s visas, fake certificates, letters pleading mercy, report cards, WHILE YOU WERE OUT messages, thousands of old photos of family and unknown people, aerograms written in Chinese, address books, birthday cards, baby announcements, wedding cards, sympathy cards, letters of recommendation, my homework, my brother’s homework, my father’s homework, my mother’s homework, angry letters, acceptance letters, and the memories of things I lost, as well as those childhood souvenirs I’m sure I kept but cannot find—the great assortment of my life. As I struggle to capture what I mean, the right word I know so well is on the tip of my tongue, and so is the right idea, but as soon as I remember that word, phrase, or idea, another elusive set takes its place. I must do this repeatedly until I find enough of them to fill a novel. The process of writing is the painful recovery of things that are lost.

  The characters arrive with stiff personalities or histrionic ones. They will remain caricatures until I can truly feel them. At several points in the writing, I will realize I have embarked on an impossible task. I will have fewer than a hundred pages, always fewer than a hundred, and they are all bad. I will be seized with paralyzing existential dread that I will never finish this book. Who I was an hour ago no longer exists. This is not writer’s block. This is chaos with no way out. The metaphoric connections have been cut. The wonders are gone. The worst has happened. I am no longer a writer. And then, after another five minutes of self-flagellation, I start writing again.

  When I took my first writers workshop, I heard someone talk about the continuous dream. The essence was this: once you set up your story, you should step into it and write as if you are living in that fictional dream. The result would be a story that would make readers feel that they, too, were in a seamless story, a dream. I believed that the continuous dream was a normal state that most writers went into, a state of higher awareness. It happened to me from time to time, but in spurts, and not as often as it should. I was new to writing fiction, and I believed that in time, my continuous dreams would become more continuous. While trying to minimize the noise of construction work in an adjacent building, I discovered that listening to music could keep me immersed in the mood of a scene for longer periods of time. But I still had to create the scene, characters, and basis for the story. Music could not fix flaws. Nor was music successful in keeping external distractions from reaching me—the phone, faxes, and what would happen to my privacy after I was published. I was naive—unaware that heaps of self-consciousness awaited me. After my first book was published I found my groove far less often than I did ruts. Each book since then has been increasingly difficult to write. The more I know about writing, the more difficult it is to write. I am too often in a self-conscious state that excludes the intuitive subcon
scious one. I need to stop rereading each sentence I write before I continue to the next. You can’t write a novel one sentence at a time.

  Distractions vie with self-consciousness as the reason novels-in-waiting languish from neglect. I have learned to say no to events, to parties, to seeing friends from out of town, to providing comments on books about to be published. But none of the strictures I put on my time are able to hold tight when there is a family emergency, or when a friend has just received a bad diagnosis. None of it works when I hear the piteous screams of my little dog, which was what he emitted the other night. I came out of the land of continuous dreams and ran to him. After loving his teddy bear, my little dog was unable to retract his penis into its protective sheath. The sight of that problem was much bigger for such a little dog than I would have ever imagined possible—had I even imagined it. Imagine my four-pound Yorkie as a miniature stallion. It was appalling to me, his noncanine mother. I quickly looked up information via the Internet and found the prognosis and the treatment: if the situation was not immediately handled—literally handled—my little dog would risk infection, even amputation. I got out the olive oil. I put on the examining gloves. An hour later, he was fine. I was not. That’s the kind of distraction I’m talking about, ones I must handle immediately, no matter how well or poorly my writing is going.

  To get away from distractions, I once tried an artists’ colony. While I can work perfectly well on an airplane, I discovered that in this haven for industrious artists, I could not begin. The room was oddly arranged, with two twin beds and three metal desks lined against the walls, a configuration that made me uncomfortable. It was bad feng shui, and I would be out of harmony if I did not change it. The beds had orange bedspreads, which I also found disturbing. I spent the entire first night moving furniture around. The next morning, I bought new bedspreads. I then discovered that the room faced the rising sun and cast a glare on my computer screen. The room was muggy and I had to sit right next to a large fan and anchor my pages so they did not blow away. I then couldn’t work because the unoccupied room next to mine became the meeting place for extramarital affairs. Its trysting sets of industrious writers, musicians, and painters banged the bedstead against the common wall without self-consciousness or consideration of my peace of mind. I bought better earphones and listened to louder music. I left the artists’ colony with twenty pages. My inability to write actually had nothing to do with the room. It was a beautiful room. Those orange bedspreads were not impediments to my writing. I was. I had imagined I was supposed to do great work in that room where Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers had also stayed. With their good works in mind, I found it hard to begin. I was too self-conscious of what I was supposed to produce, and thus I avoided writing altogether.

  I read a study recently on creativity and the brain, which gave me insight into my difficulties writing. MRI imaging was done on the brains of jazz pianists who play by improvising, which is, in essence, composing on the fly, a high level of spontaneous creativity. The results showed that when the jazz pianists were improvising, their brains were not more engaged, but less, in particular, in the frontal lobes. In nonscientific terms, the frontal lobes keep you under control so that you appear to be a rational, well-socialized human being. They keep you from telling your boss he’s an asshole or taking off your clothes in public simply because it’s warm. Whenever I meet people who are not aware how asinine they come across, I suspect their frontal lobes have suffered decay. The frontal lobes, I am guessing, are the center of self-consciousness and self-censorship. Somehow, jazz pianists are able to put that state of control on standby. One jazz pianist described improvising as complete freedom.

  When I write, I’m certain my frontal lobes are very much in active mode. The self-censors are busy. The wellspring of doubt and worry are overflowing. The standards of perfection are polished and on display. I imagine a look of deep concern on my editor’s face when he reads the manuscript. I think I have a brain disease. I suspect the gray matter in my precuneus is becoming a bit threadbare. My need to avoid complacency has trapped me. It has had an ill effect on my writing. It is time to put away the imagined critics, the ones who said, “Lacks imagination or drive, which are necessary to a deeper creative level.”

  Like those jazz pianists, I, too, have also had nonstop improvisational flights. I know exactly what they feel like. They have occurred at least once with every work of fiction, both in short stories and novels. They come as unexpected openings in portals that enable me to step into the scene I am writing. I am fully there, the observer, the narrator, the other characters, and the reader. I am clearly doing the writing, yet I do not know exactly what will happen in the story. I am not planning the next move. I am writing without hesitation and it feels magical, not logical. But logic later tells me that my writing was freed because I had already set up the conditions that allowed my frontal lobes to idle in neutral. Most of the logistics of time, place, and narrative structure had been established. There was less to decide, because there was less to eliminate. What was left was for me to say what happens next, letting emotions and tension become the momentum driving the story forward. If I can push out my inhibitions, I will have access to intuitions, and with that come the autobiographical metaphors I have garnered over a lifetime. The imagery arrives without my consciously choosing it. The narrative knows intuitively where to go.

  I cannot tell you the exact mechanics of how this happens. That would be tantamount to trying to deconstruct the arrival and contents of any stream of thought or emotions. But I do sense that the mind has an algorithm of sorts for detecting possible interactions of visual imagery, language, and emotion that can form autobiographic metaphors. Those combinations are not haphazard. There are patterns and parameters. It may be similar to chemistry. The brain is, after all, a busy hive of chemical interactions of oxygen, metals, hormones, and the like. Maybe each image has a valence—a potential for bonding with intuitions and emotions to form metaphoric compounds. Perhaps narrative tension is the electrically charged state that attracts pairings of words to thought, words to emotions, molecules of meaning.

  I do know that the more tension I feel in the story, the further I am pulled forward—once close to fifty continuous pages in a twelve-hour period. That run occurred during the writing of my third novel, the same one I had been trying to write the year before at the artists’ colony. By then I knew what was at stake for the narrator—the disappearance of a woman who may or may not have been her sister. I felt the same urgency and tension in thinking about the impending disappearance of my mother, who had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The stakes were doubled when my editor Faith Sale was diagnosed a month later with Stage IV cancer. She was like a sister to me. I had no excuse to delay the book and keep it from her. I rented an apartment in New York City, near where Faith lived. Like the room at the artists’ colony, the apartment was too sunny, the desk was not aligned according to the dimensions of the room. I put a plastic table and chair inside a lightless butler’s pantry, and I started writing at 6:00 P.M. My mind was clear. There was no hesitation, no puzzling over plot points. I wrote in a state of elation, not knowing how much time was passing. When I finished, I opened the door and gasped to find the sun rising at dawn. Twelve hours had gone by. That day I gave the completed manuscript to Faith. The words I wrote that night were the ones that were published.

  Looking back, those fifty pages seem like a miracle to me. I have never been in a similar fugue state since, neither in length nor intensity. In writing about this now, I realize what can free the mind of self-consciousness: uncertainty and urgency, and in the case of my third novel, the urgency was the combination of terror and love. Uncertainty and urgency moved the story forward in other novels. These days, those uninterrupted passages last for only a few paragraphs or at most, a few pages. They almost always arrive as the ending of a chapter or the novel—when the narrator and I reach a point where we recognize what this confluence of thought, emo
tion, and events has led to. As I continue to write, I don’t know what will happen, and yet I do. It is inevitable, like déjà vu moments, experienced as familiar as soon as I write them, the revelation of my spiritual twin—the intuitive part of me made conscious.

  That was what I sensed while writing The Joy Luck Club. When the metaphoric understanding came, I felt astonishment similar to what I experienced when I emerged from my spell in a lightless room to find the sun rising at dawn. In the story “Scar,” I had not anticipated that imagery that was both violent and painful would also be emotionally freeing.

  Even though I was young. I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.

  This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.

  This was unexpected understanding from a place in the brain where metaphoric imagery is not governed by logic but exists as a sensation of truth steeped in memory, the twin to intuition.

  Spontaneous epiphanies always leave me convinced once again that there is no greater meaning to my life than what happens when I write. It gives me awareness so sharp it punctures old layers of thought so that I can ascend—that’s what it feels like, a weightless rising to a view high enough to survey the moments of the past that led to this one. Too soon, that feeling dissipates, and I am hanging on to contrails as I come back down to a normal state of mind—the one that requires me to write in the more laborious, conscious, preplanned way, all the while hoping I will soon have another intuitive run in which the pieces join, lose their seams, and become whole.

  Has my imagination worked this way since birth? What enables me to draw a bird that looks like a bird? When did I start noticing that one thing is emotionally like another? When did emotion and imagery start colluding with velvety sharks?