Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  And then I told her about that day when she met with my parents in the living room, what my parents had said afterward, that I would be a doctor, and how it had affected me through childhood, even into adulthood. Before I could continue, she broke in. “I never said anything of the kind. That’s not what the study was about. It was about early reading.” I assured her that I knew that, because I had read her research and her book. I explained that my parents had used that opportunity to express their hopes that I would become a doctor. “Well, they shouldn’t have,” she said emphatically. “That was wrong. You were an early reader and that’s what mattered. That’s why you became a writer.”

  She had said exactly what I needed to hear.

  [ QUIRK ]

  Splayed Poem: The Road

  [From the journal]

  FEBRUARY 2012. Working to figure out the sense of a character, I took down a book of poems from the shelf above my head, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. On the first splayed page, this:

  Not I, nor any one else can travel that road for you,

  You must travel it for yourself.

  It is not far, it is within reach,

  Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,

  Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

  Like apparitions, the words appeared, as if summoned. And I understood: This is what the character is about. No, more than that: This is what my writing is about. This is what my whole life is about. It is the loneliness of never fully sharing the truth of who I am because I have not yet found it, yet know only that the words will be inadequate. Words, private not public, are all I have to give in exchange for understanding what I think, the totality of what I’ve felt. I’ve known that since I was a child, that I would never be understood.

  [ QUIRK ]

  Eidolons

  [From the journal]

  FEBRUARY 2012. A new word: eidolons. An ideal image and not a body double, not the mechanical device replicating the president’s signature, not the political surrogate spouting regional forecasts, not the plagiarist of ideas and style, not the hacker of an identity that is sixteen numbers. Eidolon—the companion at the desk, my spirit-image, like an old pair of pajamas I will change into when life is done, when I will see at last the original writing that I changed, scratching over it millions of words to dig for the original meaning.

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

  3/8/11

  TO: Amy

  FROM: Dan

  Amy, Lou, and Bombo,

  Just arrived in Jacksonville. Where? It is warm and green … Golfer territory.

  I wanted to say again what a pleasure it was to meet the three of you. I know our paths have crossed, but to spend quality time with you guys was very special to me. I’ve been a Tan Fan since Faith first told me about “this amazing young writer,” so for me as a reader, the meeting had an extra glow.

  Warm regards,

  Dan

  * * *

  3/8/11

  TO: Dan

  FROM: Amy

  Hi Dan,

  It was wonderful to spend time with you and your team and for the bonus of Malbec time. By the way, I liked your desk lamp being the solitary light, which gave the room the warmth of an intimate study, in contrast to the typical fluorescent office. I was also relieved to find I had already finished the book. The cover is terrific.

  “This amazing young writer” is now 23 years older and amazed at what is happening. I have been talking to friends and with Steven Barclay, my trusted friend and lecture agent whose clients’ publishing houses run the gamut of good and bad. All the sources have nothing but good things to say about you.

  Amy

  * * *

  3/31/11

  TO: Dan

  FROM: Amy

  Hi Dan,

  During this last week, I have been mulling over the structure of The Valley of Amazement. I am considering restructuring, so that instead of making the book a chronological narrative, it would begin with what is now the middle section—Daisy/Diashi’s story. Reordering does not really require any major revision to what I’ve been writing. It is more dropping in tangents here and there that will be connected as the book progresses.

  The reasons are several for me. There’s the intuitive one: I feel closest to this voice. I know it. There’s the narrative intrigue of not revealing in the beginning what the painting is about, nor who painted it and for what reason. In addition, this is the character that connects the other two at the end of the book by her absence. Her nature illuminates. I also think this is the voice that will draw in readers more easily and quickly.

  It’s tricky, of course, to begin with a voice, a particular consciousness, and then switch to another. Big no-no in some provincial creative writing classes. But I think I am providing enough “need to know” narrative pull to make that transition a natural progression of the story. In any case, I now think that beginning with the voice of an American woman would be misdirection as to what this story is about, that is, it is not about American and Chinese culture, but individuals and circumstances. The sense of the story is not chronological, but looping. It’s more the sensibility in Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths—infinite possibilities, coincidences that are recurrences, a realization that the sense and meaning of anything is not linear, does not follow prescribed order, but branches out of its own accord.

  Since you haven’t read actual pages, I am not expecting you can comment on this. But since you’re now my editor, I will subject you to my mulling around, which, as you will discover more and more, is like making my way through labyrinths and forking paths.

  Amy

  * * *

  3/31/11

  TO: Amy

  FROM: Dan

  Hi Amy,

  By all means, subject me to your mullings—I’m here for you, on one of the parallel forking paths, happy to be subjected.

  The notion of your restructure (in the abstract) sounds like it will offer the narrative more texture, above and below the line. Of course, when the book is done, you’ll have the chance to rearrange it again, if you feel so inclined—depending, of course, on how the novel ends up getting itself written. By the way, your description of the story being “looping as opposed to chronological” is great. As is “coincidences that are recurrences …” And, sense and meaning of anything not being linear, but branching out of their own accord. Lovely. These thoughts might join that ars poetica essay of our courtship.

  Your happy editor,

  Dan

  * * *

  4/1/11

  TO: Dan

  FROM: Amy

  Hi Dan,

  I cannot imagine any pressing need you might have to call me. But here is a US-based number for reaching me. It has voice mail, which I will listen to, since voice mails take on greater importance when received overseas. It is akin to how I felt about long-distance calls when I was a kid. The distance made the message more important because of cost and imagining a phone line that extended that long on two cans.

  You dial the number as you would any US-based number.

  415 729 3350

  It’s easy to remember.

  729 is the result of successive factors using the multiplier 3, and starting with the prime number 3:

  3 × 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 729

  Note that the number 3 appears 5 times

  Using the factors, it looks like this:

  3 × 3 = 9

  9 × 3 = 27

  27 × 3 = 81

  81 × 3 = 243

  243 × 3 = 729

  Since nothing else follows the local prefix of 729, logically, according to me, that is represented by a zero at the end of 3350.

  I was assigned this number, 729-3350, by Skype, as my online number. I kid you not.

  Numerically speaking,

  Amy

  * * *

  4/1/11

  TO: Amy

  FROM: Dan

  I
feel like I’ve just taken the SAT again. I’ll find you if I need you, but I’m hoping it won’t be necessary to distract you from your Parisian Days. What’s Bombo up to? I guess he doesn’t undergo jet lag, with his metabolism.

  * * *

  4/1/11

  TO: Dan

  FROM: Amy

  Thanks for the feedback and your saying once again that you like my confessional outpouring and want even more. The writer friend I sent it to, after having misgivings, thought it was excessive, but enjoyed it in the same way he might the National Enquirer. Well, he did not put it that way, but that was the gist of it. He is a great writer, of good taste, so I was a little worried that you would think I was a watch-out piece of work and best avoided.

  Speaking of tabloids, Lou and I could not resist buying one whose cover story was “Where are they now?” He looked at their smiling faces on the cover and said, in front of the cashier, “She’s dead, he’s dead, she is definitely dead …” so he figured that where they were was in a cemetery. He actually insisted he knew that. And the cashier laughed! I was aghast. Of course they were alive. I knew that. How could a tabloid, read by millions of compassionate people about the travails of unlucky people, write a cruel story about their favorite TV stars being dead and forgotten? What’s-her-name on “The Dick Van Dyke Show”—alive, thank you very much. (Would a TV show these days ever have a name with the words “dick” and “dyke” in it?) (See how I ramble?)

  Up and at ’em. The new me, up before 10 a.m. But oatmeal first. No green milk, which we discovered, in fact, at the tabloid-supplied supermarket, is 30 proof.

  * * *

  4/1/11

  TO: Amy

  FROM: Dan

  You can’t really shake me now, National Enquirer or no. And I truly do like your personal thoughts on the art and psychology of writing. Keep a notebook!

  The new routine sounds like you’ve completely shaken the Lyme! Also sounds like an ideal life—wish I could write novels, but I don’t have the required patience.

  * * *

  4/28/11

  TO: Dan

  FROM: Amy

  How lucky that you got to have Sunday brunch at the Spenders! Lizzie told me that Wystan, as she called Auden, came over often, and that Stravinsky, another dinner guest, wrote her a 9-note theme, which I wish she could find so I can take it to my music friends (conductors, composers, concert pianists) to appreciate and play around with. Imagine hearing him plunk out Petrushka! I used to play that all day—on my iPod, that is. I latch onto a piece of music and play it endlessly while I work, so I can keep the same mood.

  Do you like classical music? In the event you do, here are some musical notes in my life:

  My latest is the Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 3 in D minor. I love D minor! (Just kidding about that detail.) And so now you can have to imagine what mood I am in while writing the novel. Rach is always passionate. The pianist in the album I like is Yefim Bronfman—Lang Lang plays the same piece—both of whom I have heard play live, but with Bronfman, my hair stood on end and I wept and could not help but jump up at the end, as opposed to joining a standing ovation because everyone is doing so.

  One time, at an impromptu party at the loft, we had four concert pianists, two opera singers, one jazz singer, one hip-hop rock composer and singer, and one opera composer. It was not a music party either. Four of them performed spontaneously. I don’t think any musicians are coming this time. I think about myself at age six, suffering my first public humiliation at a church talent show, and am amazed that I know incredible musicians.

  * * *

  4/28/11

  TO: Amy

  FROM: Dan

  Dear Wistful,

  Interesting about the same music/same mood. I do that with playlists, some kind of odd, like my contemporary Italian, French pop, Cuban, Satie/Milhaud. Love classical music but listen to more jazz. I’ll go through the notes this weekend and make an AT PLAYLIST.

  Remind me to tell you about my interview with Auden.

  Root-Canal-ed-Out,

  D

  * * *

  5/26/11

  TO: Dan

  FROM: Amy

  Okay, I admit I may be in town, in fact, for Lisa Randall’s party. I promised a mutual friend we would go together and then train to DC where I will receive an award.

  But the thing about the Moth event is not my personal GPS bearings but absolute time. I know that this is all the answer you need to hear and that you do understand, but I want to tell you about the world in and out of my head when it comes to these sorts of things.

  Things like Padma’s event requires time figuring out the story—and I have tons of storyettes—but I need to create from them an oral narrative arc. Oral is different from written. I need to have anchors throughout to keep the arc in place, which, in the case of a person with memory issues, means constructing images in my head for each transition point, plus tight entries and exits, and known places to vary the speed, the tone, the phrases I use. I have to know what the arc leads to—a cathartic end, which I think oral storytelling requires, and if I miss it, it’s like explaining a joke.

  To do all this then requires rehearsal, they said, dry runs, and strict time limits. Those time boundaries are stressful for me. They’re killer. It is better for me to lose writing time rearranging my closet than doing a story. Story work takes me out of my novel. It requires the same brainwork.

  If I agreed, I would obsess over this for a week or more, lose work time, kick myself that I ever agreed to do what everyone said was so easy. I know I probably gave you the impression that stories fall out of me so easily. And indeed, I can give you tidbits about a story in minutes via e-mail. But when it will be performed in public, that makes it theater, and it takes on seriousness of form that requires shaping as much as any short story. It has to be tight, gently pulled, yet natural, seemingly spontaneous. The shorter it is, the more work it is for me. I’m much more of a free spirit when it comes to talking about something spontaneously. The talk I give at universities and lecture series is one I’ve worked on for years. It seems natural, off the cuff, but it’s not. I speak for an hour without notes.

  The worst part of live performance: when it’s done, I analyze what I did and I feel sick at heart because I think of all the ways it was terrible. I hate my TED talk that is on their website. I cannot bear to watch it. I want to yank it off there.

  A few years back, you could have asked me to do a circus act in a clown suit, and I would have said sure. I was always making exceptions for everyone in the past, and I have gotten myself into trouble so often over the years it is the major reason I don’t have a book. An opera that was supposed to be easy—no work necessary!—took 5 years to make. I did hundreds of interviews because they came pleading that this and that interviewer said they would not do it unless I did it—“You gotta! It’s the NY Times!” Years out of my life. Then came a book on the making of the opera, published by Chronicle Books. Then a man took wonderful photos of the opera and wanted a foreword. Then came a documentary on the making of the opera, which required shooting in SF and China.

  During the last five years, I also did an “easy” assignment, an article for National Geographic. Major work. But that is what took me to the boonies of Guizhou and into a rice field in the mountains of impoverished farmers. That’s where I ate the magic food with the Feng Shui Masters to help those who had been possessed by ghosts. It’s where I sat on little guest stools for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, having conversations about the ghost of a man who died in a fire that burned a fifth of the village. I lived in that village about 3 weeks over a period of time. It took months to write that 4,000-word piece. It was wonderful and I don’t regret it, because that is an enriched life and I need that kind of life to write.

  But I also need to finish a novel.

  * * *

  5/26/11

  TO: Amy

  FROM: Dan

  I agonize over every public event for months, write a hundred d
rafts of a talk or essay that will be gone the moment the event is over. Frankly, my best night is a night when I find myself at the end of day having forgotten to make a plan. So I drag myself out to dinner. I jotted this down (it’s all about the Carbonara rhyme):

  THE DINER IN THE CORNER

  A table in the corner of the room, my table, 52,

  beyond the new electronics, dinner alone all the way through.

  For a moment. For an evening. If it’s true the price of fame

  is the loss of anonymity, goodbye applause, goodbye acclaim,

  I’m welcomed back to my seat in the neighborhood restaurant,

  a plainly clad waitress and the missing maître d’, just a pleasant

  welcome back, the specials a few chalk marks on the blackboard

  leaning against a badly painted wall. Tonight it’s the grilled sword-

  fish, Mussels in Cast Iron and Brussels Sprouts Carbonara.

  I have the company I need—a novel and recent e-mails are a

  Happy evening’s entertainment. Solo, nothing to dialogue,

  Only my plate and me, sustenance, some wine and monologue

  Between self and soul. It’s pretty fucking grand sitting here

  In the corner at table 52, just me and me, unpardoned and clear.

  * * *

  5/27/11

  TO: Dan

  FROM: Amy

  I LOVE YOUR POEM! I will have to have a table number for myself, and that will be something to keep in mind when I need to mentally escape. I sat at the bar of a really popular restaurant in the Ferry Building last Saturday after my French class and ate a Vietnamese lunch. I was anonymous, but there were no table numbers. Maybe I was Stool 17.

  I have anonymity, I feel, most of the time, but not enough during some important times. Like being in a public toilet. Tonight it was nice to not be anonymous. I went to a screening of Woody Allen’s new movie and when we arrived we were told by some officious guy with red-streaked hair that there were no more seats left, even though we had RSVPd. He waved his hand to four other disappointed people and said we were not alone. We were about to leave, when a woman coming out of the screening room spotted me and said, “Amy?” She made a gesture for me to wait, then went into the theater. After a couple of minutes, she came out and gestured for me to come in, just like the rabbit from Wonderland. I called for Lou and the red-streaked guy warned him not to go in. But we dashed inside and we were being shown to seats. The guy ran in and I heard him say that we didn’t have tickets. Then rabbit woman said something and he went away.