Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  A few months later, my mother became friends with three widows, and they used the Ouija board on numerous occasions and received much better answers than mine, including one that indicated that my father was disappointed in my choice of boyfriend, and another in which my boyfriend’s father declared—in German, no less—that he was disappointed in his son.

  That would have been the end of my ghostwriting stint if I had not started writing fiction. My mother believed that many of the stories I had written had been dictated to me by her mother.

  The other day, while digging through a box of documents, I found a bit of my mother’s writing. It was a recipe she had jotted down after someone suggested she write a sequel to my novel The Kitchen God’s Wife, which she felt was close to her true story. She would call her book The Kitchen God’s Wife Cookbook. She was indeed an excellent cook, but she was not able to organize her knowledge into precise amounts of ingredients and clear instructions. Her method of explanation ran more toward a haphazard list of ingredients without quantities. She was an intuitive cook. “The recipe is in my nose,” she often said to those who admired her cooking. Her sense of smell determined if she had the right mix of ingredients and whether it was salty enough. Her eyes, tongue, and fingers judged whether the food had cooked long enough. As she saw it, it took only twenty additional seconds for fish to go from tender and juicy to overcooked and dry. Having grown up eating her food, I developed a refined palate for how Shanghainese dishes should taste, as well as an eye for how a dish should appear—how thick or thin or long the meat or vegetables had been sliced, whether the dish glistened with just the right amount of oil or was soaking in nasty pools of it. Being in the kitchen with her was stressful. She was a perfectionist, and given the amount of work it took to shop, prepare, cook, serve, and clean up, I was not motivated to learn how to cook. On those rare occasions when I did cook, I would simply wing it, but with less satisfactory results.

  1991: My mother’s recipe for wonton.

  But now, nearly two decades after her death, I have in hand her written instructions for cooking wonton soup. I found it in a box of documents and letters. The recipe included steps on how to cook wonton but not how to make it—no list of ingredients, no helpful hints on the precise way to wrap the filling using thin square sheets of dough. What she wrote sounded exactly like the way she talked. It brought back to vivid memory what she looked like as she explained what to do with a pile of uncooked dumplings and a steaming pot of boiling water. Those instructions were also a reminder why I was required to serve as her scribe.

  HOW TO COOK WONTON

  put half pot of water to boil put salt into

  put wonton into boil water

  right way to stir them not let them stick to bottom.

  wait to see water boil again, stir the wonton and put a cup or ½ of cold water into the boiling water so the wonton start to boil again. Then cold water again total 3 times. Wait 2–3 minutes then to see if satisfy you.

  In the box with the wonton recipe, I found my mother’s letters. A half dozen were written in English, most of them on tissue-thin sheets of paper that ensured that a four-page letter would not exceed the weight limit of a first-class airmail stamp. Several were written on aerograms, like the one she sent in 1968 to an old family friend, posted from Montreux, Switzerland, where my mother, little brother, John, and I had finally settled after hopscotching across the United States and Europe, as part of a peripatetic effort to escape grief over the deaths of my brother and father. I thought it was odd that the letter was in English, since this friend she had known since her adolescence also spoke her Shanghainese dialect. The letter started off in perfect English, which made me think she had dictated the letter to me. The handwriting might have been mine.

  We spent Christmas Day in Geneva, invited to dinner by John’s former professor and his wife at their apt. It was a rather sad celebration, and it will never be the same as before.

  She inserted someone’s name in Chinese, and the letter continued but in lighter script. This was written in her hand. The sentences were pretty much grammatical, although there were mistakes here and there, which made me think she had incorrectly copied the sentences I had written on another sheet of paper. And then the sentences contained numerous errors, making it apparent she had abandoned my help. The last paragraph was in her voice, and it was obvious I had not helped her write it, given the subject matter.

  It is headache to raise children, and almost lead to a senseless and aimless life. Here is gossip colum: [X] ever since I’ve known her never forgets to say, “I don’t feel strong, sick here, sick there. Now she writes the same as she talks. Of anything, she mentions something she never keeps her word.

  I was surprised that she knew how to use the present perfect tense: ever since I’ve known her. Some teacher must have drilled that into her. In fact, of all the tenses she used, the ones that she used correctly most often were both the present and past perfect tenses, what she might have learned in an advanced English grammar course. The present perfect is what you use to describe where you’ve been. I’ve been to Florida. I’ve been to New York. I’ve been to Switzerland. Use the past perfect to describe what had just happened before you lost your mind: They had both died. Use the past perfect to tell us about assumptions that proved false. I had thought a change of scenery might do us good. I had neglected to choose the scenery we should change to.

  My mother made several changes of scenery. Her first choice was inspired by a can of Old Dutch Cleanser, which she used each night to clean the kitchen sink. The little Dutch girl on the can’s label had already served as inspiration for a hideous Halloween costume that I wore in the first grade. She would now help set our new course in life. “Holland is clean,” my mother announced to my little brother and me one night. “We are moving to Holland.” Had my mother asked my father through the Ouija board whether this impetuous idea was a good one, I would have answered without hesitation: Yes, that is the best idea you’ve ever had. But I also knew that it would be crazy to move to a country where we knew no one. My mother reasoned that we had seldom gone on a true vacation. We only worked hard and maybe that was the reason my father and brother fell ill. She hinted that we should see the world before it was too late—meaning, before we all died of a curse. Friends and family counseled her to wait longer before making such a big decision. She interpreted their concern as insults to her intelligence. The more objections my mother received, the more adamant she was about her choice. When they could not dissuade her, they conceded that a change of scenery might do her some good, but she should return if she felt lonely. They told her to bring back souvenirs. By June 1968, four months after my father died, my mother had already sold the house, the car, and most of our furnishings—although not the piano, which she stored at a relative’s house.

  My mother laid out maps she got for free from AAA. She showed us her grand plan. She had bought round-the-world airline tickets for each of us, $700 apiece, a bargain. She had booked us on a train and a boat. She had even contemplated a ride in a helicopter. She put her finger on the map to show us a series of destinations we would make in a year. In July, we embarked on John’s and my first trip outside of California. We took our first airplane ride—a trip to Florida to stay with my great-aunt and great-uncle. Because the flight was nearly empty, we sat in first class and also roamed the length of the plane to look out of different windows to see the differing landscapes and cities that lay below. In Florida, we wrote postcards to report that we had swum with manatees and had dipped our fingers in Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth. With the help of my great-uncle and his traps, we caught over fifty softshell crabs, which my great-aunt boiled alive, a distressing sight that made it impossible for me to eat them. I wrote that we were almost killed several times because my great-aunt was a terrible driver; she turned around to talk to us and nearly ran off the road or crashed head-on into other cars on the other side of the road. In Washington, D.C., we sent postcards of the
White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian, and Mount Vernon. In New York, we sent postcards of the Rockettes, the Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty. We bragged that we happened to see Shirley MacLaine dancing around a fountain in Rockefeller Center while the movie Sweet Charity was being filmed. That’s New York. You can see just about anything. I wrote in a letter to one high school friend that I saw a man dressed in a business suit, who was lying in the gutter with his limbs turned in impossible angles after being hit by a cab and killed. No one did anything for him, I said. That’s New York.

  From New York, we boarded the SS Rotterdam and sailed to the fabled land of cleanliness. Each night we dressed in our best clothes and sat at a table with a white tablecloth. Three handsome young men in white tuxedoes served us. I was ecstatic that they flirted shamelessly with me in front of my mother, each one claiming I had broken his heart. No boys in high school had ever flirted with me. I had broken no one’s heart. One night, I surreptitiously met with one of the waiters, Sieggy, who was ten years older than I was. We shared a romantically forbidden nicotine-flavored kiss. Standards were low then. I wrote an exaggerated account about this to my best friend back home. He took a risk and could have been fired. Our family, now reduced to three, embraced all that was new to escape reminders of tragedy. I traded my old identity for a glamorous one. I pretended to be familiar with the routine of ordering three courses from a French menu. On one occasion, when the silver dome covering my plate was lifted, I saw a quarter round of hideous tissue. Brains. My brother’s. My father’s. The waiters smiled with good humor. To maintain my new sophisticated persona, I pretended that this was indeed what my mouth had been watering to eat. I had many cosmopolitan experiences like that. My mother had a knack for meeting strangers and asking them straight out for advice on what there was to see in Europe. One evening, I listened to a Swiss German salesman with oily hair and bad teeth offer to give us a tour of his small but charming hometown. To further entice us, he yodeled. For the first time in eighteen months, my mother seemed happy.

  After a glamorous week on the high seas, we landed in Rotterdam, which was indeed a big change of scenery. My brother and I quickly learned that our mother had done nothing to prepare for life after disembarkation. She had no idea where we would live, let alone where my brother and I would go to school. Carpe diem led us to a cheap but clean hotel. Because we could not read the Dutch menus and feared ordering something like brains, we ate the local dishes that we could clearly see in vending machines. We also ate at a series of so-called Chinese restaurants, and they were all, by my mother’s opinion, awful, not Chinese food, but Indonesian. We discovered there was no furnished apartment we could rent in Rotterdam, so we moved to Utrecht and stayed in the YMCA, where the staff spoke English. From there, John and I commuted an hour and a half each way by train and bus to reach the closest English-speaking school. It was located in Werkhoven on the grounds of a picturesque castle with horse stables. It even had a drawbridge and swans swimming in the moat. I thought it was perfect. I quickly won favor by drawing realistic pictures of swans.

  We took lodgings in the home of a parsimonious landlady, who prohibited us from using lights past nine o’clock. After a week, my mother decided we should next go to Karlsruhe, Germany, where a family friend lived—a minister who had attended divinity school with my father—with his wife, who was genuinely fond of my mother. They offered us a guest room where we could stay until we found an apartment. Because none of us could speak German, my mother used a simple and ingenious method to glean information necessary for our survival. First, she would ask strangers if they could speak English. If they could not, she would use pantomime to ask them for recommendations for hotels, restaurants, and tourist sites. This mode of communication, unfortunately, led several men to presume my mother was a pimp and that I was a girl for hire. One time, a line of drunken men followed us along the street. Another time, a man who had picked us up as hitchhikers let my mother and brother off, and then nearly drove away with me stuck in the back of his car. My mother ran after the car and managed to open the door. After she extricated me from the confines of the back seat, I shouted that she should no longer ask strangers for help. “I could have been raped!” My mother did not apologize, nor did she argue. Instead, she bought a VW bug, and with a handbook of English-speaking schools as our guide, we drove south, stopping in towns with English-speaking schools to inquire if there were any openings for two students. My mother also asked the locals, even those in small towns, if they had a Chinese restaurant. These were people who had never seen anyone who was Asian.

  I recall our drive as joyful. The scenery was so stunning, we sang tunes from The Sound of Music. Like the von Trapp family, we had escaped—from sadness, from bad landladies, from perverted men. We finally reached a resort town in Switzerland next to Lake Geneva, Montreux. The school, then called Institut Monte Rosa, did indeed have two openings for day students, and being a vacation destination, the town had plenty of advertisements for furnished apartments. My mother rejected those that smelled of dust and chose a clean one, a Bavarian-style chalet made of thick dark logs. We stepped into a parlor with a ticking cuckoo clock. On the right was the bedroom my mother and I would share. It had two feather-tick beds and two square windows with shutters that gave us a view of Lake Geneva. My brother would sleep in the bigger room next to ours. It was furnished with a long dining table suitable for twelve, a sofa bed, a TV, and a china cabinet. The cabinet contained a bonus: stationery, tissue-thin pink and green sheets with matching envelopes. The landlady encouraged us to use as much as we wanted. Over the next year, my mother and I took her at her word. We sent many letters reporting about our new life. Mine were typically ten pages long. I wrote about the impossibly beautiful views: We could see clear across the lake, practically to Geneva. We could see the French Alps and the Italian Alps, and there was always snow on top. We could see the school that lay at the bottom of a cobblestone path of fourteenth-century buildings. Steps away from our chalet, I could climb onto a funicular with my new boyfriend, an unemployed German army deserter. We went to Les Avants to have café au lait. I watched my boyfriend play table foosball all afternoon; he was very good and usually won in competitions with the locals, so he never had to pay a franc for a new game. From Les Avants, we took a cogwheel train up to the peak of the mountain, Rochers de Naye. From there, we could see the world.

  We were smart tourists who used carpe diem as our motto—seize the day, for tomorrow we may die. In that picturesque town, I learned so much. I learned to ski—albeit miserably. I learned to eat the local dishes: yogurt and muesli, as well as raclette. I learned to drink Bordeaux wine and café. I learned French, just a bit. I learned about love; I had the love letters to prove it. I learned what kind of fur coat you needed to be a snob, not rabbit. I learned to smoke cigarettes; Marlboros, then Gauloise, then hashish; and soon after, hashish cut with opium. I learned what happens when you are arrested in Switzerland for drugs. I learned I would not go to jail, unlike my boyfriend, because I was only sixteen. I learned what my mother could do to me when she went crazy and what she would do for me out of love. Sometimes they were the same thing.

  At the end of our stay in Montreux, nearly all the sheets of paper were gone.

  This month I retrieved the file that contained my letters to her written soon after I arrived at college, the first time we were apart. I was moved to tears that she had saved them. I had drawn so much from our lives together for my fiction, and here were the letters that preserved some of those experiences. The first letter I saw was a typed list of expenses, dated September 26, 1969, when I was seventeen. I had graduated a year early from the school in Switzerland because of thrift and greed. The tuition at the school was $600 a year, a large sum for our family. We discovered, however, that there was no limit on the number of courses I could take. It operated on the same principle as those $1.99 restaurants where you could eat all you wanted, choosing from a glut of offerings, ranging
from roast beef and mashed potatoes to Jell-O pudding and fruit cocktail in mayonnaise. I loved learning and saw no reason why I could not take French and Spanish, art history and art, chemistry, math, American history, English literature, piano, and skiing. At the start of the second semester, the headmaster told me I would graduate that year. I felt I had won a prize. I would be able to leave home a year early. My mother, little brother, and I had gone through a tumultuous year with frequent fights, self-destructive impulses, followed by tearful reconciliations. We had been emotionally pummeled during the year my brother and father were dying, and now, with hope no longer necessary, we had all gone a little crazy. During one argument, John threw lemonade on my college applications, I slugged him, and he ran off barefoot in the dark night when it was snowing so hard the pathway to our chalet had foot-deep drifts. My mother and I called on the landlady, her son, and a teacher to form a search party. As we walked down the snowy cobblestone path, we yelled for my brother. I was certain we would find him frozen blue and my mother would never stop screaming. How much more could we take? He was eventually found alive, shivering with near hypothermia and frostbite. We were all exhausted from crises yet we could not stop making them.

  The letters I held in my hand were those I had written when I began college. And that would become the pattern: we wrote letters in English when we were far apart. Except for the run-away letter I wrote when I was eight, this was the first time I had written to her and not for her. Reading the letters now, I am struck by how odd the tone is—like that of a perky character from a teen movie in the 1960s. This was not how I spoke to her in person.