The Opposite of Fate (19 page)

Ma demonstrates how to break open the body.
Crack!
I feel as if I were in sixth-grade science class. Behold, the internal organs. Xiao-dong is sucking on his little crab. Yuhang has broken a leg off hers and is using it as an entrenching tool. She watches as I poke at my crab. “Eat this part first,” she says. I stare at an orange mass.

“What is it?” I whisper to my mother.

“Don’t ask,” she says. “You no wanna know. Eat.” I stare at the orangy part again, certain it must be crab brains.

“Eat,” commands Yuhang. “That’s the best part. Eat it before it turns bad.”

“How will it turn bad?” I say.

She reaches over with her crab leg and picks out the orange stuff. “Eat before it gets cold.”

I had promised myself that my attitude about living in China would be “Come what may, take what comes.” I pour a heavy dose of sauce and put the orange goo in my mouth. It has a creamy texture, and is slightly fishy. I don’t like it, but I have not yet retched.

“Eat this.” Yuhang dredges out more orange goo. “Don’t waste any of it. It’s too good.”

I crack off a leg and dutifully begin to dig and shove and swallow, dig and shove and swallow, dig—

“Don’t eat that!” I hear my mother say.

Yuhang looks over to see what I am doing to my crab. She laughs and then scolds me. “Oyo, don’t eat that.” She points to something that to me is indistinguishable from the orange stuff they said was so exquisite.

“Why?” I ask. “Why is this part different?”

“Anh!” she exclaims—perhaps she can’t believe she has such a stupid sister.
“Da bien.”
She pinches her mouth shut.

I stare at my crab.
Da bien.
Poop. I think about that American expression used to describe stupid people. Shit for brains. That’s what I have in front of me. A miniature toilet bowl.

My mother takes the crab out of my hands and quickly removes the offending part. “Eat.” She digs out a piece of fleshy meat, then gives the crab back to me.

I slowly start to eat again. This part does not taste so bad. I dip the meat in the vinegary sauce and eat with concentration, glad to be almost halfway through this ordeal. This part actually tastes quite good. Xiao-dong is relishing this feast. He has almost finished his crab and is poking and sucking at every possible crevice.

“Don’t eat that!” I hear my mother say again.

“Don’t eat what?” I ask.

She points. I don’t understand what she is pointing to. “This.” It is a six-sided piece, what looks like a soft piece of cartilage. “If you eat it,” she explains, “it leaves the body cold.”

“How does it do that?”

“Don’t eat it,” she says.

“But why does it leave the body cold? What does that mean?”

“Ai!” my mother says. “Don’t ask why. It’s enough that I tell you not to eat it.”

Yuhang shakes her head. “Don’t eat it.” She points to another grayish mass. “And don’t eat this part.” To me it looks the same as the rest of the crab meat. I’m confused, a hostage forced to obey the advice and opinions of my elders.

I think about the tiny softshell crabs, of eating them, of my upcoming two weeks of life in China. The legs are bound up, movement restricted. There are exquisite tastes to be found, but the moment when one can find them is brief, transitory. If one waits too long, the flavor is lost, the taste becomes ordinary. And inside these crabs is knowledge, the kind I don’t have: what is good, what is bad, and why, and why I shouldn’t ask, and what will happen if I don’t listen.

Welcome back to China.

• joy luck and hollywood •

This was written in response to interview questions posed by the
Los Angeles Times
. I sat down one night and e-mailed my answers. A version of those was used for a story that ran on September 5, 1993.

I
was an unlikely person to get involved with filmmaking. I’ve never had a particular infatuation with Hollywood or tabloid stories of its stars—well, maybe I’ve taken a glance now and then at gossip having to do with Robert Redford. For the most part, though, I’ve always preferred to daydream about characters of my own making. At the same time, I didn’t hold any grudges against movies as an art form. I wasn’t tearing my hair out, vowing, “As God is my witness, I’ll show the world how movies really should be made!” To put it simply, I was neither fan nor foe.

During the last decade, in an effort to control how I consumed my time, my appetite for television and movies dwindled to anorexic level. I spent whatever available hours I had reading or writing. Until recently, I was not in the habit of going to the movies, although, because of a nine-month book promotion schedule, I sometimes saw them as “in-flight entertainment” but on anemic screens. Occasionally, I rented videos of former box-office hits. My choices took into consideration which movies my
husband might enjoy as well. In other words, no tearjerkers about reincarnated lovers and such.

But there was a period in my life, childhood, when I thought movies were the ultimate luxury. Perhaps once a month, my parents gave my brothers and me fifty cents each to see a matinee with friends—real doozies like
The Angry Red Planet, The Fly, Around the World in 80 Days, Flower Drum Song,
but not
The World of Suzie Wong
(too adult, according to my parents). I also saw
The Parent Trap, 101 Dalmatians, Old Yeller, The Absent-Minded Professor—
a lot of Disney movies. I wanted to draw the cartoons that went into animated films.

Mostly I saw old movies on television, my favorite being
The Wizard of Oz,
which I watched faithfully every year on our black-and-white set, and continued to be awed by, especially when I saw it on another family’s color television. I identified with Dorothy, a girl who felt she was misunderstood and went searching for a sense of home. Plus she had the greatest shoes, ruby slippers, which could take her anywhere her heart desired. But Kansas? If I had been in her shoes, I would have stayed in Oz and started a new life as a torch singer.

Shoes became an imaginative device for me as a fiction writer, especially if I was writing about a period outside my life experience. I would place myself in my character’s shoes, look down at them, and start walking. When I looked up, I would see the scenery in front of me, say, China in the 1920s. I would note what was around me: To my left, a doorway, the light streaming through. To my right, a group of people staring at me critically. Up close, a coffin holding a woman, who no longer saw falseness or faults in others.

Now that I think of it, perhaps my imagination has always
worked like a movie camera, at least in terms of visual framing. Like the camera, I do five or six “setups,” as I now know them to be called, those camera angles required to capture each scene from various audience perspectives. In fiction, however, I am both the audience and the character. And I never see the back of my own head.

Moreover, fiction, as opposed to film, allows me to include any characters I want; I don’t need a casting agent. I can write a scene with a thousand angels dancing in the sky; I don’t worry about costumes, or special effects, or choreography, or liability insurance. In fiction, I can revise ad nauseam, tossing out countless pages at a time, as well as the expensive locations that come with them. I can invent new characters, remove others. I’m not on a seventy-seven-day writing schedule. No union fines me if I make my characters work through the scenes with me after midnight or on weekends. My characters do not become upset when I tell them I’ve eliminated their scene. Nor do they ever change my lines and ad-lib something they think is better.

A fiction writer has the perquisites of solitude, artistic freedom, and control. She has the luxury to go into a funk for two weeks and not get anything done. Why would any writer in her right mind ever consider making a movie instead? That’s like going from being a monk or a nun to serving as a camp counselor for hundreds of problem children.

I can say only that I went to Hollywood for many of the same reasons Dorothy found herself in Oz. I met a lot of remarkably nice people along the way. And they had heart and brains and courage.

Didn’t Anyone Warn You?

In 1988, before
The Joy Luck Club
was published, I attended a screenwriting workshop at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in northern California. I went partly because it was a plum to get into the program, and largely because I felt I could learn techniques about character development that would benefit my fiction.

Ten others and I attended these sessions to discover where our best stories came from—the answer being from our worst life experiences. We collaborated on an adaptation of a short story, during which I discovered how much I preferred working solo. Writing with others seemed a feat of coordination not unlike those three-legged races I used to run as a kid. How many different ways can a character enter a doorway? Ask four screenwriters.

At the workshop, we also heard war stories. One novelist-turned-screenwriter was still gnashing his teeth in regret. They had taken his literary novel, trampled it with pat formulas, padded it with shapely thighs. In the hierarchy of power and respect, they treated him as though he ranked somewhere below bacteria. They kicked him off the set. Later, he had to endure watching the movie with an audience that included his squirming literary friends, all of whom developed simultaneous coughing fits.

“Did you feel the movie ruined your novel?” someone from the workshop asked. “No,” he said. “It ruined my life.” Yet later I heard he was doing another screenplay. Why? What was the addiction?

The Blow-by-Blow

As well as I can remember, here is the chronology of
The Joy Luck Club’
s being made into a movie:

October 1987: Went to China for the first time.

November 1987: Sold the book proposal to Putnam.

March 1988: Met Janet Yang, an executive at MCA/Universal. Janet had read the three stories that my agent, Sandy Dijkstra, had sold to Putnam as the basis for a book. Janet and I met in an outdoor café in San Francisco’s North Beach, and there she told me how much she loved the stories, how she sensed she was reading about herself. That’s all she wanted to say, that she was a fan. As I recall, she felt the book would be a hard sell as a movie. But if there was interest once the book was out, she would be waiting in the wings to help.

March 1989:
The Joy Luck Club
published. After two weeks, it hit the bestseller lists, much to everyone’s surprise, including mine. While I was still trying to reason that this was a temporary fluke, my literary agent started to field inquiries from movie and television producers. Sandy advised that we find a film agent, and to that end she linked me up with Sally Willcox of Creative Artists Agency, who handles a number of authors.

During the next few months, between my book promotion responsibilities, I met with a dozen or so producers and studio execs. Out of these meetings, I received five or six offers to option the book. I did not accept any of them, because I was still not sure the book should be a movie. Of course, one could get option money and the movie might never be made. But I had this little worry running through my head: What if the movie was
made and it was a terrible depiction of Asian-Americans? What if the movie showed women wearing coolie hats and tight dresses slit up their thighs? What if they were given pointy, red-lacquered fingernails that they used to stab their philandering white boyfriends? (Don’t laugh—Lou, my husband, saw those images on television the very day I received an option offer.)

August 1989: Met Wayne Wang. After a wonderful conversation about everything from the book to family to Asians and Asian-Americans in the arts, I knew intuitively that Wayne was the right person to direct the movie—if ever there should be a movie. I was glad to meet him, and we thought we could work together on something in the future regardless of what happened to this movie. I thought I could learn from him creatively—about stories, about the emotion of an image.

January 1990: Team formation. With Wayne, I met the screenwriter Ron Bass at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Ron was the only person I met who knew exactly how to turn the book into a movie. He began with a specific analysis about each of the families depicted. I had read many reviews of
Joy Luck,
but his insights about the characters as people—and not literary themes—made me feel that he knew the book better than I did.

Wayne and I mentioned the problem of so many stories, so many characters, how everyone thought it impossible to make a coherent movie out of the whole book.

“Impossible?” Ron said. “Why is it impossible? Let me tell you a few of my ideas.” He pulled out a yellow pad with two pages of an outline. “First, we keep all the characters, all the stories. Second, we do what everyone in the industry tells you not to do: we use a lot of voice-over. Third, we use a wraparound that
allows us to tell the stories through an ensemble, no single lead character.” The book could succeed as a movie, he said, only if we broke all the rules. And for the next hour and a half, he explained in detail how the rules would be broken.

Ron also thought I should be involved in the screenwriting. I wasn’t interested. I wanted to leave the book in these guys’ hands and go on with my work as a fiction writer. But then he said something irresistible to a writer: “I think I could help you find the poetry of the scene.” You have to realize that Ron used to be an entertainment lawyer. He knows exactly what to say to people to get them on his side.

We agreed with a handshake that we three would form a team. We would also seek creative control. Those two conditions were inviolable, and without them, I would not option the book. The way I figured it, we had about a one-in-a-million chance of getting a movie made, but if it did happen, we’d have a great time.

Spring 1990: Collaboration set up. Oliver Stone agreed to be our executive co-producer. Janet Yang, who was by then vice-president of Stone’s production company, Ixtlan, had arranged a meeting with him. We met at an editing studio in Santa Monica, where he was cutting
The Doors.
He said he would help us make
The Joy Luck Club
under his deal with Carolco.