The Opposite of Fate (38 page)

What I look for most in a story, what I crave, and what I found in these twenty-one, is a distinctive voice that tells a story only that voice can tell. The voice is not merely the language, the prose style, the imagery. It is that ineffable combination of things that creates a triangulated relationship among narrator,
reader, and fictional world. It may have an intimacy or a distance, a trustworthiness or an edginess. The voice is this hour’s guide to eternity and will immerse me in a unique consciousness that observes some nuances of human nature and overlooks others. It is the keeper of forgiveness and condemnation. It will order perception and juxtapose events and rearrange time, then deliver me back to my own consciousness slightly askew.

By the end of the story, what I’ve witnessed and experienced as reader is so interesting, so intense, so transcendent that if someone were to ask me what the story was about, I would not be able to distill it into an easy answer. It would be a sacrilege for me to say it is about, say, survival or hope or the endlessness of love. For the whole story is what the story is about, and there is no shorthanding it. I can only say please read it yourself.

If this collection holds a common thread with regard to my tastes, it is what I think the best of fiction is by its nature and its virtues. It can enlarge us by helping us notice small details in life. It can remind us to distrust absolute truths, to dismiss clichés, to both desire and fear stillness, to see the world freshly from closer up or farther away, with a sense of mystery or acceptance, discontent or hope, all the while remembering that there are so many possibilities, and that this was only one.

The best stories do change us. They help us live interesting lives.

HOPE

Now help me light three sticks of incense. The smoke will take our wishes to heaven. Of course, it’s only superstition, just for fun. But see how fast the smoke rises—oh, even faster when we laugh, lifting our hopes, higher and higher.

• The Kitchen God’s Wife

• what i would remember •

W
hen I was in my twenties, at a time when my mother and I were not getting along that well, she asked me, “If I die, what you remember?”

Here we go, I thought, the old Chinese-torture routine. I answered something like this: “Come on, you’re not going to die.”

She persisted. “What you remember?”

I struggled to come up with an answer. “You know, all
kinds
of things. Like, well, you know, you’re my mother.”

And then my mother said, in a both sad and angry voice: “I think you know little percent of me.”

Those words came back to me when, one day in 1985, I received a phone call telling me my mother was probably dead. At the time, I was in Hawaii on vacation and had left no phone number where I could be reached. So it was not until my friend Gretchen, who was with my husband and me in Hawaii, had checked her answering machine back home that I learned that four days had already passed since my mother had suffered an apparent heart attack. She was now in intensive care.

As I went to a phone booth to call the hospital, I was sure it
was too late. She was dead. I tried to imagine her alive, and all I could do was picture her saying those words: “What you remember?” Now I asked myself, What should I remember? What had I lost? What had been my mother’s greatest hopes and fears? What was important to her? I had a surge of remorse and guilt, realizing she had been right all along: I knew little percent of her. What a sad fact.

With shaky hands, I dialed the number. As I waited to be connected from the switchboard to the nursing station in intensive care, I made a vow to God and whoever was listening, “If my mother lives, I will get to know her. I will ask her about her past, and this time I’ll actually listen to what she has to say. Why, I’ll even take her to China, and yes, I’ll write stories about her. . . .” Soon a nurse would tell me in quiet tones that I would have to speak to a doctor, and the doctor would say, “I’m sorry, but I have some very bad news. . . .”

All at once, I heard my mother’s voice. “Amy-ah?”

“Oh . . . Mom? Are you okay?”

“Yes, fine, fine. Where you?”

“Hawaii.”

“Hawai-hee? When you go Hawai-hee?”

“Listen. I thought you had a heart attack. I thought—”

My mother cut me off with a huff. “Heart attack. No, no, no, no. I go to fish market, and the fishmonger he try cheating me. Make me so mad. All sudden got a pain in my chest, hurt me so bad, so I drive to Kaiser Hospital. They put me here, ICC, do all kinds test, but turn out I have angina, cause by stress! So you see, that fishmonger, he wrong. Stress me out.”

I let out an audible sigh.

Then she asked, “You worry? That’s why call? Yes? Ha,
ha!
You worry for
me!
” She was enormously pleased. So there I was, in a phone booth at a shopping center in Hawaii, crying and laughing at the same time. After I hung up, I heard a voice saying, “Hey, don’t forget now. You
promised
 . . .”

So I did take her to China. I endured three weeks of being with her twenty-four hours a day. Three weeks of her giving me her expert advice, criticizing my clothes, my eating habits, the bad bargains I made at the market. I hated it and I loved it. And when I returned home, I began to write stories about her life.

At the beginning of
The Joy Luck Club,
I imagined a young woman whose mother has just died. They are now separated by death, seemingly without a reconciliation. There was never any one great fight that divided them, just life itself over the years, petty misunderstandings, and the desire of the mother to give her daughter advice and the daughter’s desire to find her own way. So what would this daughter remember?

In the end, the daughter learns something, realizes something, something obvious that has been there all along, and she is ready to take her mother’s place at the mah jong table, on the east, where things begin.

On the dedication page of
The Joy Luck Club,
I wrote:

To my mother
and the memory of her mother

You asked me once
what I would remember.
This, and much more.

• to complain is american •

This is taken from an informal panel at Renaissance Weekend, an annual gathering of creators and thinkers from all walks of life, in which I was asked to address the topic “What’s Bugging Me Lately?”

I
find it disconcerting to be asked to gripe in public. It goes against the tenets of how I was raised. “You shouldn’t make a big stink over nothing,” my mother would say. “Just like farting.”

Yet I grew up thinking my mother was the biggest complainer I knew. Bad service in restaurants? She would let the whole world know, pointing to the greasy bowl or the sticky chopsticks. “Hey, see this?” she would say loud enough for all the hungry customers to hear: “You expect me to eat with this dirty thing?”

Perhaps it is because of my upbringing that I would rather foment trouble quietly. Besides, I have little to complain about personally. Life has been good to me, more than good, remarkable in fact, beyond anything I could have ever imagined, and I have a wild imagination.

But being a writer, I also remind myself that talking about the unspeakable is part and parcel of my work. I
can
complain. I
should
complain. Writers do and often should bring up subjects
that are uncomfortable. As an Asian-American writer, or “writer of color,” as some would say, I am expected to lash out on a range of social issues. And as an American writer, which is how I think of myself—no hyphenated term—I have the right to express myself on any subject and in any direction I wish. I believe that what makes me an American writer more than anything else is my taking for granted this unalienable right called freedom of speech.

And so, as an American writer, I have refused, even early in my career when I was still unknown, to have a story of mine printed because the people at the magazine wanted to change one word. One measly word, they said. The word was “shit,” what a character says to his wife. If the editor had said to me, “We’re a family magazine. Can we just have the man look glumly at his wife?” I might have replied, “Sure.” But this magazine editor wanted to replace “shit” with “Christ.” I ask you, Which is more offensive to say in such a context? Why should I let this editor’s interpretations of morals govern mine?

This may seem petty to you, one word, but I hold it as not just my right but my responsibility as an American writer to reject arbitrary censorship. In a case like that, trivial as it may seem, I stand against editorial tinkering that reflects the larger question of who defines “good taste.” As a writer, I think a great deal about intentions and consequences, about personal responsibility, credit, and blame. These come with everything I write. But they also come up when I am asked a question like this: “What should we do about human rights in China?”

I am not an expert on the rule of law and its absence in China. But it just so happens that I think about this subject quite a bit, in part because the media often ask me, but even more because I
have family in China—a sister who lives in Shanghai, her husband and children, as well as numerous cousins, an aunt, and my mother’s brother, my dear old uncle, who was the Vice-Secretary of Trade Unions, a man who survived the Long March and now enjoys the Long Yarn. When I visit, he loves to tell me about the brave martyrs, some of them his friends, who helped with the revolution. Being a retired official of high standing, my uncle has a car and a driver, and he has escorted me around town in this lap of luxury so that I can conveniently see the sights. Once, when I was to attend a dinner at the residence of the American ambassador and his wife, my uncle tersely told me it was “not convenient” for him to take me, nor was it convenient for the U.S. embassy’s car to come any closer than one block from where he lived. This happened at the time the embassy had given refuge to the dissident Fang Lizhi. You might say that my uncle and I do not always see eye to eye on things.

The last time I was in Beijing, I was there with my husband on behalf of an American group raising money for Chinese orphanages. Lou and I were to attend a dinner for four hundred fifty people—foreign diplomats, executives of overseas divisions of large corporations, and the cream of the philanthropic Beijing international society. The event, the first of its kind there, was sold out, and the donated money would go toward bedding, clothing, and corrective surgeries that would not only increase children’s chances of being adopted but also help them survive in a country where central heating is not common, and where the government allotment for each orphan amounts to a few dollars a month. These poor conditions have less to do with governmental neglect than with the realities of keeping 1.2 billion people fed.
Lou and I had pledged a sum of money that would enable many children to have surgeries to repair cleft palates, clubfeet, and other birth defects. We had an opportunity to meet some of the children who needed the help. We held them and never felt closer to knowing that our money was going to a very worthy cause.

At the event, to take place in a hotel ballroom, I was supposed to tell a few jokes before dinner, talk about the children we had met, and thank all in attendance for their generosity. But it turned out that the American fund-raising organization did not have a not-for-profit permit to solicit funds legally in China. Who knows why this information had not come out sooner. It was your basic instance of Americans with good intentions but a certain amount of ineptitude. In any case, people from the Public Security Bureau came to the hotel the afternoon before the dinner and informed the organizers that it would have to be canceled. The American organizers pleaded. The PSB officials were at first adamant, yet after some negotiation allowed the group to hold the dinner—although the banners would have to come down and the ballroom would have to be partitioned, as if this were only a dinner and not a charity event. Any mention of soliciting money was strictly forbidden. This was most unfortunate, and a few people were mightily angry. We coped. The dinner went on as planned. We did not give speeches from the podium, but went from table to table to thank everyone for coming.

A number of reporters attended the dinner. They saw the event quite differently. The next morning, the Reuters and AP stories went something like this: “Police stormed and raided the hotel, tearing down banners, and prevented the author Amy Tan
from going to the podium to speak about the situation of orphanages in China.” By the next day, the story was picked up by maybe a hundred newspapers and television stations worldwide. In one televised report, old footage taken when I was promoting my latest novel ran strategically next to footage of a dying child in an orphanage, which had been filmed surreptitiously by a British crew for another program. With the manipulation of images, it appeared that I was expressing shock and outrage over the condition of orphanages in China.

Soon after, China shut the doors of its orphanages to prying Western eyes. The monies that should have gone for cleft-palate surgeries, for saving the lives of babies, were held up. The adoptions of Chinese babies by American couples were stopped. And I was banned from returning to China. The fact that real lives had been compromised bothered me greatly. In fact, it angered me. And my anger was directed not just at the officials who closed the orphanage doors to additional help, but at the Western media and those who had taken this event as an opportunity to rail against the conditions of the orphanages in the name of human rights. Their actions had not helped those babies; they imperiled them. What had gone wrong?

As Americans, we have an inordinate fondness for rights. Our country was founded on them; we enjoy the right to bear arms, to bear children, to bare our thoughts as we see fit. The right to life, the right to choose, the right to die, the right to speak out or remain silent. We argue ferociously for our rights in whatever way each of us interprets them. When we do it on our own soil, we are on solid ground. We have lawyers who can back us up. But when we argue for rights on behalf of people in
another country, things get a bit tricky. They don’t always go the way we intend. Doors might slam shut, and who knows what goes on behind them.