The Bonesetter's Daughter

Transcription

Hello, I'm Amy Tan. I'm here today to talk about my book, The Joy Luck Club. I think if you ask everybody, if you ask yourself, I bet you'd say, "Yeah, I have a story in me." What is the reason you have a story in you? You have a way of looking at the world that's different from anybody else. You know, with a book it's like windows and doors to my mind and I can go out of these windows, I can go anywhere, I can explore different lands and it's magic. And I still feel that today. Confusion is the best place to start a story as is conflicts, ambiguity, ambivalence... All these things where you're sort of standing on an edge You're about to fall... You know, that is a great place to start a story. And when you read a book you get somebody's story, you go through these same things, you go through joy, and sudden tragedy, and loss, and you feel it, and you come out of that and you say, "That was me. That was my life." My parents spoke Chinese and in the home they spoke Mandarin together. My parents didn't force me to speak Chinese because they thought, erroneously, that if I learned Chinese it would affect my ability to learn English. I heard my mother speaking Mandarin to me as she's always saying all these terrible things to me, like, you know, "Go to bed." Um... But she used to sit around a table with friends and they would be preparing food you know, they would be shelling these fava beans or they would be chopping vegetables or gutting fish. They had a newspaper spread out over the table and they were also talking. They were talking about the old days. And I think that what happened was that I absorbed some of these stories, that I somehow knew things in an unconscious way. Starting at about the age of eight, I used to read the thesaurus. It had so many words in it, and those words had many meanings to me, they had many possibilities. And each of those words were like little stories to me. I remember this one word that I thought was the most exciting word that day and it was "precipitous." And it was also related to a precipice and it was related to a cliff. And what I could see with that word was a sense of danger and my standing on the edge of a cliff and falling. I always grew up with this sense of danger, I think because my mother had so many warnings. She was very worried I would fall into a situation where I'd ruin my life. She'd say that I had to be careful crossing the street and she wanted me to remember. And she said, "You don't watch out, somebody run you over, smash you flat, just like one of those pom-pom fish two eyes, both, one side of your face." Now at the time she said these things I didn't understand. I didn't want to listen. And in part it was because I didn't realize where these warnings came from. And they came from her life. I didn't know what her life had been in China. Her mother had been the daughter of a scholar and a very beautiful intelligent woman. And the father died when she was two. Here she had been the wife of a scholar, and now she was destitute. My mother felt that shame that her mother had. And she used to say to me, "This is a stain you cannot wash off your back." And my mother said, "You don't understand. that was China back then." And I realized that I had to understand more of what that was. And when I started to imagine and put myself into that time and into that family, and what her circumstances were, I began to understand those warnings and they weren't meant to simply scare me, they were really her way of saying she loved me. I wrote letters when I was a kid and that's because we moved every year, sometimes every six months, and when I moved I lost my friends. So I would write letters to these friends and I started to make up things. I gave myself a different name: Effie May Hoodwinkle. I don't know why I chose that name Effie May Hoodwinkle had many adventures. She could fly! She had shoes that allowed her to fly over the sidewalk. And so it was obvious they were fictional stories but my first readers were the friends I left behind when I moved. The first time I entered a library I was six years old. It was this giant brick building. I walked in and the ceilings were huge, the room echoed, and there were so many books there. And I would go to a shelf and all the little books for kids were down low so you could sit on the floor and just pick out the books you wanted. A lot of those early books were fairy tales, Grimm's Fairy Tales had a lot of very gruesome things in there as well, and I progressed. I think they ended up organizing it so that as you got older the books, you know, sort of went higher. I remember feeling very grown up when I read a book called, "To Kill A Mockingbird." That was a very difficult book for me to read. The words were bigger, I had to keep in mind a lot more things, but I was really, really proud that I was able to read that book. There was a book, and I don't remember how old I was exactly except that I was probably in my adolescence. And I read a book called "Jane Eyre." She was a little girl like me who seemed to be misunderstood by a lot of people. And she seemed to have no friends. I was going through a very unhappy time and I felt my mother was like that step-aunt that Jane Eyre had. And that what happened to her friend, when her friend died in the orphanage, that that was me. You know, all of a sudden I was alone. It was that feeling there was a friend, the friend was in a book, but the friend was there, and I could turn to that friend whenever I wanted. And I thought, "That's me. That book is about me." There was a book that was very important to me as a writer, and that was "Catcher in the Rye." It was important not so much because of what was in there, it was because that book was taken away from me. It was a banned book and my father's friend had seen me reading that book and he told my father. They took the book away from me. And that just meant I had to buy it again. And I read it and it didn't seem like it was that dangerous. But I decided after that that I was never going to let anybody tell me what I should read and not read. That I think is something that is a part of me today. I had taken an IQ test when I was six years old. I didn't do that well on the verbal portion. I did extremely well on the math portion. And the psychologist gave the results to my parents and she said I could become a doctor, that I had good math skills. And my parents took that as you know, the rule for the rest of my life. I'd play the piano, be a concert pianist... I'd become a doctor... and I believed that as well. It never occurred to me that I should challenge it until I was out of high school. My father was dead by then, and I was in college, and I realized that I didn't have to take pre-med. I could become an English major! Because actually, even though those tests said I was not very good in the verbal areas, I loved to write. I have imagery in English and I have imagery in Chinese and sometimes they meld and sometimes they don't. I hear my mother saying things to this day and maybe they were not the things she actually said but I can think of the way she would have said it, the imagery she would have used. There's not these pat phrases, it's the way she saw things. She used metaphors a lot and that is, um, I think one of the most important parts of a writer's imagination. You make these associations and they're experiential, they're visual, they're sensorial, they're everything. They're emotional, they are your meaning in life. You connect meaning to metaphors. Starting at the age of twelve, my mother and I seemed to have a lot of disagreements. And I think it was typical because I wanted to be independent. I didn't want to listen to everything my mother said, because that was like being my mother. And I was my own person. She would tell me these same warnings. As an adult, she would look over my shoulder and she would say, "Oh Amy, you work so hard. Squeeze all your brain out onto this paper." And it's a horrible image, you know but that's how she would say things, very visceral, very, um, almost violent imagery. Those images stayed with me and I realized that in an image of a fish, lying in a store, with both eyes on one side of the head, you have the whole story. The words "Joy Luck" had a lot to do with your circumstances and that in life you're handed something. It has to do with where you were born, and what happened, and if you went through a war... if you lost your money, your identity... and so there was bad luck, but, just as easily, there could be good luck and it could change all that. And when it changed you would have joy. Joy and luck was part of my life since the earliest of my memories and that was because there really was a Joy Luck Club. My father had named it. And it was a group of Chinese friends who had immigrated to this country. And they got together about once a month and they played Mah-Jongg, and they played cards, and they cooked Chinese food at midnight They had what we call "shi-fan," a rice porridge, and all kinds of goodies, and we kids would be there during part of it, just listening, and at midnight we'd get up and get some of the food. So we grew up Joy Luck, that's very ordinary words to me. I look back and there's no one moment where I said, "Oh, I should be a writer!" I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to draw. And I think that it was the same, in one sense, wanting to be an artist was also wanting to be a writer. You wanted to represent your way of seeing the world and you wanted to do that creatively. I didn't make a decision to become a writer until I was published as a writer. I was writing these stories and I considered myself a beginning writer. I think we often mistake being a writer as being a published writer. Being a writer is trying to write about things that are meaningful. I write for many reasons I write because I love to write... um... I love words. I write because I love the craft of writing, of creating a story and then looking back at it as a creation, a form of art, just as people create other things. They create art, they create dance. Writing to me is about revision. People think that I start writing, Page one... ch ch ch ch... page 300 and I'm done. That's what makes you a professional writer, that you make no mistakes, it all comes easily, everybody says it's so hard, how can you do it? It is harder. Stories push you and you have to go deeper. You have to, in some sense, survive. Whether it's emotionally or, you know, whatever you're doing, you have to survive. And that's when you discover things. I think that when people go through great change, great happiness, great trauma, that is when those questions get forced to the top. I learned that when people were telling me what they got out of The Joy Luck Club. Suddenly I had people saying, "Well, that's my story! You know, my mother was like that." And I felt like saying, "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." But, you know, what they were saying is that they became that. This whole idea that your imagination, now you've become that person, and you come out of it and say, "That's me." And now I take away from it um, who I am even more. Even though you became that person for a while. It's a really wonderful, magical, thing that happens when you are reading. You know, when I started writing The Joy Luck Club, I really thought I was writing stories. I was trying to learn the craft of writing and I didn't even write these stories based on my life. I never thought my life was that interesting. And so I didn't write about that at first. And then these stories began to seem so much about my mother and me and about these conflicts, and in ways that I had not thought about. The structure of The Joy Luck Club always sounds very impressive when people, somebody else, analyzes it. In fact, I loved reading The Joy Luck Club Cliff Notes. Because it just explains how brilliant I was in coming up with this structure of four parts, and mothers and daughters, eight characters, you know, revealing the past and the present, and blah blah blah. And it wasn't like that. It was, you know, everything in my life starts with confusion, and that's good. So that confusion is that I start off writing one story, and then I wrote another one, and I wrote another one, and they were all different. They were different families, different characters, and I started adding more stories, and I wanted more stories, because I wanted the variety of writing a story with different conflicts. And then at the end I had this mess of sixteen stories. My editor looked at them and she said, "They're about mothers and daughters." and it was the first time that I realized it. I thought I was writing a story that was at first just stories, you know, the craft of fiction. And then it became a story about my mother and me. And so I thought to myself, well, I can create a community. And there was already a built-in community in my family. And that was The Joy Luck Club. So now that we had these stories, and so many different characters and things going back and forth, you know, there was this question of how to structure it. And I just started throwing the stories down, according to what it felt like. Here's a story about a secret and something a mother never told her daughter that was so important now her mother is dead. And this is a girl who never found herself because she was trying to live up to the expectations of a mother she didn't really know. The story about Suyuan leaving her girls behind, the twin baby girls, that had some basis in my mother's life. She left behind three daughters in China. Imagine how you would feel if you left kids behind and then you didn't see them for 30 years. And then you have your daughter growing up in this other country with all the opportunities and, you know, she doesn't appreciate you, and you want to say, "I have these other daughters and they would have been just happy to have me by their side, protecting them, and giving them good advice." And those kind of conflicts were always present and I didn't know what they were from, I didn't know I had sisters in China. The very last thing that I wrote is the very first page that a reader would read in this book. And it's called "Feathers from a Thousand Li Away." The feathers from a thousand li away... the mother has bought this duck and the duck, it became a goose, it was even better... and then it became a swan, it just keeps getting better and better and better. And she's taking this swan to prove to her daughter things can get better, it can be more than what you hoped for. And, um, and instead, somebody takes it away from her. You know, and that happens in life, too. All of a sudden, it's gone. She has just one swan feather and she's determined still to give that to her daughter. And this is what she is going to give, the most precious thing she's going to give, and the daughter just, like, poof, you know... I couldn't have written that until I got to the end of the book because that was what the book meant to me. My mother, she had been my ally, she had been the one who protected me the most, and taught me these strengths, and she was also my enemy, in a strange way. She was the one who could wound me with any little thing she would say. "Oh, not so good," or, "You should've practiced, why did you get an A-minus?" Um, you know, they would be so wounding and I felt I could never satisfy her, I could never meet her expectations, so why should I try? So I didn't really set out to write about my mother and our relationship. It just came to the surface. And that is what I think writing is about, discovering things that you never could express. And it was as though the craft of writing had tricked me into thinking about things I hadn't thought about. In the end, it turned out that these stories were from my mother. They were for me in the beginning, But I realized that they were saying I listened. And when she read that book, it was the first time, I think, she felt that she didn't have to tell me these same words of advice. At the end of reading the book she said this comment, she said, "So easy to read." It didn't mean that my English was simply easy for her to read, It meant that it went down so easily in her heart. And that she now recognized how much she meant to me. I knew this later on, too, because she was arguing with somebody and she was trying to tell me how mad she was at this person, going into all the details... "And I said this, then she said this, because she promised, and then she lied later on..." And this is going to be one of her stories, her diatribes that was going to go on for three hours, and days and days, and I'd have to listen to this. And she stopped, and she said, "No, I don't have to tell you, you understand, you're just like me." That's what she got out of the book. To me, I would say that that the biggest thing that this book is about, to me, is hope. The qualities of hope and what our mothers believed about hope. Over the years, you know, I think there were a lot of people, especially women, who say, "Oh, you know, I've become just like my mother." And what they mean by that is Oh my God, I'm saying these horrible things these warnings, and, you know, "If you fall down don't come crying to me" kind of stuff. But in another sense, I'll tell you what is more revealing to me in becoming my mother, and that is that I have taken on the way that she believes. And what I mean by that is that there is no one set of beliefs that govern the way the world works for me. And that I have to find these answers by asking my own questions. My mother believed in all possibilities. She believed in miracles, she believed in God, she believed in curses, she believed in ghosts, she believed in fate, she believed in luck, and ancestors and reincarnation, She believed I was a reincarnation of somebody she wronged in a past life because I had come back to torture her. She believed in, she believed in so many things, and it's not to say she was inconsistent, and she, you know, was crazy. It was more that She believed in whatever was... what would give her the most hope. And that's what she did, she taught me the qualities of hope. I've developed this personal theory about hope and imagination and it is the ability to associate so profoundly that you are in that place That level of empathy is like compassion. So, to me, imagination is the closest thing we have to compassion. We certainly need a lot of compassion in this world. I write because it is about the meaning of my life. We all find meaning in different ways. We find it through families, we find it through work, we find it through friends, we find it in the kinds of things that make us happy and sad. And I have the time to think about all of that when I am writing. I just... I just feel like it's a great luxury. I think if you ask everybody, if you ask yourself, I bet you'd say, "Yeah, I have a story in me." What is the reason you have a story in you? You have a way of looking at the world that's different from anybody else. My epitaph, if I had to choose one right on the spot it would be: She believed in all possiblities and she found some of them. Now I'm ready for the revision! That was just the draft!