Sunday, Dec. 07, 2003
In The Opposite of Fate, Chinese-American novelist Amy Tan reveals that one of the reasons she became a writer was to make a testament to her mother, Daisy, who emigrated from China in 1949. The formidable Daisy, who appears frequently in this collection of essays, had a distinct voice of her own, typified by this Talibanic pronouncement on the mortal perils of dating: "Don't ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can't stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill yourself."
Ever since her debut novel, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan's fiction has sought to unweave the tangled web of family memory and to trace those threads that span continents—Asia and North America—and generations. Tan's stolid Chinese mothers are the repositories of those tightly bound reminiscences; to their conflicted daughters falls the duty of unraveling them. The Opposite of Fate is an attempt to pull at some of the loose ends, with added ruminations on the quirks of celebrity authorship, recollections of rocking-and-rolling with Stephen King and an inevitable (and forgettable) commencement address. But Tan's best essays are essentially ghost stories that cut through the knotted past to recover a measure of understanding.
Tan believes in real ghosts, like the kind that haunted her remodeled San Francisco attic and needed to be exorcised by a professional (as she writes in
Room with a View,
New Kitchen and
Ghosts). That belief, like so much else, was bequeathed by her mother. Daisy consulted a Ouija board on how to raise Amy and her little brother, after her husband and eldest son both died of brain tumors in the same year. It makes sense that ghosts should be endemic to a life as haunted as Tan's. Besides the deaths of her father and brother, she writes of losing a best friend in a violent murder, a beloved editor to swift cancer and, in the moving essay
Last Week, of watching her mother succumb to Alzheimer's disease.
Daisy, like many of her generation, had much she may have wished to forget. Born into the florid decay of imperial China, Daisy would live through a particular horror: she watched her own mother, forced to become a concubine, commit suicide by swallowing raw opium. Despite such early trauma, she managed to survive in Shanghai amid hellish marital troubles (her brutal first husband divorced her and seized custody of her three children), before she fled to the U.S. As Daisy exhibits symptoms of Alzheimer's, a concerned Amy takes her mother in for tests; Daisy growls, "Nothing wrong my memory. Depress 'cause can not forget." Amy suffered for Daisy's traumas. In the short essay Confessions, the most harrowing piece in the collection, Amy recalls a violent standoff with her mother over her first real boyfriend, a confrontation that ended with Daisy holding a meat cleaver against her daughter's neck. Years later, when Alzheimer's has almost obliterated Daisy's memory, Amy asks her mother about the incident. Daisy laughs and dismisses it. Amy was always a good daughter, she says, and they never fought. Never. Writes Tan: "How wonderful to hear her say what was never true, yet now would be forever so."
- Bryan Walsh
- Amy Tan explores family history and the mystery of memory in The Opposite of Fate
