Ghosts at my shoulder
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,44
5496,00.html

From childhood, Amy Tan has had a close acquaintance with death and
trauma. It has left her with an abiding sense of danger - but also,
she tells Maya Jaggi, a sense that benign presences are helping her
to write. The result has been a series of novels with enormous
popular appeal

Saturday March 3, 2001
The Guardian

Amy Tan has always seen the world as a violent, dangerous place -
with good reason. Her own life, and that of her mother and
grandmother in pre-revolutionary China, has been dogged with
astonishing drama, tragedy and violence.

While that inheritance can be traced in her novels, what stands out
more is the changing, often abrasive, interplay between generations,
between Chinese mothers and their American daughters. She began
writing late, and enjoyed immediate success. Her first novel, The Joy
Luck Club, was published in 1989 when she was 37, remained on the New
York Times bestseller list for 77 weeks, and, like all her books, has
been translated into many languages, including Chinese.

Set mainly in San Francisco's Chinatown, the largest in the western
world and dating back to the Gold Rush, it interweaves the pasts and
presents of four migrant women who gather to play mahjong under the
impatient glances of their Coca-Cola-swilling daughters. Though Tan
had precedents, notably Maxine Hong Kingston, she is credited with
opening eyes to hidden lives - and doors to younger writers - not
least in a city where a third of the population is east Asian.

The Joy Luck Club, and the Hollywood spin-off directed by Wayne Wang
four years later, cornered what Time magazine saw as burgeoning US
interest in "growing up ethnic". Yet its broad appeal, and that of
Tan's subsequent bestsellers, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) and The
Hundred Secret Senses (1996), owe as much to their humour about
family neuroses that cross ethnic lines as detached curiosity. Like
her friend and Bay area neighbour, Isabel Allende, Tan's popular
fiction, with its historical backdrop spanning California and China,
undercuts exoticism with irony, romance with anxiety, the
supernatural with the sceptical.

The Bonesetter's Daughter, Tan's new novel and her first in five
years, was conceived in response to the diagnoses, within a few
months of each other, of her mother Daisy with Alzheimer's and her
friend and editor, Faith Sale, with cancer. "I became consumed with
both illnesses and both people," says Tan. "I wanted to write about
the loss of memory, and the memories you keep in the midst of losing
somebody; what you try to keep but end up forgetting, and what you
try to discover before the loss." But she found herself spinning out
the novel for years beyond the deadline. "It almost felt as though,
as long as I kept writing the book, they'd both stay alive."

Daisy Tan and Sale died within weeks of each other in late 1999. Tan
then rewrote the book from scratch. The story of Ruth, a Chinese-
American New Age ghostwriter finding her own voice while her Chinese-
born mother, Lu-Ling, succumbs to Alzheimer's, it is Tan's most
autobiographical to date.

Reflecting changes wrought by the disease in Tan's relationship with
her own mother, it brings a paradoxical sense of healing and closure
in an oeuvre marked by burning attrition between mothers and
daughters.

Now 49, Tan shares her home in Presidio Heights, overlooking the
Golden Gate Bridge, with her husband of 27 years, Louis DeMattei, a
tax attorney, and a pair of tiny Yorkshire terriers, Bubba and
Lilliput. She is graceful and self-possessed, but it is clear she has
a wilder side, too: she sings for charity in a rock band, The Rock
Bottom Remainders, with other bestselling writers, including Stephen
King, Carl Hiaasen and, until recently, Barbara Kingsolver. Touring
once a year as a leather-clad dominatrix, belting out These Boots Are
Made For Walking and Leader Of The Pack satisfies a need, she laughs,
to be a teenager again. And there are other advantages: "Nobody on
the bus asks, 'Where do you get your ideas?' "

She enjoys the other trappings of success, too, including a cabin by
Lake Tahoe and a New York apartment. Yet celebrity has added to her
ever-present sense of danger, bringing stalkers and death threats -
even a bizarre website titled "AmyTanmustdie".

Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952. Her mother had left
China in 1949, five days before the communists took Shanghai. In
Tan's fiction, the Chinese mothers are infuriating, both in their
eccentric beliefs and in their dress sense, but they are vindicated
through their daughters' gradual understanding of their pasts. Tan
discovered that her own grandmother had been raped as a young widow
by a merchant who had forced her into concubinage; she killed herself
by swallowing raw opium. Her daughter, Daisy - Amy's mother - was
forced into a feudal marriage, but later ran away from her abusive
husband, blaming him for the deaths of two of her five children.
Leaving her husband without a divorce was a criminal act – let alone
leaving him for another man, as she did.

John Tan, her second husband, was an electrical engineer from
Beijing - he fled the country for the US; Daisy was captured, raped
and thrown into jail - her trial, says Tan, was covered in the
Shanghai tabloids - before she, too, was able to escape to California
and join him. Daisy left China expecting to send for her three
daughters, but they were trapped once the "bamboo curtain" came down.
It was 30 years before she saw them again, and for many years she
never spoke of them to her new family.

Safe in the US, both John and Daisy toiled at night school. "From
when I was seven," recalls Tan, "my mother was a nurse, doing
everything from changing bedpans to giving vaccinations, which is
amazing to me; how she managed to cook incredible meals every night.
Everything was fresh - which I hated. Why can't we have canned
spinach?'" Tan wags her head brattishly. "'Fresh vegetables are what
poor people eat.'"

Tan, who when she was young fantasised about plastic surgery to make
her look less oriental, blamed her unhappiness as a child on being
Chinese - "It was the most convenient scapegoat" - but now feels that
the constant uprooting, between 10 cities around the San Francisco
Bay area, was as much a cause of alienation. "I'd lose a set of
friends, and spend months before I'd find others. All children have
their forms of unhappiness, and being different is an anxiety,
especially as a teenager." The 50s and 60s were also an era of
assimilation: "Being different was less tolerated; you'd be teased
with racial jokes. People found it disgusting if you ate fish with
the head still attached to it. Teenagers can be very cruel."

Brought up bilingual (in her dreams, she speaks fluent Mandarin), Tan
was soon refusing to speak Chinese in public. She became an
interpreter for her mother, of whose imperfect English she was
ashamed. "It's something I resented as a child," she recalls, "though
you can look at it with humour. I'd be on the telephone to banks as a
young girl, pretending I was my mother. A lot of what I translated
had to do with how terrible I was - writing letters to my mother's
friends saying she was thinking of sending me to school in Taiwan to
turn me into a better girl. I learnt to say what I thought people
wanted to hear."

When Tan was 14, her elder brother died of a brain tumour; within the
year, her father was also dead, of the same cause. She now suspects
that this coincidence (her mother also developed a benign brain
tumour) was due to her father's business making electrical
transformers. "They were doughnut-shaped, with a very powerful
electromagnetic force, which we all made and tested in the house."
Yet her mother, who believed in ancestral spirits and malign
imbalances, felt that the family was cursed. "She had such a morbid
feeling about everything; she became distressed at the smallest sign
of illness. She'd take me to hospital if I complained of a headache.
My way of dealing with that was not to tell her about anything that
scared or hurt me."

There were other traumas. An episode of child molestation in The
Bonesetter's Daughter echoes something that happened to Amy Tan
herself. "My brother was dead, my father was in the hospital and had
lost his mind; he almost didn't recognise me. I'd been a Daddy's
girl - my father was brilliant, personable; he was the one I wanted
to be like. To see him there, laughing because he was demented . . ."
she trails off.

She was being counselled by a community elder because her mother
thought she was out of control. "The man said, 'Your father's in a
lot of physical pain; he'd be in even more pain knowing what you're
doing.' I'd been this hard-shelled, defiant teenager, not showing
that anything mattered to me. But I broke down sobbing. I was
hysterical with grief." Then the man changed tack: "He started to
tickle me, threw me on to the bed and moved to other parts of my
body. It felt so wrong, but I thought, how can it be? This man is a
respected member of the community."

The man, whom Tan declines to name to this day ("I'm so afraid he'll
come back into my life"), reappeared years later at one of her book
signings. "I was like a deer caught in headlights," she says. "I
could not speak." That muteness - a theme of her new book - returned
after a college roommate was murdered while Tan was studying for a
PhD at Berkeley. "I had to identify the body and go in the room and
see all the blood," she remembers with horror. "It happened on my
birthday, and every year for about 10 years, on my birthday I lost my
voice."

After her husband's death, Tan's mother sold the business and took
Amy and her younger brother, John - who now works for a software
company near his sister - to Europe. They drove through the
Netherlands and Germany, before renting a furnished chalet in
Montreux, Switzerland, overlooking Lake Geneva. But at her private
school, Tan says, she was nearly raped by a school janitor. "The
teachers told me, next time, you should be more careful." They sacked
the man. "I lived in terror he would come after me and kill me."

These events have bred a sense of danger that lurks everywhere. "I
live with thoughts of being killed every day," says Tan. "I'm not so
much afraid of death as of violence; and my mother's warnings are
fulfilled - people die, terrible things can happen."

Tan lists the things that have happened to her: "I have been in three
hotel break-ins, held up at gunpoint, made to lie down on the floor
in a meat-locker, beaten up in a bar by a drunk, had a gang of people
come after me with knives. I think, is this forewarning, or is that
superstitious neurosis? Then I think, thank God I'm a writer: you can
play with notions of fear and mortality." She adds: "It's made me
very strong; I'm resilient, I have survivor skills. Some of that is
superficial - what I present to people outwardly - but what makes
people resilient is the ability to find humour and irony in
situations that would otherwise overpower you."

By the time the family left Switzerland when Tan was 17, she was in
open revolt. The year before, her mother had hired a private
detective to follow her and her German boyfriend ("An army deserter
who had escaped from a mental hospital"), and he stumbled on her
friends who were dealing in hashish ("I was unaware - it's not as
though I was sticking needles in myself"). All of them, except the 16-
year-old Amy, were deported.

Once back in California, Tan infuriated her mother further by
abandoning pre-med school to study English and linguistics (she jokes
that she was expected to be a neurosurgeon by profession and a
concert pianist as a hobby). But there were moments of
reconciliation. Amy's husband-to-be, a friend of her cousin, made a
good impression: "My cousin turned up with 10 friends, expecting
dinner. My mother was angry - in the kitchen throwing pots and pans
around and growling. Lou quietly ate a lot, and she remembers he
appreciated her cooking."

Lou's Italian-American parents initially disapproved - "because I was
Chinese, they thought I'd be a liability to him as a lawyer". But
Tan's mother had "given up the notion that I'd marry a Chinese boy;
in high school there were none. All the Chinese boys I knew were
relatives or close family friends." Tan faintly regrets that lack of
opportunity to date Chinese men ("It's very comfortable when somebody
has a similar sense of history"), yet feels her husband has blended
in. "So much of family revolves around food, and Lou eats more things
Chinese than I do - I'm much more squeamish."

After a spell as a speech therapist for children with disabilities,
Tan was a successful corporate writer, writing everything from
computer manuals to romantic horoscopes. Yet she spent much of the
80s as a self- confessed workaholic, putting in a joyless 90-hour
week. "I couldn't find the threshold that would tell me to stop, to
say now you've succeeded, you're happy, you've gotten enough
approval. Whatever people are looking for in work or life, I wasn't
finding, so I was smoking and working round the clock. Lou complained
that I had no life and was stinking up the house."

So she took up jazz piano and creative writing. But Tan had to
rediscover her Chinese ancestry before she could find her subject.
The change had begun in Europe. "In Switzerland, being Chinese was an
asset; boys thought I was exotic. Looking back, the new spin was
possibly no better than being looked at as undesirable, but I saw my
opinion of myself could turn simply because of people's biases. It
was a valuable lesson in self-esteem."

At college, she took classes in spoken Chinese and Asian
history. "You go through a more activist period of being angry that
your history books never had any positive role model of Asians, just
had them working the railroads, and that wasn't my background. But
it's necessary to find a balance, being comfortable and knowledgeable
about your own culture, and not feeling guilty that you're not really
Chinese. It's an evolution of ethnic identity, but it's a lifetime's
process."

Tan was in her teens before she learned that her mother had been
married before, and had the three elder daughters in China. The
subject erupted when her father was in hospital. "I'd done something
that angered my mother," says Tan. "She was hitting me, saying, 'Why
did I have you? I have other daughters who are good; they speak
Chinese.' I felt very threatened - that I could be replaced." She
wasn't to meet her half- sisters for 20 years.

In 1986, while on holiday in Hawaii, Tan received the news that her
mother had had a heart attack. She rushed home, vowing to get to know
her mother better, but it was a false alarm: "She'd gotten into a row
with a fishmonger." Tan followed through her promise, however,
visiting China for the first time with her mother and her husband.
She felt more American there, "in that stupid, traveller sense", but
also "suddenly Chinese, the minute I touched China" - "As if the
membrane separating the two halves of my life has finally been shed,"
as she wrote.

"I felt connected to that history and landscape, and to everything
that formed my family and their past," she says. "And my mother was
extremely proud to feel needed to explain the world to me now, when
all those years I'd had to translate for her. I found that she got
into as many arguments with shopkeepers as she did in America - it
had nothing to do with language; it was personality."

Tan at last met her three half-sisters - "My uncle, an important
communist official, appeared with a woman. I shook hands stiffly and
only later realised that she was my sister. I'd anticipated the big
American embrace, but we talked later." She began to look differently
at the inheritance that she shared with these half-sisters who
displayed common "emotional traits" - "hand gestures; sense of
humour; small nuances of expression; their sense of outrage if
someone tried to humiliate them; speechlessness, then sudden rage;
being depressed by certain things".

Yet there were cultural differences. "I have a sense of entitlement
they don't have - being an American." In fact, though Tan's eldest
half-sister, Yuhang Wang, a retired civil servant, is still in
Shanghai, the other two have since migrated to the US. Tina runs a
takeaway in Wisconsin, June is a software engineer in the Bay area.
The reunited family spends Chinese new years together.

While Tan was in China, The Joy Luck Club, still only in embryonic
form, was sold to a New York publisher for $50,000. Paperback rights
were later auctioned for $1.2 million. Though Tan is now proud of the
film she co-produced in 1993 with Oliver Stone and also co-wrote
("It's an emotional sibling to the book; it was never intended to be
a twin, a filmic clone"), she had been apprehensive beforehand.

"I've had criticisms from people who think I should be creating
sociological models. One mandate placed on writers from different
ethnic backgrounds is to create 'superior' characters who speak
articulate English. But simply because my mother could not speak good
English, did that make her inferior? If I can create a character who
speaks the way my mother spoke to me, but who has valuable things to
say, and it seduces the reader into rooting for her, then I've done
more than anything else to forward a sense of humanity, in making
people not judge others for superficial reasons."

Her mother's storytelling about her life in China fuels Tan's
fiction, most directly The Kitchen God's Wife. "One of the things my
mother said to me after she read The Joy Luck Club was, 'The past can
be changed; if you tell the world, the pattern can be changed.' It's
not as though I'm going to change the way women are treated, but I
can change how my grandmother will be remembered - not simply as a
tragic victim and a forgotten woman, but as a woman who left a legacy
of strength."

Tan remains fascinated by the history that affected her family - from
the Boxer uprisings of the 19th century to the Japanese invasion and
civil war of the 20th. Her paternal grandfather was educated by
missionaries and the influence endured: her father became a Baptist
minister in California.

Tan's first novel came out the year the Tiananmen Square students'
uprising was crushed. She found herself under great pressure to
denounce China: "My family was in Beijing; if I denounced the
government, I was putting them at risk. I thought, does my spouting
my mouth off improve things or simply assert my rights as an American
to say what I feel? People took that as my standing on the fence, but
if I'm concerned about human rights I have to think harder about what
I do that results in positive change."

Despite her success, Tan suffers bouts of depression. "It could be
genetic or being around a mother who was suicidal," she says. "When I
was a little girl, she talked about killing herself, and there were
times when she'd make an attempt in front of us. Mostly, it wasn't a
quiet depression - she'd be hysterical and shouting; she'd open the
car door on the freeway and try to jump out; turn all the furniture
upside down in the house in rage, and brandish a knife. It's easy to
pass that on to a child. And my grandmother was obviously depressed;
it runs in three generations."

She now controls it with anti-depressants. "I don't think of myself
as weak, but I have this in my psychological make-up, chinks in the
emotional armour." She once tried therapy ("The therapist fell
asleep"), but prefers informal chats with therapist friends. "Part of
my problem is self-esteem and a difficulty trusting strangers. People
think I'm so open, but there's a lot I keep within myself. It's good
to keep secrets if you're a writer and gradually unveil them."

The Hundred Secret Senses, perhaps Tan's funniest book, is the story
of the Chinese-American Olivia and her Chinese elder half-sister,
Kwan, who remembers past lives. Tan spoke of it as a "coming out"
about her beliefs in "yin people" (ghosts) as a source of her
fiction - an admission she knew would expose her to ridicule. "My
father and brother dying makes me think a lot about what goes on
after life; the possibility that consciousness goes on," she says.

Her mother would set a ouija board before her and ask not only about
their dead relatives but about the stock market. "I've always been
ambivalent," says Tan. "I was raised with a sense that I could
communicate with ghosts, and it did seem to come from something other
than myself. I can still find rational ways to explain these things -
as repressed memory or the Jungian collective unconscious. But I've
gotten so much help in my writing that it's hard to pass these off -
it's like being ungrateful; denying the existence of a force greater
than oneself. You could say it's ghosts or the supernatural, but
those terms are tainted as flaky notions. To me, it's not about
physical bodies before birth or after death; it's a continuous
consciousness and a form of love. It's benevolent, not frightening."

While the New York Times saw it as a battle between Tan's "rational,
western side", and her "dreamier, eastern side", her beliefs owe
more, perhaps, to Californian New Ageism than to any eastern
mysticism. It was as Tan was finishing The Hundred Secret Senses that
she learned that Faith Sale, her editor and friend, was ill. "I
realised I'd never lived alone until I went to New York to be with my
editor. I went from living at home to living with a roommate to being
with Lou. New York was a frightening experience."

Then her mother's Alzheimer's was diagnosed, and Tan became, as does
Ruth in the new novel, "a mother to the child her mother had become".
Tan remembers inviting her mother for Christmas in New York. "I
worried the whole time: how would she remember her flight number?
It's like sending a five-year-old child across the country."

She was aware of changes in her mother, who "lost her English and her
Mandarin, and could only speak Shanghainese, her first language". But
dementia was also a "truth serum": "My mother no longer had any
buffers on her emotions. In some sense, she'd always remained about
nine years old emotionally, because that's when her mother killed
herself; she needed to be the centre of attention and to feel wanted."

On Tan's half-sister's birthday, her mother declared that she should
get all the presents. "It sounds child-like, but it's also how she
was before, though she didn't say it so openly. Instead of being
distressed, we'd joke about the things in ourselves that would show
up if we had the same condition; what little bits of truth would leak
out if we didn't censor ourselves."

She adds: "I found that I knew so much more about my mother
emotionally than I had thought. People often say that, with
Alzheimer's, the person is is no longer the person you knew, that
they become a shell of themselves. I didn't find that. My mother
retained a rich and happy emotional life. She wanted to be loved and
needed, and I could use my knowledge of her emotional needs to
communicate with her; that was enormously gratifying to me. I
realised it wasn't that my mother had to read my books or know that
I'd accomplished things to make her proud of me. It's the thing I
miss most about having a mother; there is no one else in the world
who worries about you so much; who sees the dangers and will annoy
the hell out of you telling you what they are."

The Bonesetter's Daughter mirrors Tan's practical battle with her
mother's disease. After buying houses and trying to offer live-in
help, Tan and her husband moved Daisy into an assisted-care residence
through subterfuge. "We told her it cost $750 a month - her social
security - and she thought it was a bargain. In all the places she's
lived, she was the happiest there. She felt safe. When she was dying
those last three weeks, we all moved in, 18 or 20 of us, playing card
games and mahjong, eating takeout food, taking turns to stay
overnight."

The novel was reshaped when Tan learned her mother's true maiden
name – Li Bingzi - on the day her mother died. "I was stunned; I'd
spent all these years writing about her life, but I didn't know what
name she was born with." She found a metaphor in Peking Man, the
bones of which were excavated, lost and never refound. "It's so much
like how we learn about our own parents, our ancestors and origins.
We discover pieces and then lose them, and so much remains a mystery."

There was an unexpected emotional resolution to a rift of long
before. When Tan was 16, "my mother was so frustrated - and I really
did do things that would have driven any parent crazy - she snapped
and held a cleaver to my throat. I was so numb and angry, for 20
minutes I acted as though I didn't care if she sliced my throat. She
was absolutely crazy; you could see it in her eyes. She said, 'I'll
kill you and Didi [my little brother] then myself, and we'll go where
Daddy and Peter are, and you won't be ruining your life.' She never
talked later about what happened. But two years after she had
Alzheimer's, she said in Chinese, in a rare moment of lucidity: 'Amy,
I think I'm losing my mind, I can't remember so many things. But I
did something terrible to you when you were a child, I don't remember
what. I'm sorry.' It was such a wonderful thing. For every child, no
matter how good their childhood, there's something back there that
you wished your parents had said sorry for; for me, it was for that."

Tan, who has also written two children's books, decided with her
husband not to have children. She speculates about an early
miscarriage: "In my mind it was a girl; she'd be 21 now, and would be
giving us such grief, though we're convinced our children would have
been beautiful." More seriously, she feared passing on instability -
"I've never learned to feed myself at regular intervals, and I've
operated for so long on impulse" - and neurosis: "I'd worry
obsessively and see danger in so much." Yet she has no regrets. "We
never felt a strong compulsion to duplicate our genetic structure;
what's in me that I'd have wanted to pass on is already in the books."