Amy Tan - Where the Past Begins - A Writer’s Memoir

With only those exceptions, I have kept all the photos. The problem is, I no longer recognize the faces of many—not the girl in the pool with me, or three out of the four women at a clothes-swap party. Nor those people having dinner at my house. Then again, I have met hundreds of thousands of people in my sixty-five years. Some of them may have even been important in my life. Yet, without conscious choice on my part, my brain has let a lot of moments slide over the cliff. While writing this memoir, I was conscious that much of what I think I remember is inaccurate, guessed at, or biased by experiences that came later. If I were to write this same book five years from now, I would likely describe some of the events differently, either because of a change of perspective or worsening memory—or even because new evidence has come to light. That is exactly what happened while writing this book. I had to revise often as more discoveries appeared.

I used to think photographs were more accurate than bare memory because they capture moments as they were, making them indisputable. They are like hard facts, whereas aging memory is impressionistic and selective in details, much like fiction is. But now, having gone through the archives, I realize that photos also distort what is really being captured. To get the best shot, the messiness is shoved to the side, the weedy yard is out of the shot. The images are also missing context: the reason why some are missing, what happened before and after, who likes or dislikes whom, if anyone is unhappy to be there. When they heard “cheese,” they uniformly stared at the camera’s mechanical eye, and put on the happy mask, leaving a viewer fifty years later to assume everyone had a grand time. I keep in mind the caveat that I should question what I see and what is not seen. I use the photos to trigger a complement of emotional memories. I use a magnifying glass to look closely at details in the black-and-white images in sizes popular in the 1940s and 1950s—squares ranging from one and a half to three and a half inches. They document a progression of Easter Sundays after church and the annual mauling of Christmas presents, which were laid underneath scraggly trees or artificial ones, in old apartments or new tract homes. Some of these photos refuted what I had believed was true, for example, that our family owned no children’s books, except one, Chinese Fairy Tales, illustrated by an artist who made the characters look like George Chakiris and Natalie Wood from West Side Story . A photo of me at age three shows otherwise: I am mesmerized by the words and pictures in a book spread open in my lap. In other photos of that same day, there is evidence of presents of similar size waiting to be ripped open. I had not known this when I wrote the piece “How I Learned to Read.” But it all makes sense that I would have been given books by family friends, if not by my parents. As a writer, I’m glad to know that my grubby little paws were all over those pages.

I came across many photos of me from the ages of one to five looking flirtatiously photogenic: perched in the crook of a tree, looking up from a wading pool, holding a cup with two hands, giving myself a hug, or grinning at the bottom of a playground slide. My father was an amateur photographer with a prized Rollei camera. He was no doubt giving me suggestions on how to arrange myself, praising me for remaining still, and telling me how pretty I looked, words I would have taken as a reward of love not given to my mother or brothers.

The oldest and rarest photos are in large-format albums. After seventy years, the glue has flaked off the bindings and the rusty rivets have lost their heads. The paper corner brackets that held the photos in place have fallen off, and the photos lie loose between thick black pages. Some of the studio photos taken over a hundred years ago are the size of postage stamps, which was why I did not realize they were of my grandmother until six years ago, when I placed a magnifying loupe over the sepia images.

One album holds photos my father took of my mother when they became secret lovers in Tianjin in 1945. He had arranged an artful collage: a large photo of my mother is in the center and smaller ones of himself surround her, as if to say that she is the center of his universe. My father also took many photos of Peter, the firstborn. I found multiple copies of the same photos, suggesting he sent them to friends or handed them out at church. My younger brother, John, received short shrift. Very few are of him alone.

By the early 1960s, my father stopped taking artfully posed photos with his Rollei. He switched to a Brownie camera for snapshots at birthday parties or when relatives or family friends came a long distance to visit us. There are fewer photos of my brothers and me when we were no longer cute and huggable; our limbs had elongated and turned knobby and our faces were sweaty, pimply, and darkened by the sun. In one, I am wearing white cat’s-eye glasses. My hairstyle looks like an explosion of black snakes, the aftermath of a novice beautician’s first attempt at giving a perm. My nose is bulbous, my cheeks are balloons, and my legs are thick and shapeless. That was how I saw myself. I browse through more images, seeking clues of the start of illness in our family. In one of the last photos of my father, he appears to have aged a great deal in just one year. His face looks tired and puffy. He has lost half of his eyebrows, which makes him look less vivid. After he died, there were few posed photos, not even for Lou’s and my wedding, aside from a dozen snapshots taken by friends and family members with disposable cameras. How lucky I am that my father, the amateur photographer with his prized Rollei camera, left behind such a rich pictorial history of our family.

In another bin, I found my first attempts at fiction writing, starting at the age of thirty-three. I saw layers of abandoned novels from over the last twenty-seven years, distressing pages I had not looked at since the awful day when I knew in the hollow of my gut that the novel was dead and that no further revisions or advancement of the narrative would save it. I had long since gotten over being heartsick about them. Nowadays, I let go of pages much more easily. That’s a necessary part of finding a story. Yet I had my trepidations about rereading those abandoned pages. When I did, I saw again the flaws that doomed them. But I was also happy to remember those fictional places where I had lived for months or years, while sitting long hours at my desk. I was still interested in the characters and their personalities. There is much in these stories I am still fond of. I never lost them. They are there, but just for me.

I took out a random assortment of childhood memorabilia and felt fond and strange emotions handling these objects that had once meant so much. I was aware that my fingerprints overlay those I had left as a child. There was residue of who I was in these objects. I was the girl who secretly wanted to be an artist. At eleven, the drawing of my cat lying on her back was the best I had ever done. At twelve, the best was a portrait of my cat soon after she was killed. I saved my brother’s scrawled science project notes on the care, feeding, breeding, and deaths of his guinea pigs. I kept his Willie Mays baseball mitt, which is no longer pliable. I kept two naked dolls with articulated joints whose eyes open and close, but not in synchrony, giving them a drunken cock-eyed expression. I remembered why I kept the pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT message slip on which the high school secretary had written that my brother Peter was doing well after brain surgery. I thought then that if I threw it away, he would die. So I kept it, but he died anyway.

This past year, while examining the contents of those boxes—the photos, letters, memorabilia, and toys—I was gratified to learn that many of my childhood memories were largely correct. In many cases, they returned more fully understood. But there were also shocking discoveries about my mother and father, including a little white lie they told me when I was six, which hugely affected my self-esteem throughout childhood and even into adulthood. The discoveries arranged themselves into patterns, magnetically drawn, it seemed, to what was related. They include artifacts of expectations and ambition, flaws and failings, catastrophes and the ruins of hope, perseverance and the raw tenderness of love. This was the emotional pulse that ran through my life and made me the particular writer that I am. I am not the subject matter of mothers and daughters or Chinese culture or immigrant experience that most people cite as my domain. I am a writer compelled by a subconscious neediness to know, which is different from a need to know . The latter can be satisfied with information. The former is a perpetual state of uncertainty and a tether to the past.