Amy Tan - The Opposite of Fate

With love to Lou DeMattei, who knows the fiction and nonfiction of my life, as well as all that cannot be put into words.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

A Note to the Reader

FATE AND FAITH

THE CLIFFSNOTES VERSION OF MY LIFE

HOW WE KNEW

A QUESTION OF FATE

FAITH

CHANGING THE PAST

LAST WEEK

MY GRANDMOTHER’S CHOICE

THINLY DISGUISED MEMOIR

PERSONA ERRATA

SCENT

AMERICAN CIRCUMSTANCES AND CHINESE CHARACTER

FISH CHEEKS

DANGEROUS ADVICE

MIDLIFE CONFIDENTIAL

ARRIVAL BANQUET

JOY LUCK AND HOLLYWOOD

STRONG WINDS, STRONG INFLUENCES

WHAT SHE MEANT

CONFESSIONS

PRETTY BEYOND BELIEF

THE MOST HATEFUL WORDS

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH VLADIMIR NABOKOV

LUCK, CHANCE, AND A CHARMED LIFE

INFERIOR DECORATING

ROOM WITH A VIEW, NEW KITCHEN, AND GHOSTS

RETREAT TO REALITY

MY HAIR, MY FACE, MY NAILS

THE GHOSTS OF MY IMAGINATION

A CHOICE OF WORDS

WHAT THE LIBRARY MEANS TO ME

MOTHER TONGUE

THE LANGUAGE OF DISCRETION

FIVE WRITING TIPS

REQUIRED READING AND OTHER DANGEROUS SUBJECTS

ANGST AND THE SECOND BOOK

THE BEST STORIES

HOPE

WHAT I WOULD REMEMBER

TO COMPLAIN IS AMERICAN

THE OPPOSITE OF FATE

Footnotes

Gratitude

Praise for The Opposite of Fate

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

These are musings on my life, including the metaphors I used as an eight-year-old child, sensing books as windows opening and illuminating my room, and the thoughts I had as I wrote my mother’s obituary, trying to sum up who she was and what legacy she had bequeathed to me.

I call this a book of musings because the writings are mostly casual pieces rather than formal essays. Some are long, versions of conversational talks I gave at universities. Others are short, particular to the desperate hour in which I wrote them, for example, the eulogy for my editor, the incomparable Faith Sale; or the e-mail sent to friends after an unexpected disaster resulting in my near-demise made the national news. There is also a love poem to my husband, which counts as my most difficult exercise in brevity.

I have included such longer pieces as my ruminations about the making of the film The Joy Luck Club. A reporter had faxed me questions, and I sent back the answers, written off the top of my head, ending with my wondering what would happen next; in a footnote, I explain what did. I offer as well a portion of my journal entries from a 1990 trip to China in which I was smothered in the bosom of family and had to acquiesce rather than follow my typical American ways. I offer it here for fun, and because it shows how nearly everything in my life turns into obsessive observation, images, questions, and if I am lucky, the beginnings of stories, however ragtag they may be. The last reflection in this book was written only recently, and for a fateful but hopeful reason.

Some of the pieces have ignominious origins. “Mother Tongue” was written hastily, as an apologia the night before I was to be on a panel with people far more erudite than I on the topic “The State of the English Language.” The speech was later published in The Threepenny Review and then selected for inclusion in the anthology The Best American Essays 1991 —leading me to wonder whether all my essays should be written at two in the morning in a state of panic. A version of “Mother Tongue” has also been used for the Advanced Placement SAT in English; this unanticipated development delights this author to no end, since her score in the 400s on the verbal section of the SAT made it seem unlikely, at least in 1969, that she would even think of making her living by the artful arrangement of words.

In gathering these pieces for the book, I made a new realization, so obvious that I was stunned I had not seen the pattern a hundred times before. In all of my writings, both fiction and nonfiction, directly or obliquely but always obsessively, I return to questions of fate and its alternatives. I saw that these musings about fate express my idiosyncratic and evolving philosophy, and this in turn is my “voice,” the one that determines the kinds of stories I want to tell, the characters I choose, the details I decide are relevant. In my fictional stories, I have chosen characters who question what they should believe at different moments in their lives, often in times of loss. And while I never intended for the pieces in this current nonfiction book to explain my fiction, they do.

Thus, although each of these writings came about for its own reasons, collectively they hold much in common, and at times they overlap in my mention of ideas, people, and pivotal moments. They are musings linked by my fascination with fate, both blind and blessed, and its many alternatives: choice, chance, luck, faith, forgiveness, forgetting, freedom of expression, the pursuit of happiness, the balm of love, a sturdy attitude, a strong will, a bevy of good-luck charms, adherence to rituals, appeasement through prayer, trolling for miracles, a plea to others to throw a lifeline, and the generous provision of that by strangers and loved ones.

I see that these permutations of changing fate are really one all-encompassing thing: hope. Hope has always allowed for all things. Hope has always been there. My mother, who taught me the many permutations of fate, was hope’s most stubborn defender. If fate was the minute hand on a clock, mindlessly moving forward, she could find a way to force it to go back. She did it often. She, who adamantly believed I would grow up to be a doctor, would later brag to anyone who listened, “I always know she be writer one day.” And in so saying, fate was changed and hope was fulfilled. And here I am, a writer, just as she predicted.

My mother believed in God’s will for many years. It was as if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said “fate” because she couldn’t pronounce that “th” sound in “faith.”

And later, I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you’re in control. I found out the most I could have was hope, and with that I was not denying any possibility, good or bad. I was just saying, If there is a choice, dear God or whatever you are, here’s where the odds should be placed.

• The Joy Luck Club

Soon after my first book was published, I found myself often confronted with the subject of my mortality. I remember being asked by a young woman what I did for a living. “I’m an author,” I said with proud new authority.

“A contemporary author?” she wanted to know.

And being newly published at the time, I had to think for a moment before I realized that if I were not contemporary I would be the alternative, which is, of course, dead.

Since then I have preferred to call myself a writer. A writer writes—she writes in the present progressive tense. Whereas an author, unless she is clearly said to be “contemporary,” is in the past tense, someone who once wrote, someone who no longer has to sharpen her pencil, so to speak. To me, the word author is as chilling as rigor mortis, and I shudder when I hear myself introduced as such when I lecture at universities. This is probably due to the fact that when I was an English major at a university, all the authors I read were, sad to say, not contemporary.