Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir (2021) Movie Script

[birds cawing]
Right. It's that.
Where is her photos?
Where did I put them?
I used to have this
all organized.
And now...
Okay, let me see.
This is my mother as a young
woman with her friends.
This is the back of the mansion
where she lived,
just out of Shanghai.
Okay, so...
In my office
is a time capsule.
Seven large,
clear plastic bins
safeguarding frozen moments
in time,
a past that began
before my birth.
During the writing
of this book,
I delved into the contents...
memorabilia, letters, photos,
and the like...
and what I found had the force
of glaciers calving.
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.
[lively piano music playing]



You know, when you're writing,
I think you're naturally
going through
some kind of subconscious
philosophical construct,
your own cosmology,
how the world is put together,
and how events happen,
and what's related,
what's coincidental.
Okay.
It's not as though I want
to change the past.
It's really trying
to understand
how these things come together
to bring you where you are.
If you want to visit
the overflow crowd
or if we've hit your time where
you need your down time...
- Whatever you want.
- No.
It's whatever you want, actually.
I often think I'm just
dreaming my life.
You know, I've really...
there've been so many times
I've nearly died...
car accidents or whatever.
Maybe something
really happened,
and I've been unconscious
or in a coma all these years,
and I've dreamt this life up.
Please join me in welcoming
Amy Tan.
[cheers and applause]
What I'd like
to do tonight
is tell you what kind of
experiences went into me
to propel myself into writing.
A lot of people think,
well, you know from the...
My father was the oldest
of 12,
and he became an engineer.
Being the oldest, my father
had the most responsibility,
but as it turns out,
he was also the most handsome,
the most articulate,
the best English.
Many women
would have loved him,
but he chose my mother.
This is 1959.
Here we are
having a carefree moment.
The family goes off
into the future.
In this shot,
that's my little brother,
and that's me.
[piano music playing]
I have fond memories
of my mom playing piano.
She would play Mozart,
Beethoven, Bach.
She was brilliant.
They really wanted us to be
engrossed in
the American values,
and that's why I don't have
an accent.
They really wanted
to be perfect Americans,
but I know later in years,
they also wanted
to make sure that we understood
where the Chinese culture
came from,
our heritage,
and what was respected.
This is me
on my fourth birthday.
She's my best friend
to this day,
the one at the end, Sandy.
Her mother and father
were members
of the original
Joy Luck Club.
All my parents' siblings
were in China,
so I always considered Amy and
her siblings to be my cousins.
[laughter]
The Joy Luck Club was formed
by a few couples,
all Chinese,
who decided
they wanted to be
an investment group.
They would pick stocks,
review them,
and then they would
socialize afterwards.
Mostly women played Mahjong.
The men preferred
to play cards.
Then, about midnight,
they would have a feast.
We would love it as children,
you'd get to stay up late,
get to see our aunties
and uncles.
[indistinct chatter]
What I remember is
there's this comfort level
of being with like people,
especially for my mom
who grew up in Shanghai.
Auntie Daisy, Amy's mom,
was also from Shanghai.
I can imagine how comforting
that would feel.
I loved Amy's dad, Uncle John.
He had a really warm smile,
really warm and welcoming
demeanor.
My father's avocation
was the ministry,
and it was my mother
who made him quit the ministry
because it was a life
of poverty.
He went back to
his former occupation
in engineering.
He worked seven days a week.
My mother worked as well.
He also was
going to school
and getting
a master's degree,
and in his spare time,
he was still substitute
preaching.
Auntie Daisy was a spitfire.
[laughs]
She was small,
she spoke rapidly.
I could hear her voice,
like, "Amy, ah..."
With this furrowed brow.
This is a mother who would
tell me things like,
"You should never
let anyone tell you
who you should be
or what you should do."
"You should never let anyone
talk down to you."
"You should never feel
you have to get married
if you don't wanna
get married."
"And no one should tell you
you must have a baby,
not your husband,
not your mother-in-law,
not your friends."
She said, "But you should
have a good job
because if you do get married
and your husband is mean,
you can leave him immediately
without a question."
[laughter]
My mother had other advice
like that,
like crossing the street.
A lot of parents
look both ways, you know.
My mother did
the look both ways,
but she said, "You don't look,
maybe a car comes,
smash you flat like a sand dab,
both eyes on one side
of your face."
[laughter]
You never forget after that,
you never forget.
I remember
this fear of shame.
When it was my birthday,
I was so afraid
my mother would do
something like
bring Chinese food.
And I remember
being relieved
when she brought
the requisite cupcakes.
My father was an amateur
photographer
and he liked to pose people.
Posed, posed.
He was a good photographer.
See how they loved
my older brother,
the golden child.
They were constantly comparing
me and my brother, Peter.
He was always doing well.
He skipped a grade,
he was independent,
and polite, and behaved.
And they would say, why can't
you be more like Peter?
I loved my brother, Peter.
He was my hero.
He was the person who taught
me so many different things.
And he never made himself
to be superior.
But I really sensed it,
especially from my father.
This past year,
while examining the contents
of those boxes,
I was gratified to learn that
many of my childhood memories
were largely correct.
But there were also
shocking discoveries
about my mother and father,
including a little white lie
they told me when I was six.
When I was in the first grade,
the woman came to our school,
took me into this little room,
gave me, I don't know,
she probably called them
puzzles or something
because I was a little kid.
About a few weeks later,
I came home from school,
and there she was
in the living room,
and she was talking
to my mom and dad.
And then the woman left.
And my parents said to me, they
were all excited and they said,
you know, you took this test,
and the lady said
to us you are smart enough
to be a doctor.
You are going to be a doctor.
So that's how my career
was decided,
on the basis of a test.
Now I was gonna be
a doctor
and a concert pianist
on the weekend.
A lot of people think
I'm joking,
but this truly was
the expectation.
[piano music playing]

When I was nine years old,
my mother's version
of believing in me
was believing that
I could be anything,
anything she wanted
the best piano prodigy
this side of China.
I resented the piano.
It was a little slave master,
you know, where I had to get
everything right.
You know, the right rhythm,
the right fingering,
the right notes,
the right expression.
So I didn't really get a chance
to enjoy music,
as my mother would have hoped.
I was getting ready
for my first recital,
which was a talent show
at the church.
And you can see
I have on patent leather shoes,
and this beautiful,
violet dress.
[applause]
I had memorized a piece...
Bach, a simple minuet.
I started playing.
[playing piano]

And I got stuck
about five measures in.
I started over again,
and I got stuck
in the same place.
I did it over and over until
the audience started to clap
and I knew
I was being sent away.
- [stops playing]
- [laughter]
I told my mother
I did not want
to play the piano anymore,
and she said, "Okay, fine.
Why you listen to me?"
"No play piano, go outside,
play there."
"Don't have to listen
to Mother
because maybe soon,
I dead anyway."
But she was not a tiger mom,
she was a suicidal mother.
And that's very different
from simply being
a demanding mother who wants
that kind of perfection.
It was, if you don't feel
the way that I do,
I might as well kill myself.
Very different.

There was a Sunday
when it was my birthday,
we all went to church,
my mother decided to stay
behind.
I don't know why, but when
we returned home,
I had been expecting a cake
and instead, the furniture
was turned upside down.
All the chairs
in the living room,
the coffee table was
just as though
she had thrown everything.
There was gonna be no cake,
and no lunch, and no dinner.
My father took me up that day
and we went up to a hill,
and he took some pictures.
My father posed me
and told me to look at him
and I wouldn't
because I was crying.

I know that the situations
that would cause her
to become...
almost insane
is if you did not,
in her mind, respect her.
So she might have
said something
and you just ignored it,
or you said something critical
about her
in front of somebody else,
that was suicide.
That was gonna trigger suicide.
She had no way of coping with
anything like that.
"The girl and her brothers
are sitting
on the backseat
of the car,
coming back from church."
"Her mother turns to her father
to say something,
and right away,
she knows it's bad."
"Her voice is broken, squeaky,
then jagged, as words scrape
through her throat."
"'That what you want?
You want to go?'"
"'Then go, or I go first.'"
"Her father reaches
for her mother's hand,
but she snatches it back."
"It's getting worse,
and just as she thinks that,
her mother grunts something
that sounds like,
'Mm-hmm, maybe
I'll kill myself right now,
"then everybody happy.'"
"She hears the car door creak,
it's cracked open."
"The car swerves one way
and then the other,
her mother puts her right leg
out the car door."
"The road grabs her mother's
right shoe
and it's gone in an instant."
"Her mother leans
her whole body out."
"Then the car swerves again
and she feels the tire slip
and go off the road."
"And soon she hears the sound
of crunching gravel
until they stop."
"When she sits up, she sees
her mother is still
in the car."
"Finally, her mother gives up
and says in a howling
kind of voice,
'I want to die.'"
"And then the girl
feels her cheeks,
she's crying,
and she doesn't know
when it started."
"She just wants
everything to be over."
At that time, I wrote.
I wrote stories.
Writing was almost like
letters to myself,
and often they had to do
with angry feelings
I had, say, with my mother,
or something I was
frustrated about.
So it was like
a confident, in a way.
But it never occurred to me
that I could be a writer.
I wanted to be an artist.
Drawing was very private
and I could do it for hours,
pencil drawings mostly.
A cat, a horse, a girl,
a tree, a house...
whatever it was,
it was private.
I think what intruded
was this notion
it had to be perfect
and I saw other kids
who were better at drawing,
and then ultimately I had
an art teacher
who said I wasn't
very creative,
that I had no imagination,
and that I didn't have
what it would take
to get to a deeper level
of creativity.
And, you know, at that point,
it seemed there were
enough signs
that I should not pursue that,
plus, my parents would be
extremely disappointed
if I did something
that was purely fun.
Whether it's encouragement
or discouragement,
it just stays with you.
I remember
when I asked my mother,
"Would I be considered
beautiful in China?"
She says,
"Well, maybe average." [laughs]
And I was so crushed
because I thought, well,
I'm kind of ugly
in American culture.
Wouldn't I be
at least beautiful
in Chinese culture?
No, I was average.
So much for
my mother's honesty.

Auntie Daisy and Uncle John
were two of the founding
members of the Joy Luck Club,
and Uncle John actually
came up with the name
Joy Luck Club.
And they were regular members
until Peter had his brain tumor
and Uncle John had his.
Shortly after
this Christmas,
my older brother Peter
was discovered to have
an inoperable brain tumor.
My father,
the Baptist minister,
prayed to God and had
the congregations
pray for a miracle.
My mother joined him
in all of this... wrote letters.
Every day, it was a visit
to my brother
who was unconscious...
at the end of six months.
Two weeks before
my brother died,
my father was diagnosed
with a glioblastoma,
with a brain tumor.
When Peter was diagnosed
with this brain tumor,
it seemed like a short period
of time from when he died.
Six months later,
Uncle John died.
And I think Uncle John
might have been in the hospital
when Peter died.
So he couldn't really be
where he wanted to be
with his son.
Two weeks before
my father died,
a minister came to counsel me
because I had been discovered
reading a very bad book,
- Catcher in the Rye.
- [laughter]
Banned book.
He was a youth minister,
and he came into the room
and we were sitting on the bed,
and he was talking about
how I had caused my father
more pain than the brain tumor.
So I started to cry,
of course,
and then he said,
let's pray for forgiveness.
And we did,
and I was still crying,
and he said,
"You shouldn't cry now."
And I was still crying.
And then he started
to tickle me on my side.
And then he threw me
on the bed
and he tickled me
even further.
He tickled me all over.
He tickled me under my dress.
And when he was done,
he said to me,
"You have a very dirty mind
and no one's going
to believe you."
So I came out of that room
a very angry girl.
I was a daddy's girl,
I loved my older brother.
They were my protectors,
and they were gone.
I was left with this crazy,
suicidal mother.
After my father
and brother died,
my mother was in such turmoil
over what we were gonna do
with the rest of our lives.
She thought
that it was a curse
and she started seen omens
in everything.
One day she was washing dishes
and she picked up this can of...
I think it was called
Old Dutch cleanser...
and she just said,
"Holland... Holland is clean,
we're moving to Holland."
With anybody else,
that would be a joke.
But with my mother,
that was the reason
why she decide
we go to Holland.
Maybe we would be able
to outrun this curse
that was after us.
We packed all our clothes,
our furniture went
to relatives,
I didn't even know
that she sold the house.
We ended up on a boat.
This is my mother and all of
us going to the Netherlands.
We arrived at with no idea
where we were gonna live.
And we ended up drifting,
we ended up going
to Switzerland.
We lived on a little chalet
on the mountain,
Beautiful...
you could see the Lake Geneva.
Every day,
waking up to Lake Geneva.
Here's the house
where I used to live.
Here's the window
in the bedroom.
Here's the view of Montreux.
And what happened there
was not only
all the pent up anger
I had had
and was not able to express
about the death of my brother
and father.
It was now the freedom to have
boyfriends,
to be friends with rich girls
who wore makeup.
I started smoking.
I almost ran off and eloped
with the German army deserter.
My mother thought he was going
to ruin me
and she could do
nothing to dissuade me.
[John] When my mom was on her own,
there was a lot of grief
and a lot of shouting.
She was angry of everything
that was happening.
[Amy] We had many, many arguments.
I remember times when
I would go into the bathroom
so she couldn't see me.
I would be absolutely placid
and I'd go in the bathroom
and then I'd have dry heaves,
and then I'd come out,
and I didn't want her to see
that it affected me whatsoever.
Nothing that she said
could change me.
It was part of my decision
to not be like her at all,
to not have those emotions.
But I came home one day,
and she was raging.
She had this way of breathing.
It was like...
[panting heavily]
Like that,
and her face was crazed
and she pushed me
and she kept pushing me
into the bedroom,
and she locked it
from the inside, and she
tossed the key somewhere.
And she had this cleaver
and she backed me up
against the wall.
And she just said,
"It's enough. It's time."
"I'm going to kill you first,
and then Didi."
That's what we called
my brother,
"And then I'm going
to kill myself,
and we will all be
with Daddy and Peter."
And her eyes were different.
Her eyes were glazed in a way.
They were gone.
It wasn't just anger,
she was gone.
And I thought, she's really...
she's crazy.
She's gonna do it.
And I remember
looking out the window,
looking out on Lake Geneva,
and the French Alps,
and I just looked and I said,
this is it.
And it's so sad.
It's so sad that this is what
it has come to.
And what came out
of my throat,
I thought, was a complete
betrayal to me, was a voice.
The voice said,
"I wanna live."
"I wanna live. I wanna live."
When that voice said,
"I wanna live, I wanna live,"
that was the end of it.
That's all I remember
up until that point.
After a while,
when I found out that
I could graduate a year early,
I had my reason to leave home.
After they moved,
we didn't see them
for a few years,
and then when Amy
and her family
came back from Switzerland,
I guess I was a freshman
in college at San Jose State,
and Amy and her boyfriend, Lou,
had transferred
from Linfield College.
I looked them up
and we started
seeing each other again.
I had to get used
to the idea that
there was this guy
now in the picture.
Lou was actually
a blind date.
I was in a sorority,
and somebody decided
for some crazy reason to
ask him to go to a function.
And when I found out
what she had done,
I said, "I am not going out
with this guy."
It wasn't exactly
love at first sight.
It was more maybe cluelessness
at first sight
because I wasn't
adversely reacting
to all of the things
that Amy did
to make it seem that she
wanted nothing to do with me.
He was mellow, nice, handsome.
He was built
in a muscle way
that I've always
found unattractive in men.
I always feel that the amount
of muscle mass
kinda detracts
from the mass in the brain.
We overcame these thoughts
of his, somehow.
Within a month,
it was pretty evident
that we were gonna make
a go of it.
- Dad, Mom.
- Hi.
This is Rose Hsu,
my girlfriend.
-Hello
-Hi.
His parents did not like me,
and always tried to get us
to break up.
She said it was because
of the Vietnam War.
He's going to be working
with his father in the company
and, uh, he's going to be
judged by people of
a different standard
and they won't be
as understanding as we are.
Mrs. Jordan, you sound as if
Ted and I are getting married.
That's hardly the case.
Oh, I know, dear.
It's just that,
well, the way the world is,
how unpopular Vietnam was.
I'm not Vietnamese.
I'm American.
I would not wanna dismiss
them as hardcore racists.
They weren't that,
but they still
had difficulty accepting Amy
that was a cloud
on the relationship, really,
throughout our lives.
We were so young,
and he didn't know
how to stand up for me
to his parents.
And so I said, this is it.
Either we get married,
or it's over.
So that was the proposal.
[laughs]
And he said, "Oh, okay."
[laughs]
Four months later,
we got married.
He was such a nice guy.
And I had the thought that my
father would have liked him.
I lived with my mom
in San Leandro.
I think I was 16 or 17
years old.
Amy and Lou had come down
to visit.
Shrimp, my favorite.
And my mom had made over,
I'd say,
200 to 300 pot stickers.
And they came and they ate most
of them.
Oh, my God. He just, like,
wolfed those down.
I was so pissed off.
[laughs]
I said,
"Don't ever bring him back."
All this needs
is a little soy sauce.
[gasps]
The entire world assumes
it must be me.
I can't count the times
I've met people and they say,
"I know you.
You're the guy who said,
'All it needs
is a little soy sauce.'"
And I think the irony
to that story is that
I actually managed to make
a halfway decent
first impression.
He's like a brother to me.
I mean, my lost brother,
he came into my life,
he supported me
as much as possible,
and he was very conscious
of keeping my mom happy
and so forth.
There was a brief period
of time that I actually
probably had a better relationship
with Amy's mother than Amy did.
And they were at loggerheads
because Amy was finally
telling her mother,
no, I'm not going to be
a medical doctor
and a concert pianist by night.
You know, I'm going
to do this my way.
- There you are, puffing away.
- Oh.
- [both laugh]
- You've turned it on?
- Yeah.
- Oh, no.
My mother will see this
and tell me...
She won't approve.
At that point,
I really had the love/hate
relationship with my mother.
I knew what kind of support
she needed to not kill herself.
So I started
writing letters to her
when I went to college.
"Dear Mom,
Boy, it sure was good
talking to you
on the telephone,
even though I didn't say
anything too profound."
And in a way, it was similar
to what I do now
with characters.
I have to make myself
emotionally like
those characters.
And that's what I did
with my mother.
It was necessary
because she was alone
in the world.
She needed that.
Lou and I talked about kids,
and I was a little afraid
that what if I had a child
who would be,
A, like me,
once they're a teen,
you know,
a lot of trouble,
or would be... be sick
like my brother, and die.
I would have been
a terrible mother,
I would have been
like my mother.
I would have been worried all
the time about
every single possibility
of disease and danger.
And so that became
the decision.
- Hi.
- Hello.
- Oh, look at you.
- What? Look at you.
I wonder if you could just
tell us a little bit
about your
pre-Joy Luck Club world.
You know,
I had another best seller.
It sold... you know what
these numbers are.
When you have a best seller,
you have to sell a certain
amount in the first week.
I'd sold 80,000 copies
and went in for two reprints.
It was called
Telecommunications and You.
[laughter]
It was published for IBM.
And I was a business writer
before I started
writing fiction.
Amy was linguistics...
an English major...
and I remember her
wanting to write.
John, my husband,
started a business.
He had one phone line
that was Dial-A-Joke,
another phone line that
was Dial Michael Jackson,
and another one
that had astrology.
So he hired Amy
to write astrology.
She was very creative,
and she would make it up.
[laughs]
I was doing a little bit
of ad copy,
direct mail...
the really sleazy stuff.
You know, like,
do these exercises,
and your vision
will become perfect,
or study this course,
and you'll be a doctor.
I had materials I wrote for
a telecommunications company.
I was
the subject matter expert
on ISDN and wide area networks
and the divestiture of AT&T.
All those subjects, I had
absolutely no interest in.
I was doing really well.
I had a lot of clients.
I was working about
90 billable hours a week,
and... which meant I didn't have
a lot of time
to sleep or eat or be social.
And I was looking for something
more meaningful.
And that's why I started
writing fiction.
I met somebody who encouraged
me to read fiction again,
and she gave me a reading list
and she was a writer.
And I started to write.
And the things I discovered
about writing at that point
were so important to me.
It was the notion
that you could write
and find out what you really
believed and felt.
All these things
that had been submerged,
they just came out
and it was through fiction
because fiction gave you
a place of safety.
It wasn't about you,
it was about these characters,
but it was about you.
And at that point,
I knew I would write
the rest of my life.
I would write fiction
the rest of my life.
1985, 33 years old.
I never was so egotistical
as to think
I could make a living
doing that.
The telling moment
for Amy and her mother
was when
we were on vacation in Hawaii,
she got a phone call
from her brother.
He said that Mom had just
had a heart attack
and this sounded like a life-
threatening situation.
As I went to a phone booth
to call the hospital,
I was sure it was too late.
As I waited to be connected,
I made a vow to God
and whoever was listening,
if my mother lives,
I will get to know her.
I will ask her about her past.
And this time, I'll actually
listen to what she has to say.
Why, I'll even
take her to China.
And yes, I'll write stories
about her.
All at once, I heard
my mother's voice,
"Amy."
"Oh, Mom, are you okay?"
"Yes, fine, fine."
"Listen, I thought you had
a heart attack, I thought..."
My mother cut me off
with a huff.
"Heart attack?
No, no, no, no."
"I go to fish market
and the fishmonger,
he tried cheating me,
made me so mad."
"All sudden, I got a pain
in my chest, hurt me so bad."
"So I drive to Kaiser Hospital."
"Turn out, I have angina
caused by stress."
"So, you see, that fishmonger,
he wrong, stressed me out."
- Buy something like this.
- What is it?
That's fish.
After I hung up,
I heard a voice saying,
"Hey, don't forget now,
you promised."
I started to ask her
about her life.
And I listened,
instead of saying,
"I'm really busy now, I
can't... I can't listen to you."
I would listen to everything.
And that profoundly changed everything,
I wasn't fighting it anymore.
And I learned a lot
by simply being quiet
and actually listening.
Remember you used to want
to go back to China to live?
- Yeah.
- Why?
Because you two
are not treat me good,
John and you.
I want to go back and have a
servant and live alone... quiet.
At about that time,
Amy really started writing
as a mental health break
from all of the business work
that she was doing.
While Amy was writing
these stories,
she would frequently sit down
and just let her mother
tell her life story.
Okay. No, if I wrote her...
wrote him,
your father... I didn't say I
want to come to United States.
- Mm-hmm.
- No, communists... going to come
- but... what I... I can do.
- What month was that?
- That's...
- My dad and my mother
never told us
about their lives in China
when we were growing up.
And then later in the years,
she finally said,
"You have sisters in China."
And I said, "What? Sisters?
what do you mean, sisters?"
Yeah, she told us that we have
three past sisters.
I was just kinda, like,
dumbfounded.
Like, what?
I... I don't know...
What are their names and
how old are they?
Where have they been living?
That kind of information
took a while to figure out.
Amy and Lou and Mom
went back to China
to go visit the family.
Yeah, look where we are,
we're in Shanghai.
[speaking Chinese indistinctly]
We went to China so Amy
could really get
close to Amy's mother's
history and family.
[speaking Chinese]
[overlapping chatter]
[Amy] We're on the train on
our way to Qingdao.
It doesn't get any better
than this.
This is the front
of Communist martyrs hotel.
Piano that accompanied the
building of the hotel, I guess.
- Come on.
- Come on.
[playing piano]

[indistinct chatter]
After that,
they decided to see
if any of the siblings would
want to come to America.
- Amy?
- Yeah.
[in Chinese]
I'm so glad to see you today, Amy.
Next time, I may stay longer,
but I'm afraid you're too busy.
[in broken English]
How about this picture?
[Amy in Chinese] Oh, it's our Mom.
When she was a kid.
[Jindo in Chinese]
When mom was little?
So this is kid Mom?
- [Amy in English] Yeah.
- [in broken English] How about this one?
[Amy in Chinese] That's your grandma.
- [Jindo in Chinese] This is her?
- [Amy in English] Yeah.
- [Jindo in Chinese] Looks so young!
- [Amy] Uh huh.
- [in broken English] So this girl is Mom?
- [Amy in Chinese] She's your Mom.
- [Jindo in Chinese] She's your Mom, too.
- [Amy] She is my Mom and our Mom.
[Jindo in broken English]
Yes. Oh, that picture is good.
I didn't understand
until I was an adult
what she
meant by sacrifices.
They were all that she had
left behind in Shanghai,
where she'd had a life
of privilege,
starting from
the age of nine
when her widowed mother
married the richest man
on the island
outside of Shanghai.
She went from being
the honorable widow
of a poor scholar
to a wealthy man's
fourth wife,
one of his concubines.
One version of clan history,
cast her the victim of a rape
by the rich man,
which resulted in pregnancy.
To teach her husband
a lesson,
she swallowed opium.
"She had only meant
to scare him,"
my mother explained.
"She died by accident."
But there were
a few times
when she acknowledged
that her mother killed herself
because, "She could not
take it anymore."
Sometimes she felt the same,
she would say.
She was about 18, here,
and I think to judge by how
innocent she looks,
it was before she married
who she called "that bad man,"
a pilot who was supposed
to marry her stepsister,
the man threw that woman
over to marry my mother
because she was beautiful.
This is when you were 18?
- Eighteen, Chinese age is 20.
- Yeah.
- Maybe 19.
- You wore a white dress?
Yeah.
And this man spend
my money all up.
- Hm.
- Can you see that?
Mm-hmm.
And he was... destroying my
body, too, is that right?
- Mm-hmm.
- So foolish,
so stupid... stupid person.
- I hate myself.
- Mm-hmm.
And every day the sex,
every day, he want it.
They don't get... don't give it,
again on the bed.
He's not treating my person.
He treating I belong to him...
a box, a thing,
For he to not everyday use,
- is that right?
- Mm-hmm.
Just so you know
how bad he was,
He was somebody who made
his daughters bring home
their schoolmates
so he could rape them.
[audience murmuring]
This is a man my mother
could not leave.
By the laws of marriage
at that time,
she had to stay with him.
And during that time with him,
she had four children,
a son and three daughters.
The first son that you
had then, how did he die?
Maybe with the restaurant...
eat something wrong that night,
then he came home,
was diarrhea... never stop.
Then I was looking
for his father,
take him to the doctor.
He came home,
he said that son's sick.
He said,
Si ren bu guan.
Si ren bu guan.
meaning,
- doesn't something matter...
- No, if he die, I don't care.
- Yeah. Oh...
- Si ren bu guan.
- Si ren bu guan.
- Mm-hmm.
- "He dies, I don't care."
- Mm-hmm.
[somber music playing]

My father took this photo
in Tianjin,
he was working for the
US Information Agency,
and she was visiting that town
with her sister-in-law.
Once she met him, she stayed,
effectively abandoning
her marriage.
This was during the height
of my mother and father's
affair,
unfathomable love
during this time,
that could conquer everything.
They had this affair
for at least two seasons,
and then her husband,
who hired a detective,
had her hauled back to Shanghai
and put in jail.
She tried to kill herself,
of course, in jail,
was hospitalized.
And during that time,
my father had
his conscience stirred
and he felt that he had played
this terrible role
in destroying this marriage
and this family.
He pledged that he would
love her forever.
And if she could free herself,
she should join him in
the United States.
And then he left.
She got the divorce,
eventually,
through trickery and through
the help of relatives.
What happens to a person
when they leave
their daughters behind?
What kind of guilt comes up?
[somber music playing]
As my mother tells it,
when they announced
that John Tan's bride
was coming
from Shanghai,
there were several women
who shrieked
and then ran out in tears.
I don't know
whether that's true.
She was in love,
so she did what
she needed to do.

It was hard
to wrap my head around
all the different aspects
of Auntie Daisy's past.
What helped is that I had
a half-brother
and knowing the story of
my grandmother being a concubine,
which was not easy to say.
Because the culture's different,
talking to people
in the States,
it was hard, I think, for them
to understand what that meant.
I learned about
Auntie Daisy's past,
I think it was as Amy was
developing her stories.
Amy had written
a few stories
that she didn't really connect
up with as a novel or anything,
but she went to
the Squaw Valley
Writer's Conference
and got a lot of good feedback
to encourage her
to keep writing.
I was teaching
at Squaw Valley
and we had
Wednesday afternoons off.
So a bunch of us took the tram
up to the top of the mountain.
I didn't know Amy.
She was in the tram.
We got up the mountain,
it started to hail,
and the lightning was going.
Our guide, who said he knew
the mountain
like the back of his hand
did in the winter.
He was a ski instructor.
He did not know how to get us
down in the summer.
So it took us maybe
two or three hours.
I mean, we're all good writers,
but bad athletes.
None of us were exactly
in shape.
And we edged our way
down the ravines.
And when we got to the bottom,
Amy Tan unzipped her fanny pack
and pulled out
a single cigarette.
And I remember
they took a picture.
I... this white jersey skirt
of mine was...
had been hailed on, it had
mud on it, had blood on it.
It was just sort of dragging around
my ankles at that point.
But Amy looked perfect.
And then the one cigarette,
perfect. [laughs]
The next day, she felt that
we'd been through something together,
and she asked if I would
take a look at her story,
and I did, and I loved it.
And it was a mess,
and I still loved it.
And I remember saying to her,
"You know, this would be
wonderful."
"You should break this into
12 separate short stories."
And Amy said
my favorite word as a student,
"Okay," and she did it.
So that's how it started, and
it happened fast after that.
It happened very fast.
Molly Giles said,
"I think you should meet
a writer I'm working with,
Amy Tan."
And so Amy came armed with
an outline and,
the title was
Wind and Water.
And I said, well, coming
from California,
I will be laughed out of Manhattan
if I come in with a book
called Wind and Water.
- [laughter]
- In the synopsis
were these four magical words,
"The Joy Luck Club."
And I got goose pimples
when I saw those words.
That's my goose pimple test.
And I said, "Could we use that
as a title?"
And Amy said, "That's just
a club my parents have.
You know, they meet on
Thursday nights.
They play Mahjong."
It's like
the Girl Scouts of America.
I mean, it just sounded
so prosaic, you know.
It's a stock planning club,
you know?
- Yeah.
- And I said, "Well, you know,
who doesn't want joy, luck
and who doesn't wanna
be a member of that club?"
By the way, there's now
a restaurant in New York,
which is a derivative,
called the Soy Luck Club.
[laughter]
One of the nights we were
at Amy and Lou's house
was the night there was
a bidding war
for her first book.
She would excuse herself from
her table,
and she talked to her agent,
and she'd come back,
she goes, "Knopf just
bid on my book."
And then another phone call
would come in and,
"Putnam just bid on my book."
Amy thought, "Well,
I've got this contract."
"I get to write my book,
and it will be published."
"But in six months,
it will be life back
as we lived it before."
And when it took off,
did I expect it?
No, I did not.
The Joy Luck Club went
right to number one
on the bestseller list.
When The Joy Luck Club hit,
it really hit.
It was a revolution.
[laughs]
The book was a finalist for
the National Book Award
and the National Book Critics
Circle Award.
It was the longest running
number one book
on the New York Times
Best Seller list.
The Joy Luck Club was so
massive when it came out.
I mean, everybody loved it.
It was just a magical book
to appear.
There was nothing like it.
And now I see that I am not
the only one with
the mother that says all of
the stuff
that sounds unbelievable.
It was hard to believe
the success.
Everybody embraced the book.
I have to tell her
that she has
accomplished a mission with me,
showing that women
do have histories.
I don't experience that as if,
you know, like a political experience.
That's a deeply emotional experience
for me to feel like,
you know,
my history is part of
the larger history also.
It was published in 1989.
And even then,
I said to myself,
this is not gonna last.
I have to go back
to the work that I had before
to make a living,
this is for fun.
And it took me from March
until October
to finally realize
I could do this
for the rest of my life...
just write stories.
Tell me what you think
your gift is
that enables what you say to
resonate with so many people.
I think in part,
it's nothing unusual.
It's the fact that
I'm a baby boomer.
I'm an American
born in this country,
and I'm a baby boomer,
and I have feelings
that a lot of women
my age have.
And one of that
is this fear of,
what would I lose
if I lost my mother?
What do I lose by not
knowing about the past?
"In me, they see
their own daughters
just as ignorant,
just as unmindful
of all the truths and hopes
they had brought to America."
"They see daughters
who grow impatient
when their
mothers talk in Chinese,
who think they're stupid
when they explain things
in fractured English."
"They see that joy and luck
did not mean the same
to their daughters,
that to these closed
American-born minds,
joy luck is not a word."
"It does not exist."
"They see daughters who would
bear grandchildren
born without
any connecting hope
passed from generation
to generation."
I was a voracious reader
from an early age,
and she was the first
Asian-American author
I had read.
And she was the first person
that was
reflecting back to me
part of a world I knew.
She showed me the glamorous
Shanghai of the 30s.
She showed me all these
back stories that I knew about
and could relate to
from my family's story.
And then the counterpoint
of that
was to showcase the
Asian-American experience,
the second generation
of daughters
who have to deal with these
mothers who came from China.
There were moments there
that I could so relate to
as an immigrant.
"My mother saw danger
in everything,
even in other Chinese people."
"Where we lived and shopped,
everyone spoke
Cantonese or English."
"My mother was from Wuxi,
near Shanghai,
so she spoke Mandarin
and a little bit of..."
Being bi-cultural
is an asset for a writer.
It gives you curiosity.
You want to ask questions.
You want to understand deeply.
And in the answers,
you get stories.
That's what Amy has been doing.
She observes her mother,
and her aunts,
and the culture,
and at the same time,
she totally belongs here.
So it's in the contrast,
in the complexity
that she finds her language
and her inspiration.
Not to do any disservice to
the amazing
Asian-American writers
that came before Amy,
but I think this was
the first book to really
cross over into becoming
a mainstream mass market
success.
It had such a huge impact
on paving the way
for other writers of color
to tell their stories.
When I actually was about
to be published,
I gave my mother
the book to read,
and her remark was,
"It was so easy to read."
She, more than anyone,
knew what was fiction
and that it wasn't some sort
of autobiography,
but she also knew the emotions,
and the situations,
the conflicts that we had
that were embedded
in the story and felt that
I understood her completely.
She didn't have to tell me
why she was angry
about things or why she was
worried about me.
It was all in the book.

Amy and myself,
we write about emotions
and relationships.
And those are universal.
So reading Amy,
I realized that, wow,
these people are just like me,
like,
my Latin American family...
what's the difference?
Those grandmothers
are like my grandmother
and that makes it so close,
so personal,
so touching
in so many ways.
And I think that's what
every reader feels
anywhere in the world in any
language when they read Amy.
[Amy] You're gonna make
the curry potato?
- Curry chicken potato.
- Ooh, yum.
Then you have a garlic,
onion, ginger.
It's Chinese cooking.
Your vegetable have to hot
to seal them.
- Uh-huh.
- If you don't seal them,
you'll come up not right.
[man] No respect, huh?
Well, good evening, everyone,
and thanks for coming out
on this rainy night
in San Francisco.
I want to welcome you
to the 25th anniversary
of The Joy Luck Club.
- How about a round of applause?
- [cheers and applause]
[indistinct chatter]
I remember when
The Joy Luck movie came out.
Now, the Joy Luck movie
probably
did more for her than the book.
And it had all beautiful
Asian actresses in it,
that was the first one of its
kind that I can recall.
[indistinct chatter]
I gave you my good skin...
I must have seen it five
times on the big screen.
This was back in Texas,
I was still living in Houston,
and all my friends were white,
but I was so proud
to show them this movie,
you know, of English speaking
contemporary Asians. [laughs]
Because after the party,
we're going to Lake Tahoe,
and he actually asked her
to come with us.
- Oh, great!
- You'll have a great time.
Where's Jennifer?
Oh, her Auntie Joan
is putting her down for a nap.
When I started to act
in Hollywood,
many films were just coolies,
or dragon ladies,
railroad workers,
restaurant owners.
And I'm happy that
this film portrayed Chinese
as they are.
I really didn't register
how big this movie
was gonna be,
and what a long-lasting effect
it would have
on all of our lives
at the time.
Amy had the very straight
bowl cut,
and such a woman of style
and very, very...
- So down to Earth.
- Very down to Earth,
but with a certain gravitas.
When I first
started writing,
I made this list of things
about who I should be
as a writer
because I knew that it was
very likely I would get
sucked into all kinds of things
and lose my ways as a writer.
So one of them was
to make writing my focus,
don't get involved
with things like film.
Ron Bass,
who is a screenwriter,
he said, "Well, why don't you
take a scene and write it?"
And I said, "No, I'm not
getting involved with this."
I said, but I won't write
the screenplay without you
because it is not just
a wonderful book,
it is an iconic book.
It is a book that has meaning
to people of literature
and people who are
in your community.
I need your voice.
And he said, "Well,
just try it, you know."
"I'll be writing it,
but you just do one scene,
and I think you will
learn something
about earning a scene."
Now, that's like heroin
for a writer, like,
earn the emotions of a scene.
So I thought, "Well, okay,
I could do one scene."
And it went from there.
And, action.
Here, she's got a book
that is iconic.
And I would make suggestions,
and she loved suggestions.
And she would love
to talk it through.
She had no pride
of anything like,
you know,
well, the public is going
to expect that this and this.
No. Just what tells the story
the best.
My grades, my job,
[sighs]
not getting married, everything
you expected of me.
Not expect anything.
Never expect.
Only hope.
Only hoping best for you.
I remember one night
I went to the market
and after I've shopping,
I go to my car,
I see one big man ran to me.
I was scared, and I was trying
to holding on my...
my purse and ready for
an attack or something.
And the man said,
"No, wait a minute,
I just want to say...
to thank you so much
for your character
in The Joy Luck Club."
"I cried and I cried.
I just lost my mother."
"I lost my mother.
And I see your scene,
and I just want
to say thank you."
So I drive home,
and tear came to my eyes.
I realized that
Joy Luck Club,
how wonderful the story is.
It's about
the great relationship,
mother-daughter,
or mother-children.
It doesn't matter that we are
Asian or not Asian,
everybody has a mother.
[crying]
June, since your baby time,
I wear this next to my heart.
Now you wear next to yours.
It will help you know...
I see you.
I see you.
That bad crab,
only you try to take it.
Everybody else
want best quality.
When we went to the premiere
in Hollywood,
my mother was there.
And I was a little afraid
of what was going to happen
because there were scenes
in that movie that were
based on what had happened
to her as a little girl.
- Yeah.
- Watching her mother die.
And the lights come up,
end of the movie,
everybody's crying.
And I look at her,
and she's clear-eyed.
And I said, "Are you okay,
I mean, was that too sad
or too harsh?"
She goes, "Oh, no," you know,
"everything in China are so much
worse, this already better."
- [laughter]
- And I thought, okay.
One of the things for Amy
is that early success
was so huge that she had
to feel, well, now,
how do you follow that?
Was it scary
to follow up a hit
- like The Joy Luck Club?
- Um, scary isn't the word.
I think it was more
like near-death throes.
[laughter]
After I wrote
The Joy Luck Club,
I was stuck.
I made probably seven starts
at a novel
and abandoned them all.
Meanwhile, my mother is saying,
"Write my true story."
She had read
The Joy Luck Club,
but she knew
it was fiction.
She wanted to be able to tell...
"Yeah, this is my story."
And I said, "You know, Ma, it's
not how fiction is written.
It's not really
about true stories and..."
But when I got stuck,
I thought,
you know, "What is the reason
for me to write this?"
It's really to understand myself
and how I came
to have these thoughts.
And it's also to give
my mother a gift
that I was really listening.
So I said
that's what I'm gonna do.
That man. Wicked man.
So bad, you know.
And have to cheating people
to marry him you know,
like this or the... not,
'cause I'm the marriage,
the other one's not marriage,
it's a relationship.
Somebody believe him, you know.
She loved the idea she was
helping me, to write.
You know, she'd call me up at
different hours of the day to...
"I have something else to say."
And she'd go on for an hour,
and I said, you know...
I didn't want
to get her upset...
but I said, "I have to get
some work done."
"Oh, okay, okay."
Must be something
you don't want to
- lure her to give a sex scene.
- Mm-hmm.
He one time... he wanted three
to sleep together like this,
- I told you before, huh?
- Mm, mm-hmm.
And then I refused.
"I remembered the many
nights he used my body
after he had already
been with another woman."
"He even brought
a woman right to our bed
and forced me to watch."
"Of course, I did not,
but I could not shut my ears."
You can see when I talk
I'm angry, all right?
That angry never get out.
"So many years gone by,
and still the anger can never
come out completely."
"You can hear this
in my voice."
I'm the one, unfortunately,
like this used like a machine.
"That bad man
was using my body."
"Every night he used it as if
I were, what? A machine!"
So you've, you've done it.
You've finished
book number two.
- Finally.
- My next guest's
second novel,
The Kitchen God's Wife,
is still number one
on the New York Times
bestseller list this week.
It has been
for the last seven weeks.
Please welcome Amy Tan.
Her second novel looks
as though it's gonna be
an even bigger smash
than the first book.
"I've told you about
the early days
of my marriage so you can
understand why I became
weak and strong
at the same time."
What else struck you, Amy,
about your mom's upbringing?
Was it the repression
that she experienced?
It, it was repression.
It was...
but it was also her strength
that she never gave up.
Even though she lived
in a society that
offered her no choices,
that gave her
unbelievable sorrow,
she somehow could find a
strength and rise above that.
I couldn't speak English
at all.
Couldn't read A, B, C, D.
[both laughing]
Chinese Americans
are becoming
an increasingly dynamic
and visible element
of American society
in business, science,
the arts,
and literature.
We have the views of novelist
Amy Tan who was born...
The Chinese American
community, uh,
has been a great success
in North America.
So when you started writing,
did you feel that suddenly
you were responsible, somehow,
to the history of, you know,
your people
in the United States,
if such a thing is possible?
Well, first, let me say
that when I...
when I think about
"your people,"
I think of myself as being
an American as well.
And so "your" includes both
being Chinese and American,
or Chinese-American,
or whatever.
I didn't seek to be
a politician.
I didn't seek to be
a representative
of a whole community of people.
I just hope to write
some good stories.
And yet, when I was given
this mantle
of speaking for
the Asian-American community,
suddenly, there were
these expectations.
I started getting
a lot of criticism.
Some said I did it wrong,
that I had created stereotypes,
and pander to those mothers
speaking in broken English,
or concubines
who had killed themselves,
you know,
these were stereotypes.
"The chapter opens with
language highly reminiscent
of fortune cookie wisdom,
Charlie Chan aphorisms,
and the kind of
Taoist precepts scattered
throughout
"Lin Yutang's
'Chinatown Family.'"
"Tan inscribes Kwan with
the linguistic exoticism
that could only stem
from an outsider's ears."
"Tan's success hinges on her
ability to revive
Orientalist tropes as if
she rejects them."
"Amy Tan
opens her Joy Luck Club
with a fake Chinese
fairy tale."
"The fairy tale
is not Chinese,
but white racist."
In the beginning,
I didn't know what to say.
I would be caught off-guard.
But then I realized,
what they wanted,
really, was role models.
They wanted me to right
the social wrongs,
the social injustices.
And finally, they had somebody
in the limelight who should
now address that
and not be pandering,
so to speak,
to the mainstream.
What they were asking me to do
was to write propaganda.
When you occupy a space that
has rarely been occupied...
now, we're talking
30 years ago...
that that is going to be placed
on you naturally,
and I understand it.
But to be true to myself,
I could not give in
to that kind of pressure.
The moment you start mixing
activism and writing,
then you're not writing fiction anymore,
or not good fiction.
And I think that Amy has that
very clear.
The crazy thing about fiction
is it is a representation,
the deepest representation
of truth you can find.
It's not limited to facts.
It has really to do
with human nature.
And so, my mother
speaks broken English.
My grandmother was a concubine
who killed themselves.
And I said,
"You have to write
what's personally important
to you."
Every author has
the same need
to understand
their own lives.
Who are the characters
in Amy's work?
Her family and people
who really
have gone through hell
and somehow
have come out of it.
And I don't think
it's a conscious choice.
It's the way it is,
because we are surrounded
by those people.
We belong there.
In a way,
we are one of them.
We have a legacy of trauma
and tragedy,
suicide, rape, children
left behind in China.
It's embedded in me.
And I don't always know
how it is embedded
until something comes out and
clicks and makes me respond,
and not always in a good way.
"I have had bouts of
depression in the past."
"They had occurred after
big changes in my life,
which should have been
happy periods,
including the unanticipated
success
of my first book,
The Joy Luck Club."
"On the day my book
was published, I cried."
"They were not tears of joy
for a dream come true."
"I was afraid."
"I was overwhelmed
with a sense that this book
would upend the happiness
I already had."
"Everyone expected too much,
and I was certain
I would fail."
You're uncomfortable
with success.
We just have a few seconds.
Are you getting used to it now?
I don't think I'll ever
get used to it.
I don't think I should.
But it's been wonderful...
a wonderful reception
to both books.
Well, we're certainly
very glad
that you've been successful.
We look forward
to your next novel.
I don't wanna give you
an anxiety attack,
but hopefully,
we'll talk then.
- Amy Tan, thanks so much.
- Thank you.
Then Amy Tan wrote
a children's book,
The Moon Lady.
The latest book is another
children's book
called The Chinese Siamese Cat.
"Just like our ancestor,
Sagwa of China."
- And that's the end.
- Wow.
That is one of the best stories
Elmo has ever had, Amy.
As a short story writer,
I've never had expectations.
And you learn to work
without expectations
just for
the joy of it, you know?
I think Amy is unusual in that
she's had more expectations
than any writer I've known.
And if there was just pressure
to keep doing this.
My first guest is already one
of the world's
leading female authors.
She's written a third book,
The Hundred Secret Senses.
Family used to always ask
me, "Where's Amy?"
And I said, "Well,
how would I know?"
And then she'll end up
on some TV show.
Ms. Tan, I loved
The Joy Luck Club.
You really showed me
how the mother-daughter bond
can triumph over adversity.
No, that's not
what I meant at all.
You couldn't have gotten it
more wrong.
- But...
- Please, just sit down.
I'm embarrassed
for both of us.
Her books have sold more
than five million copies
worldwide, translated into
35 different languages.
The Hundred Secret Senses
as the characters...
Over the years,
with each book,
she realized how much time
was being taken away
from writing.
She knew that she had to
be pretty public
and show
appreciation to her readers,
which she's so great about.
She will take the time to sign.
She'll take the time to talk.
Oh, this is for my daughter
Katie, she said...
When I was young, I really
craved privacy.
And I think it was in part
to get away from demands
and family chaos.
And I would go in my room,
and I would draw.
And that is something I had
with my fiction at one time.
It was private.
And I wrote it
for my own reasons
to be in that place.
And when you have
a lot of expectations,
the little private room
is very
crowded with editors,
and agents, and fans,
and detractors.
And all of that made it
very difficult to write.
I was writing in a...
at a different place.
It was not as meditative.
It was full of anxiety.
I felt the burden
of expectations a lot.
[indistinct chatter]
One of the main achievements
of this band
over the years
has been to reduce
the reputation of Amy Tan
to rubble.
[laughter]
We're gonna bring Amy Tan out
to do a song where
she reveals her inner bad girl.
[cheers and applause]
[playing "These Boots
Are Made for Walkin'"

You keep saying you got
something for me
Somethin' you call love
but confess
My friend Kathi said,
"You know,
I'm thinking of putting
together a rock band.
What do you think?"
And without thinking,
I just said, "Yeah, sure."
The band was started
by a woman
named Kathi Kamen Goldmark,
who was a literary escort
in San Francisco.
She, over the years
had met many authors,
me being one, who had
been in bands at one point
or another,
or who wanted to have been
in bands.
So she came up with the idea
of starting...
of having all-author rock band
perform in Anaheim, California,
in 1992.
And so she sent faxes out
to every author she knew,
and the ones who answered "yes"
became the band.
And Stephen King was
one of those authors,
Ridley Pearson, Amy Tan.
Bye, bye, love
Bye, bye, sweet caress
People were laughing,
and they were dancing,
and we pretty quickly decided
we had to do this again.
In the next year
we went on a...
like, a multi-city tour,
and we were still terrible.
We got a little bit better.
We all just loved it.
And I realized this
was my outlet
for the kind of
boxed-in feeling
of being in public because
there are no expectations.
There is no reviewer.
It was just for the fun
of doing it.
And that was immediate,
and it was exhilarating.
You couldn't expect it.
What Amy has told me is that
to come out and dress
like she's hot shit
and just carry a whip
was so liberating for her.
Why don't we
do it in the road?

No one is watching us
Why don't we
do it in the road?
I feel like to have fun,
I sometimes
have to take risks.
Being in the band
taught me that
you have to go beyond
what you're comfortable with
and you can't just imagine
the dangerous and
the horrible things that could
happen at the end of it
as a consequence.
You have to just be there
and have a great time.
And with a lot
of risky things,
the potential
for having fun
is so much greater
because you find
these things in yourself
where you just have
to go to an extreme.
I used to be scared
of swimming in the ocean.
I would never do it
because I imagined
that there were all these
scary things under there.
I was my mother's daughter
imagining dangers,
I would die horrible death.
And then one day,
I actually looked under
with goggles,
and I saw this beauty.
And it built from there
until more recently,
I went swimming with sharks,
I'd watch these sharks
looking at me
like, "Who are you?
What are you doing here?"
I just love that.
[indistinct chatter]
Okay. There was,
no purchases made
since our last meeting,
but I have deposited the 600
collected last meeting.
"In 1995, my mother had
been diagnosed
with Alzheimer's disease."
"She was several months shy
of her 80th birthday."
"The plaques on her brain
had likely
started to accumulate years
before,
but we never would have
recognized the signs."
"'Language difficulties,
gets into arguments,
poor judgment...
those were traits
my mother had shown
her entire life."
"How could we distinguish between
a chronically difficult personality
and a dementing one?"
When her mother was
developing Alzheimer's,
I'd say the worst part
of that time
is when the person
who is suffering from it
knows that things
aren't right,
but has enough intact mentally
for it to really haunt them.
"We were eating dinner
in a restaurant
and she was obsessing
about a family member
who she
believed did not respect her."
"Lou, my brother, and I didn't
exactly disagree with her."
"The trouble was we didn't
wholeheartedly agree."
"Her anger mounted until
she leapt up from the table
and ran out
of the crowded restaurant
with us chasing after her."
She went charging out
of the restaurant
to get ran over in traffic.
And as far as I could tell,
she was ready to act on it.
And I went chasing out
after her,
and I picked her up and
carried her back to the car.
I think it was just
an urge she would
never be able to get rid of
probably as...
as strong as alcohol is
to an alcoholic or,
you know, cocaine
to a cocaine addict.
It's not something
you could just say
you don't have to
do this anymore,
your life is happy.
You don't have to threaten anymore.
It was... it was an impulse.
It was a desire
that just came up from her
she couldn't control.
[indistinct chatter]
[somber music playing]

I'm a different person
than I was from my last book,
only because I've gone through
more of life.
"Ruth was amazed at what her
mother could recall."
"She knew not to expect LuLing
to remember appointments
or facts about
a recent event."
"But her mother often
surprised her with
"he clarity of her emotions
when she spoke of her youth."
"It didn't matter
that she blurred
some of the finer points."
"The past, even revised,
was meaningful."
This book is about memory,
losing memories and trying
to hang on
to certain memories
and so it is intensely personal
about the things I went through
over the last five years.
"After all, Bao Bomu says,
'What is the past but what we
choose to remember?'
"They can choose
not to hide it,
to take what's broken,
to feel the pain and know
that it will heal."
[indistinct chatter]
- Hi.
- Hi.
- So nice to meet you.
- Nice to meet you.
We all have...
Thank you so much
for paving the way
for Asian-American representation
in writing and in art.
Are you in writing...
are you writers?
We're all aspiring creatives.
You mean you're not in
pre-med or...
- No.
- No.
- She is.
- Oh, you are? Okay.
- You have to have one.
- [laughter]
- Thank you.
- Sure.
Thank you.
- And for you as well.
- Yeah.
"At the end of June 2001,
after a four-month book tour
that had taken me
to 40 cities across
the United States,
then to a dozen more
in the United Kingdom,
the Republic of Ireland,
Australia and New Zealand,
"I returned home
to San Francisco."
"I lowered the shades,
crawled into bed,
and began the long rest
I felt I deserved."
"I slept for nearly 24 hours
that first day."
"After the tour, I told my
husband, Lou,
that I felt as if something
in my body had broken,
something was not right."
There were these times
where she'd be
really quiet and disengaged,
and I would wonder
if it was me,
our relationship.
She was just ill
and didn't know it.
I started running red lights
and stopping at green lights.
I would get lost
and suddenly find
that I didn't recognize
where I was.
Soon, the hallucinations started.
"Some switch in my brain
that controlled dreams
now seemed to fail to turn
off once I open my eyes."
"And before me
would spring forth
the embodiment
of my nightmares."
"I would whisper,
'Who's there?'"
"And the dogs would instantly
leap to attention,
scan the room, sniff the air."
"When they settled back to
sleep, so would I."
"That is, I would try to sleep
after having seen a corpse
lying next to me
or a pudgy poodle
dangling from the ceiling."
At the worst, I would say,
it had to do with feeling
that I was losing my mind.
I know what it feels like
to have Alzheimer's.
I couldn't read. I couldn't
remember anything.
I couldn't speak.
At the time, we were
perplexed and, you know,
I was mystified, but I know
with hindsight
exactly what happened.
We attended her editor's
daughter's wedding
on the Hudson River in New York
in 1999,
and she had a tick infect her
from that afternoon,
although she didn't know that
at the time.
It was only when Tan
went on the Internet
and saw a tick rash
like this one
that answers started to come.
And I said, "Oh my God,
that is the rash that I had
on my leg four years ago."
What several doctors
who misdiagnosed her
didn't know was Tan had been
bitten by a tick this tiny.
It infected her
with Lyme disease.
As soon as I started taking medication,
the anxiety went away completely.
No amount of therapy
would have done that.
It had to be medication
to get rid of Lyme disease.
And it was because
it went into my brain,
and it caused brain inflammation,
it caused scarring in my brain,
and the reason I have epilepsy.
That Lyme disease,
it went after her.
So that set her back,
but she is incredibly tough
and resilient.

It's her first
non-fiction book
called The Opposite of Fate:
A Book of Musings.
The book is called
Saving Fish from Drowning.
- Amy Tan, good morning.
- Good morning.
- Great to see you.
- Good to be here.
We haven't seen anything
from you in eight years,
so what took you so long?
I started one book,
and then I,
suddenly, I saw something,
a family mystery developed
and I had to start
another book.
It's called
The Valley of Amazement.
It goes on sale tomorrow.
You can-
I probably learned as much
working with Amy
on her books than I have
any other writer.
For Amy, actual writing
is not a challenge
because she's so
fluid and so good
at getting down what she knows
she needs to get down.
And she's got such a good ear
for language.
She hears the language
in a way
that a poet hears it.
I think the biggest challenge
is a psychological one,
that is, writing.
Not the writing.
It's just writing.
What's this?
It's...
Oh, that's a sonata?
I'd like that.
[playing piano]

[laughs]

One day, I got a phone call.
I don't know how long
it was into her Alzheimer's.
I would say it was at least
two years into it.
At that point, she didn't
remember a lot of things.
She was not that verbal.
And her voice sounded like
her voice from the past.
She said, "Amy, Amy I... I...
I don't know where I am.
I'm scared.
I think I'm going crazy."
And I had not heard her talk
like that.
And it was like she had come up
from out
of the deep of the ocean,
and she was, like, flailing
and trying not to drown again.
She said... and I said,
"You know,
we often can't
remember where we are.
Don't worry about it.
You're fine."
And she said, "No, no, no.
Something is wrong
with my mind."
And... and then she said,
"I just wanna tell you that..."
[sniffs]
"I know I did some things
to hurt you,"
And...
And I was saying, "No, no,
don't worry about it,
it's fine."
She said, "I know I did some
things to hurt you",
and I don't remember
what they are,
but I know I hurt you,
and I just want to say
I'm sorry and...
I'm sorry, and I hope
that you'll forget
"just as I forgot."
And I don't know what she
was remembering,
but it was enough to erase everything,
everything that
I had ever been hurt...
you know, that she'd done to
hurt me.
Um, and then she was gone,
she was gone again,
and she didn't talk like that.
She was again,
incoherent, unable to say
complete sentences.
It was a gift.
Shortly afterward,
my mother fell into a coma,
10-20 family members
were in her rooms
at all hours.
We played poker, mahjong,
we eat pizza and Chinese takeout.
We played videos
of her favorite movies.
I put on a CD
of Chopin piano music
and whispered in her ear,
"That's me playing, I've been
practicing harder."

Where the Past Begins,
A Writer's Memoir,
you actually call this
an unintended memoir.
When did you realize that's
what you were actually doing?
I was going to write a book
about writing.
You know,
how does the mind work?
How does my writer's mind work,
creativity, imagination.
And it wasn't until
I started writing things
spontaneously and seeing
that they kept reverting
to what had happened to me
in childhood,
that it became
more of a memoir.
The past was always present
in our lives.
Remember that test
I told you about,
the one that predicted I was
going to be a doctor?
It wasn't until, like,
three years ago that I said,
what was that test anyway?
That was so irresponsible
for a woman to give a child
one test and then say
she was gonna be a doctor.
Why hadn't I questioned it before?
That couldn't be the case.
So I typed in "1958 Oakland
first grade longitudinal IQ."
And the first thing
that came up
was a study by a woman named
Dolores Durkin,
out of 5,003 students
who enrolled
in the first grade that year,
49 of them were found
to be able to read.
I was an early reader.
There I was in my bedroom
reading this,
and it was 63 years
of self-esteem in front of me
and it had been a lie,
it was based on a lie.
It had nothing to do with whether
I was smart enough
to be a doctor
and my thinking
I never was smart enough.
I continued to read,
and she had five interviews
in there with parents.
My father said
that I had always
been a scribbler,
and that even before
the age of four,
I enjoyed drawing pictures
and making up stories
about them.
"Her imagination was amazing,"
my father said.
And there I had it.
After all those years
of being told
I was going to be a doctor,
to read that my father said,
I had an amazing imagination
made me cry,
and that was only recently that
I read that, that I saw that.
I read your second memoir,
Where the Past Begins,
And I wondered,
was that easier to write
than a novel or harder?
At the end of each day,
when I was done writing,
my husband,
he'd have dinner waiting,
ten o'clock at night,
I'd go up there,
and I would be shaking
because of what
I had just
finished writing.
So I did that once a week
for about four months,
and then I had a book.
It was the fastest book
I've ever written.
It was the most emotionally
eviscerating book
I've ever written.
And I think it is the reason
why I have
a really hard time now writing,
because I'm actually
rather afraid
to have that experience
happen to me again.
"My childhood, with
topsy turvy emotions,
has, in fact, been a reason
to write."
"I can lay it out squarely on
the page and see what it was."
"I can understand it
and see the patterns."
"My characters are witness
to what I went through."
"And each story
we are untangling
a knot in a huge
matted mess."
"The work of undoing them
one at a time
is the most gratifying part
of writing,
but the mess
will always be there."
She's at a point where
she would like to continue
to be a writer,
but she's also thinking about
not having
a publishing contract
hanging over her head.
[whistling]
And she does have one more
book under contract.
And I think that the writer's
block element to
all of this would free up
if she were able
to complete that
and then felt an inspiration
to write something
without feeling
the added pressure
of a business
obligation to do so.
Oh, they're fighting.
In 2016, I started to draw
what I saw out the window,
and I realized that, you know,
it was bringing up this love
that I always had for drawing.
Tried,
Some of these are incomplete.
I have a lot of false starts.
You start something and then
forgot all about it.
If I could simply do
what I wanted to do
all day for a month,
all I would do is
look at birds and draw.
I don't have anyone
expecting me
to produce anything.
And in fact, when somebody
says to me,
"Can you draw me a bird,"
like my publisher did.
And I said, "Sure."
And then I couldn't
draw him a bird.
And I realized
that was a part of it.
The freedom to do
what I enjoyed
had to come
with no expectations
and that I did it
only for myself.
I joined
a Nature Journal Group.
I would post things.
I would post my mistakes even.
It was good exercise
to say I didn't have to be perfect.
It's not just powers
of observation,
of details and behavior,
it's wonder,
it's wonderment, you know,
because when you look
at these things,
you wonder how...
how this is possible.
How did... why is this bird
on this branch?
What is, you know,
the behavior?
What... why is it doing this?
And allowing no answers
and just saying you just
have to observe it
and be in
wonder the whole time.

[indistinct chatter]


Oh, that one.
There's so many there,
and I just...
it's not completely exact.
- [inaudible]
- Yes.
"Spontaneous epiphanies
always leave me convinced
once again that there
is no greater meaning
to my life than what happens
when I write."
"It gives me awareness
so sharp it punctures
all layers of thought
so that I can rise."
"That's what it feels like,
a weightless rising
to a view high enough
to survey the moments of the
past that led to this one."
"Too soon,
that feeling dissipates,
and I am hanging on
to contrails as I come back
down to a normal state
of mind."
"Has my imagination worked
this way since birth?"
"What enables me to draw a
bird that looks like a bird?"
"When did I start noticing
that one thing is emotionally
like another?"
"When did emotion and imagery
start colluding
with velvety sharks?"
"Whatever imagination is,
I'm grateful for
its elasticity
and willingness
to accommodate whatever
comes along,
for giving me flotillas
of imagery
circumnavigating a brain
that finds emotional resonance
"in almost anything."
"I just have to let go of
self-consciousness
for it to spill out freely,
"as if all I am doing
is listening to music."

[soft piano music playing]