Archive for September 22nd, 2010

I spent the night in Fort Worth last night in order to hear an old hero, Amy Tan, speak at the John Roach Honors College at TCU. I looked this afternoon to see if any other media outlet had covered the story yet, but apparently Renaissance will be the first. Scoop, I hope.

Amy Tan, famous for writing bestsellers such as The Joy Luck Club and Kitchen God’s Wife, was one of my greatest writer-heroes when I was an undergraduate at UC Irvine. Writing with a San Francisco viewpoint and about Chinese characters, she seemed both exotic and familiar to me, born in Berkeley, on the other side of the bay.  In 1989 I wrote a newspaper promo piece for her visit to UC Irvine,, and then fell in love with her work, particularly Kitchen God. When Pia said she had tickets, I had to go.

Tan appared in a flowing red and purple garment, with jet black hair and red lipstick.  She got up on the stage with the air of someone who did this naturally– as if she thought to herself, “regale a bunch of well wishers with stories chosen at random and by plan? Easy.” Of course, I knew that giving us something worth our time was not guaranteed. I was apprehensive. What if it turned out only to be a paper moon? What if Tan no longer had anything to say, had said it all?

She opened bytelling us  it amazed her, the number and level of her successes — as she put it, she’s really just a normal person like the rest of us, “sitting around fooling with the internet.”  She described reading a biography and said it was unreal. “Not that the stuff it says is not true, it just isn’t how I would have put it.” She also reflected briefly on facing an edition of Cliff’s Notes on her work — “Aren’t you supposed to be dead before they do one of these on you?” she asked us. But then, she admitted, her very coming up with that question illustrates something she’s known for a while, that she has a tendency to “dwell on death.”

Reading only Kitchen God and Joy Luck I didn’t see that so much, but then a friend who read Saving Fish from Drowning said it had a lot of darkness.

The talk quickly settled down to a discourse on how she became a writer and why she writes the way she does. Tragedy, she said, was there from before the beginning. The deaths of her father and brother while she was still a teenager, both to brain tumors, both scarred her and drove her mother into a quest to “find out why” they had died.  The need to dig deeper, Tan said, and “find out why” has driven her as well. As a writer she came to ask more and more questions about her relationship with her mother. Tan also dug into what happened to her grandmother, who died mysteriously back in China and who seems to resemble the “Double Second” concubine wife of Kitchen God’s Wife.

This person in a red and purple chiffon, speaking unconcernedly into a microphone,  is the woman who wrote one of the few books I have read over and over and over, Kitchen God. How many times did I repeat her refrain from that book, “That Bad Man, my first husband … “  In my heart, I am the Kitchen God’s Wife, the good person whose life was almost ruined by others, who somehow managed to live and go on contributing nevertheless.

Tan graciously answered questions after the talk, and sat at a table and signed books for hundreds, despite a hurt thumb (she had slammed it in the car door; she reflected, ‘I didn’t know the door could go all the way shut with your thumb in there.’ Someone came up to College Girl as she stood in line and gave her two books — the two I wanted to read,  Bonesetter’s Daughter and The Opposite of Fate. I tried to take Tan’s picture as she sat, signing books, and I noticed that she’d cut her hair. There still clung about her a mystery, an aloof friendliness, a generosity and also a reserve. She seemed, even as she’d admitted that huge tracts of her greatest fiction was built upon a foundation of her own family history, to be someone hard to know, and I couldn’t manage her close friends telling her about all the secrets they shared. She’s already shared so many secrets with the public. This was the price of fame. Pia dragged me away, she was embarrased at her mother shooting pictures. She didn’t seem to realize we needed them for this blog post.

As we walked away with the books, chattering about how unbelieveable it was that we had been handed them, as if some serendipty had come upon us like a wave, we walked past a huge black Lincoln Towncar limo.

Who is that for? I asked a security guard who was helping people cross the street.

“Ms. Tan,” he said, “of course.”

We walked away into the night. “If I could, I would have a driver,” Pia told me. “I hate driving. I would have a driver, and they’d be safe, too, the most highly skilled driver I could find … “

“The Opposite of Fate,” I mused. “Let me read that book. That’s the book I want to read.” I wondered if it would answer the questions I have, or drive me, like Tan, to dig until I found something profound, to dig until I found my truth. If so, it seemed a worthy mission. I reflected that Tan had pulled it off: coming to Texas to speak to admirers who already knew her well through her writing, she’d dug deeper, found something more to share, and offered it up, a writer’s writer, we might call her, and a stranger’s friend.  `