The Opposite of Fate (34 page)

I didn’t start reading fiction again regularly until 1985. I don’t think it was coincidence that most of what I read was
by women writers, among them: Flannery O’Connor, Isabel Allende, Louise Erdrich, Eudora Welty, Laurie Colwin, Alice Adams, Amy Hempel, Alice Walker, Lorrie Moore, Anne Tyler, Alice Munro, Harriet Doerr, and Molly Giles. I was not gender-exclusive: I also read works by Gabriel García Márquez, Raymond Carver, David Leavitt, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. But mostly I read fiction by women, because I had so rarely read novels by women in my adult years, and I found I enjoyed their sensibilities, their voices, and what they had to say about the world. I was feeling again the thrill I had felt as a child choosing my own books, falling in love with characters, reading stories because I couldn’t stop myself. Now I kept reading, day and night, until I couldn’t stop myself from
writing.

When my first book was published, in 1989, I was at the advanced age of thirty-seven. Interviewers asked me why I had waited so long to write fiction. I could answer only, “It never occurred to me that I could.” By that, I didn’t mean I lacked the desire. In part I didn’t think I could because I didn’t have the talent or necessary disposition to think of tricky symbols and plant them in carefully tilled rows of sentences. I didn’t think I could because I wasn’t an expert on white whales or white males. The idea of my becoming a published fiction writer was as ludicrous as, say, my wearing a dominatrix costume while singing rock ’n’ roll onstage at the Hollywood Palladium with Bruce Springsteen, which, by the way, I recently did. Suffice it to say, the way that I used to read literature did not encourage me to become a writer. If anything, it discouraged me.

This short history of my educational background is to show by example that minorities and women were largely ignored in
the literature curriculum until a couple of decades ago. I understand the reasons professors and students campaigned for the inclusion of ethnic studies programs. With the creation of these separate programs, at last we had stories of Asian-Americans written by Asian-Americans, taught by Asian-Americans, and read by Asian-American students. At last we had a history that went beyond the railroads and laundries of the Gold Rush days. And because so little was available, we found our sources for material overlapping. We looked to story to provide history. In any case, to have our story included in the curriculum, we had to create a separate department, separate and equal as we could make it.

Unfortunately, in some educational arenas this notion of separatism remains the primary focus. As writers, we’re asked, “Are you one of them or one of us?”—meaning we can’t be both. We’re asked, “Are you writing American literature or Asian-American literature?”—meaning one is not the other. We’re asked, “Are you writing for Asian-Americans or for the mainstream?”—meaning one necessarily excludes the other. And those of us, including Bharati Mukherjee, Maxine Hong Kingston, and me, who say we are American writers have been censured by the separatists, reviled on podiums, and denounced with expletives in the student press.

In the past, I’ve tried to ignore the potshots. A
Washington Post
reporter once asked me what I thought of so-and-so calling me “a running-dog whore sucking on the tit of the imperialist white pigs.”

“Well,” I said as dispassionately as possible. “You can’t please everyone, can you?” Readers are free to interpret what
they will or won’t out of a book, and they are free to appreciate or not appreciate what they’ve interpreted. In any case, reacting to critics makes a writer look defensive, petulant, and like an all-around bad sport.

But lately I’ve started thinking that I shouldn’t take such a laissez-faire attitude. I’ve come to think I must say something, not so much to defend myself and my work, but to support American literature and what it has the possibility of becoming in the twenty-first century, a truly American literature, democratic in its inclusion of many colorful voices, men and women, gay and straight, of all ethnicities and races.

Until recently, I didn’t think it was important for writers to express their private intentions in order for their work to be appreciated. My domain is fiction, and I believed the analysis of my intentions was the domain of literature classes. But I realize that the study of literature does have its effect on how books are being read, and thus on what might be read, published, and written in the future. For that reason, I believe writers today must talk about their intentions, if for nothing else, to serve as an antidote to what others define as what our intentions should be.

S
o why do I write? Because I once thought I couldn’t, and I now know I can. Because I have qualities in my nature shaped by my past—a secret legacy of suicide, forced marriages, and abandoned children in China; an eclectic upbringing that included no fewer than fifteen residences, ranging from tough neighborhoods in
Oakland, California, to the snobbish environs of Montreux, Switzerland; a distorted view of life shaped by two conflictin2g religions, the death of my father and brother in a year’s time, and the murder of my best friend. Those elements and others in my life have combined to make me feel that writing provides the sort of freedom and danger, satisfaction and discomfort, truth and contradiction that I can’t find anywhere else in life.

I write stories because I have questions about life, not answers. I believe life is mysterious and not dissectable. I think human nature is best described in even a long-winded story and not in a psychoanalytical diagnosis. I write because often I can’t express myself any other way, and I think I’ll implode if I don’t find the words. I can’t paraphrase or give succinct morals about love and hope, pain and loss. I have to use a mental longhand, ponder and work it out in the form of a story that is revised again and again, twenty times, a hundred times, until it feels true.

I write for very much the same reasons that I read: to startle my mind, to churn my heart, to tingle my spine, to knock the blinders off my eyes and allow me to see beyond the pale. Fiction is an intimate companion and confidant for life.

I write because I have been in love with words since I was a child. I hoarded words from the thesaurus and the dictionary as though they were magic stones, toys, treasures. I loved metaphors and used them before I knew what the word meant. I thought of metaphors as secret passageways that took me to hidden rooms in my heart, and my memory as the dreamy part of myself that lived in another world. I played with my memory of both real and imaginary life the way girls play with their Barbies and boys with their penises. I dressed it up, changed it a dozen
times, manipulated it, tugged at it, wondered if it would enlarge and pulsate until others noticed it too. I thought of it as a weapon, a secret, a sin, an incorrigible vice.

I write because it is the ultimate freedom of expression. And for that reason it is also as scary as skiing down a glacier, as thrilling as singing in a rock-’n’-roll band, as dangerous as falling on your face doing both.

Writing to me is an act of faith, a hope that I will discover what I mean by truth. But I don’t know what that will be until I finish. I can’t determine it ahead of time. And more often than not, I can’t summarize what it is I’ve discovered. It’s simply a feeling. The feeling is the entire story. To paraphrase the feeling or to analyze the story reduces the feeling for me.

I also think of reading as an act of faith, a hope I will discover something remarkable about ordinary life, about myself. And if the writer and the reader discover the same thing, if they have that connection, the act of faith has resulted in an act of magic. To me, that’s the mystery and the wonder of both life and fiction—the connection between two unique individuals who discover in the end that they are more the same than they are different.

And if that doesn’t happen, it’s nobody’s fault. There are still plenty of other books on the shelf to choose from.

• angst and the second book •

I
am glad that I shall never again have to write a Second Book.

About two weeks after I turned in the manuscript for
The Joy Luck Club
to Putnam, a friend showed me a book, whose title I’ve mercifully forgotten, which listed hundreds of major novelists throughout the centuries, with career summaries glimpsed through bar graphs. The graphs, similar to records of annual rainfall amounts, represented the relative critical success of each of the authors’ books, a statistical epitaph of sorts. For some, a flood of sudden success—then unrelenting drought, book after book after book.

“Isn’t it interesting,” my friend noted, “how many writers went on to write lousy second books?”

I never considered that the critics might have been wrong. Instead, I stayed up half the night reading that book, and by morning I had decided that whatever those writers had lacked—confidence, stamina, vision, sharp red pencils—I would stock in extra portions. Each of my books, I determined, would outdo its predecessor, increasing in scope, depth, precision of language,
intelligence of form, and thus critical acceptance and perhaps even readership.

Of course, that’s what I determined
before
I was published, before
The Joy Luck Club
ever hit the bestseller list, before I attended my first literary luncheon, where a woman asked me with absolute sincerity, “How does it feel to have written your best book first?”

Shortly after the book was published, I was in New York having lunch with my editor, Faith Sale, as well as a friend of hers, another writer, the author of four books. The friend asked me if I had started the Second Book.

“I have some ideas,” I said vaguely. I was loath to admit in front of Faith that I had not the slightest idea what I would do next. “I just haven’t decided which one to go with,” I added. “All I know is that it won’t be Son of Joy Luck.”

“Well, don’t sweat over it too much,” the other writer said. “The Second Book’s doomed no matter what you do. Just get it over with, let the critics bury it, then move on to your third book and don’t look back.” I saw the bar graphs of my literary career falling over like tombstones.

I was to hear this same doom and gloom, or permutations of it, from many writers. Actually, I cannot recall
any
writer—with or without splashy debut—who said the Second Book came easily. The Second Book is bound to be trashed, one said, especially if the first was an unexpected success. The Second Book is always a disappointment, said another, because now everyone has preformed expectations. Critics will say it is too much like the first. Readers will complain that it is too different.

“It’s as though you’re always competing against yourself,”
said one writer friend, whose first book met with unanimous praise, quickly propelling him upward to literary heights. The Second Book was compared with the first and received mixed reviews. The third and fourth earned renewed praise, but the first always managed to creep into reviews as the standard. “You begin to hate the first book,” he said. “It’s like the kid brother sticking his tongue out, going, ‘Nah-nah-nah.’ ”

“The critics are always worse when the first book was really, really big,” confided another writer. “With the first, they put you on this great big pedestal. But by the time the Second Book comes around, you realize you’re not sitting on a pedestal at all. It’s one of those collapsible chairs above a tank of water at the county fair.”

“It’s like that Mister Rogers song,” said another writer friend, “the one that says, You’ll never go down, never go down, never go down the drain. My daughter heard that song. And after that, she started screaming in the bathtub, scared out of her mind she was going to be sucked down the drain. And then the next day I went to speak at a literary luncheon and overheard some people whispering, ‘Can she do it again? Can she really do it again?’ They put the fear in me. They were saying, ‘Honey, you
can
go down the drain.’ ”

Only one person—a reporter on the literary scene—told me not to worry. “The Second Book is
nothing
,” he said. “Everyone expects it to be weaker than an impressive first book. The real problem comes after the third book. Then the reviews begin: ‘Her first novel was terrific, but now, after two weak efforts in a row, it’s becoming increasingly likely that its virtues were only an aberration.’ ”

I’ve noticed that first books are often praised for their freshness, their lack of self-consciousness. In my case, “lack of consciousness” may have had something to do with it. And here I am referring not to what I know or don’t know about the craft of writing but to what I didn’t know about publishing. While I was writing my first book, I still believed that “PW” referred only to the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse, and not the trade magazine
Publishers Weekly
as well. I did not know the importance of a “boxed review.” I had never heard “blurb” used as a verb. When I was told my book was being sold to the “clubs,” I thought that meant as in Med or Rotary. I guessed that first serial rights were a writer’s adjunct to the First Amendment. I am serious. Ask my editor.

And then the reviews started to come in. They surprised me, every one of them. I read reviews that praised me as having skills that I never knew I had—related to my unusual use of structure and the simplicity of my prose. And I read the critical ones as well, which pointed out faults that I also never knew I had—related to my unusual use of structure and the simplicity of my prose. And then I read one, which I cannot quote exactly, since I threw it away, that said something to this effect: “It will be hard, if not impossible, for Amy Tan to follow her own act.” Shortly after that, I broke out with hives.

I should explain that I have never been a particularly nervous person or someone prone to psychosomatic illnesses. But while writing the Second Book, I developed literal symptoms of the imagined weight of my task. Each morning, when I was not on the road doing promotion for my first book, I would dutifully sit at my desk, turn on my computer, and stare at the blank screen.
And sure enough, my imagination would take off unbidden, unrestrained. And I would imagine hundreds, thousands of people looking over my shoulder, offering helpful suggestions: