Memoir: Mothers and daughters, daughters and mothers - a major theme and an apparently inexhaustible one.
All the ordinary complexities of such relationships become further complicated when two cultures are involved. Novelist Amy Tan grew up in the slipstream of a larger-than-life, if physically tiny mother, who shouted, shrieked, threatened, yet somehow made a lot of crazed sense. She was a Chinese woman of little education who had suffered at the hands of her first husband but fled him and China to arrive in the US and into a second and loving marriage with another Chinese man.
But there was no happy ending for her. Amy Tan's father, her mother's beloved second husband, died young from a brain tumour, the same illness that killed her son, within one terrible year of grief when the future novelist was 14. The little widow took flight again, this time to Europe, taking with her Amy and her second son. Tan's mother "began to call openly on the ghosts of her past".
And it was a past populated with many sad ghosts, including that of the novelist's grandmother, a beautiful woman who killed herself by swallowing raw opium before the eyes of her then nine-year-old daughter, Tan's mother.
On the publication in 1988 of her first book, The Joy Luck Club, a series of interconnected stories presented, somewhat to Tan's surprise, as a novel, she became a best-selling writer. Those stories drew on her family history and also the cultural contrasts that develop when a second generation grows up in a different country. It made her the voice of Chinese American fiction. Three subsequent novels followed, the best being the most recent The Bonesetter's Daughter. Tan has always addressed the problems associated with having a Chinese face and an American mind. She and her mother battled the many difficulties of speaking two very different forms of English.
The little mother had a hard tongue and a dramatic, if direct, approach to life that bordered on the terrifying. "Thanks to my mother," writes Tan, "I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact . . . The warnings grew worse, depending on the danger at hand. Sex education, for example, consisted of the following advice: 'Don't ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can't stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you (sic) life over, better just kill yourself.'"
The mother who was obviously taxing to live with, certainly proves the stuff of fiction and is central to the engagingly human autobiographical tales wrought by Tan. True as she writes herself in this new book, The Opposite of Fate, a memoir of sorts consisting of conversational essays as well as a few addresses written for specific events and interspersed within the various casual, self contained if cross-referenced pieces, her life has been acted out against a strong backdrop of family drama populated by ghosts and shadows.
The Joy Luck Club introduced Tan as a writer obliged to tell stories; her narrative approach is fresh and candid. This quality has remained in her work, although two subsequent novels, The Kitchen God's Wife and particularly, her third, The Hundred Secret Senses, suggested that Tan had quickly exhausted her material and her status would be confined to that role as a Chinese-American writer. However The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001) not only recaptured the grace of her début, it revealed a new maturity and depth and could well be her finest novel to date.
Early into this episodic collection, which Tan accurately introduces as "musings on my life", it is clear that she has had her share of life problems, some of which were inherited through belonging to a culture that she has always regarded as not quite her own. She leaves no doubts that although China, the mother country that she first visited at 35, has given her her face, her family and her stories, she is an American writer.
As with her fiction, this book, which tells Tan's story, is really about her mother. "My mother's many names were vestiges of her many selves, lives I have been excavating most of my own adult life . . . I had once thought I was the only daughter, the middle child, a position I took to have great psychological significance. I then discovered I was really the youngest of five girls, one of whom had died at birth."
It seems that it was only late in life that Tan's mother, who spent many years telling her daughter to love and obey her, also insisted that her girl tell the many stories of the family's past. The old lady, even when beginning to battle the loss of her memory, usually had something interesting, or at least colourful to say. When asked by Tan, "Hey, Ma, what was it like during the war?" the old lady considers the question before replying: "War? Oh, I was not affected."
She then goes on to describe her wartime life in China "of bombs falling, of running to escape, of pilot friends who showed up for dinner one week and were dead the next". On hearing this, the writer-daughter reminds her mother that she had told her that she had not been affected by the war. "I wasn't," insists the old lady, "I wasn't killed."
Old Ma Tan is always quotable, not only for her singular use of English, a language she never bothered to learn, but for her brutal honesty, such as when her never overly confident daughter, aged 12, asked her "whether I was beautiful by Chinese standards". Her mother never believed in softening the truth. "To Chinese person, you not beautiful. You plain." She also advised her daughter to leave her husband, but then relented when Tan pointed out how expensive divorce is.
Throughout the various pieces Tan, the perennial daughter who does not have children, writes about the responsibility of the writer, which in her experience is to remember and pass on the many stories. She also repeatedly refers to her sense of being a writer and lists her various influences including Louise Erdrich, a US writer shaped by her Native American-German background. By the final, title piece, Tan, who has assembled a book shaped by the many ghosts of her life, most notably those of her mother and editor, moves on to what probably motivated the book, obviously a product of a difficult period - her own struggle with illness.
Tan undergoes a series of medical tests, none of which offer any explanations. Finally she discovers she has contracted Lyme disease, a condition caused by a tick bite. It is an interesting piece in which Tan, confronting the reality of failing health, brings us to the present.
Arranged in seven main sections, each containing various sub-sections, The Opposite of Fate reads as an account of a writer in crisis, exploring both her youth and her more recent past. Although not particularly philosophical, it is very much in character with Tan's world view, with its autobiographical fiction, or fictionalised autobiography. It's about her and it's about her mother; it's about hurt and grief, it is likeable and sentimental, and as ever, with Amy Tan, it is about hope and most importantly, survival.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
- The Opposite of Faith By Amy Tan, Flamingo, 398 pp, £15.99
