Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 10, 1994 TAG: 9410140009
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE CAPUZZO KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
The diminutive Asian American writer (she's not in favor of the pigeonhole ``Asian American writer,'' either) is wearing an old green tunic over the pajamas, a $15 collapsible black hat, a bold smear of red lipstick and swathes of black scarves - all chosen primarily, she says, ``to crush into suitcases.''
Ron Bass, the Oscar-winning writer of ``Rain Man'' and collaborator with Tan on the screenplay of ``The Joy Luck Club, says any human being would be rendered invisible next to irrepressible and stylish Amy Tan. A bronze disc shines like an Aztec sun from a jangle of silver chains. Gold-plated Chinese characters on a necklace proclaim, in the language of Tan's ancestors, ``Joy.''
But there is little joy on promotional trips for Amy Tan, who is on a 13-city tour.
``People never believe me when I tell them book tours are so lonely,'' Tan says. ``You're surrounded all day by people who supposedly love and respect you. But when you go back to your hotel it's so lonely you feel like committing suicide. You say to yourself if the world ended tomorrow what would this mean? Nothing.''
Yet Amy Tan says she is enjoying this book tour more than usual. Her best friend, Gretchen Schields, illustrator of ``The Chinese Siamese Cat,'' her second children's book, is along for the whole trip, which began in Hawaii before coming to New York and is boomeranging west again. Her assistant, Greg Reilly, is expert, Tan says, at arranging her schedule in a ``sane'' manner (no early appointments) and mixing in doses of necessary ``insanity.''
In New York recently, Tan hung out with friend and humorist Roy Blount Jr., who plays with Tan in the famous-writers' rock group, Rock Bottom Remainders. In Tucson, Tan will visit novelist Barbara Kingsolver, another writer-rocker and friend. In Milwaukee, ``I'll visit my half-sister,'' Tan says, smiling faintly. ``Family obligations.''
Understanding all the timeless obligations of family - the tensions between mothers and daughters, Old World and New, exile and assimilation - has made Tan, 42, a major American literary figure. ``The Joy Luck Club,'' her first novel, leaped to the New York Times bestseller list when it was published in 1989 and spent 77 weeks there. Her second novel, ``The Kitchen God's Wife,'' which came out in 1991 and also became a huge bestseller, also is being made into a movie.
But something happened on the road to success as America's most acclaimed Asian American writer: Amy Tan found, to her astonishment, that there were professors of literature who didn't believe she had the credentials to write about Asian Americans. Chinese Americans, some critics said, should write only for other Chinese Americans - success, a wider audience, was a sign of failure. To attempt to write for ``all of us'' was just one more form of oppression.
Others tried to box her in as a writer of ``Asian American literature,'' a pigeonhole she rejects. ``I'm a writer of American literature,'' she says.
It is this subject, dear to her heart, that Tan has been addressing during her tour... political correctness, or ``ethnic correctness,'' and its debilitating effect on freedom in literature.
When her advisers began to plan the book tour for ``The Chinese Siamese Cat,'' a charming, uplifting children's story published by Simon & Schuster, Tan was hesitant to go on the road again selling books, a chore many well-known authors dislike. The chance to speak out on political correctness, a subject she cares about, made the book tour more appealing. ``This is something I've been thinking and writing about for two years,'' she says.
Perhaps because she's not accustomed to making speeches, Amy Tan seems to speak somewhat cautiously about her values as a writer. She doesn't stand on an Olympian soap-box, like William Faulkner did, to proclaim that all writing must address universal matters of the human heart or it is tomfoolery. But, she says, ``Literature should be free to be many different things.''
Tan's novels and her life itself, however, are powerful statements that universal longings bind people of different generations and races - and that suppression of these yearnings carries a terrible price.
``The Joy Luck Club'' was Tan's way to work out a legacy of tragic family secrets. Her grandmother in China was forced to marry the man who had raped her and later killed herself by eating opium after her child was given to a higher-ranking wife. Tan's own mother had fled from an abusive husband, leaving Tan's half-siblings behind in China.
Tan - born in 1952 in San Francisco, where her mother had married a Baptist minister - knew nothing of her mother's other family while she was growing up. She simply didn't want to listen to her mother's stories, she says now.
``I used to say, `Why suffer regrets when you can't change the past?''' Tan says. ``It wasn't until years later that I realized my mother's belief is that you can.''
Growing up in San Francisco, ashamed of her mother, aching to deny her Chinese heritage and become an all-American girl, Tan dreamed of having surgery to ``correct'' her Chinese features and escaped by writing stories. But she never imagined herself becoming a writer because that future ``wasn't available to Chinese Americans.''
At age 8, Tan's first published work was ``What the Library Means to Me.'' It won a writing contest sponsored as a fund-raiser by a closed local library, which was seeking money to reopen.
``I think I won because at the end of the essay I wrote this poignant line about how I gave my life's savings, all I owned in the world, to the Library Fund - seventeen cents,'' Tan said.
By the time Amy Tan turned 15, she had greater worries than the local library closing. That year, her father died of a brain tumor. Her elder brother died of the same disease within a year. Tan's mother, Daisy, ``decided there was something ill-fated in our family, that my younger brother and I would die, too. She decided we should see the world first. ... Looking back, it was quite crazy.''
The family headed to the Netherlands because ``my mother liked a brand of cleaner called Little Dutch Boy,'' Tan said. But they wound up on a train to Germany instead before settling in Switzerland. There, the seeds of her family's tragedies bore fruit in Tan, who began to rebel against her mother. The young Tan took up with a German army deserter who had escaped from a mental hospital. When her mother hired a private eye to watch them, Tan's friends became embroiled in drug charges and Tan's mother hastily moved the family back to the United States.
Rejecting her mother's desire that she become a doctor and a concert pianist on the side, Tan studied English in college and also earned a master's degree in linguistics from San Jose State University. Then she set out on a career as a successful freelance writer of business manuals. In her mid-30s, Tan was living in northern California, was writing 90 hours a week serving big clients such as IBM, and suffered a crisis. ``I was a total workaholic and couldn't stop working. It was making me miserable and I didn't understand why.''
She went to a therapist for three sessions, but the therapist, Tan says now with a laugh, fell asleep. ``I realized then I had to do something for myself.'' When her mother became ill briefly, Tan resolved to get to know her mother better.
The something Tan did for herself was to write ``The Joy Luck Club,'' in which she explores all the buried family stories through the relationships of immigrant Chinese women and their American daughters set around the older generation's mah-jongg game, called ``The Joy Luck Club.'' It was the name Tan's mother gave to their game, taken from a restaurant name.
No longer ashamed of her past, Tan traveled to China for the first time in the mid-1980s with her mother and her husband, a tax attorney, to find the two half-sisters her mother had abandoned in World War II.
Today Tan is living in San Francisco with her husband and plans never to have children. She fears the pain of losing a child as her mother lost children in two generations, to politics and disease. Writing often all day long, Tan is working on her third novel, which she won't discuss in any detail.
She talked too much about ``The Year of No Flood,'' which was supposed to be her third novel, she says. But that work died a-borning, only half-way done, when Tan took too many absences from the writing to work on the screenplay and production of ``The Joy Luck Club'' movie with director Wayne Wang and script-doctor Ron Bass.
``It just evaporated away,'' she says sadly. Now she refuses to work on the script for ``The Kitchen God's Wife'' until the mysterious third novel is complete.
Her mother, Daisy Tan, who is 78, worries that her daughter works too hard and doesn't know how to have fun. And it is true that Amy Tan recently spent three and a half days in Hawaii and wrote every day on a 2 1/2-pound lap-top she carries everywhere with her. But she's learning, Tan insists, how to relax and enjoy her success without being swallowed by it.
In an inscription in one of her books, Amy Tan wrote to the mother she had been ashamed of and rebelled against: ``I am so proud and happy to be your bad daughter.''
Daisy Tan feels sad, Amy says, that she cannot understand all the English words in ``The Joy Luck Club.'' And she refuses to even try to read ``The Kitchen God's Wife,'' telling her daughter, ``Why should I read that? I `told' you that story.''
But when she saw ``The Joy Luck Club'' on the big screen, Daisy said, with great pride, ``What did I do to deserve such a daughter?''
And then Amy Tan's mother told her, ``Not bad for a girl who fought with Mom and did not become a doctor.''
by CNB