Movie Reviews for Writers: Amy Tan -- Unintended Memoir

I only met Amy Tan once. She was the guest speaker at my college's literary festival, and she had only recently written her smash novel, The Joy Luck Club. I was able to sit in on her reading, and trust me, I hung on every word. 

Then I went out and bought a copy. 

When I learned about this PBS American Masters documentary, I knew I needed to watch it. 

What Is a Writer?

We each have differing meanings of what we are and what we do as a thing called "writer" or "author." When asked the questions, Tan gave perhaps my favorite definition for the term. 

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.

The writer, then, is an ongoing nature of curiosity -- an ever-longing, an ever-searching person putting together life's puzzle. 

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 happened and what's related, what's coincidental.

I love that. 

Beneath the thing we think of as "writer" is a subconscious idea, what Tan calls a philosophical construct, constantly trying to make sense of the real world and put all those truths into a fictional one. That's certainly a better definition than "some yahoo sitting at a laptop for way too many hours at a time fighting against a blank page."

The "Before" Days

How often do we take into account the life stuff that happened to make a writer a, well, writer? It's often glossed over (at least until the memoir is written or a biopic is made) as if authors were born fully formed the day their book (at least the one that "matters") was released into the wild, wild world. 

There's a lot of past that formed the bricks of the structure that eventually became the author.

For Tan, that started with reading, in particular, a book she wasn't supposed to be reading:

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. " 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.

Just as sacred cows make the best hamburgers, banned books make the best inspiration when it comes to creating writers. But it's not just the reading. She also was already writing, just not in the world of fiction... yet.

She says: 

You know, I had another bestseller. It sold. You know what these numbers are. When you have a bestseller, 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." It was published for IBM, and I was a business writer before I started writing fiction.

She also got a little help from a friend's husband. 

Amy was a linguistics and 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.

Maybe this wasn't the fictional masterpiece that The Joy Luck Club or The Kitchen God's Wife are recognized as, but it was writing. All writing counts toward mastery. All writing gets you closer to locking in technique and talent. All writing moves you closer, step by step, to the place where you can finally, eventually write the stuff you want to. 

Why Fiction?

Obviously, to someone with something more important to say than made-up astrology tidbits and business manuals, Tan found herself a bit quelled as a creative with the current writing jobs. Realizing her life had shaped (and was shaping) her toward something more fulfilling and something more imaginative and long-lasting, she turned to fiction.

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. 

Again, she started with reading. It's a cliche at this point, but I don't think it can be overestimated. Writers read. Period. I know. I know. I hear it all the time from writers I know. "I just don't have time to read. I need to be writing." Well, I'm a firm believer that writing separated from reading is a path toward failure as a writer. There, I said it. 

And so the reading of words got the part of Tan's brain that needed to write words activated, and she sat down to work, first by looking inward at the events and issues that had shaped her. 

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. 

Writing, as Tan discovered, is an infestation of the soul. It's a sickness that empowers. It's, as she says, a place of safety to explore the things eating at you, hanging around in your mind, stirring in your heart. 

I often hear from writing friends that "I write because I have to. The stories just have to come out." Yes, that's the spiritual way of looking at the craft, but it doesn't make it any less true. 

The Importance of the Everyday

It was that friend who began the connective tissue between Amy Tan the writer and Amy Tan the published, best-selling writer. 

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 Writers Conference and got a lot of good feedback to encourage her to keep writing.

During that retreat, Amy and a friend ended up on a long trek down the mountain that led to a sort of bonding moment. 

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.

That friend, author Molly Giles, was so taken by the work that she recommended Amy to someone in the publishing business. 

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." 

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.

"Just a club my parents have." What Amy didn't yet realize was that the club she thought of as common, everyday, meaningless, would be a connecting point between her and millions of readers. We, as authors, never really know what's going to connect our work to the zeitgeist -- if anything at all. But if we set out at the onset by automatically discounting anything, no matter how trivial we may see it, we could be shooting our careers in the foot. 

The trivial is the thing that helps readers identify themselves in the work. 

Plan B

"I never was so egotistical as to think I could make a living doing that," says Tan. That kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking was just too much for her to even consider -- even as she was waiting by the phone receiving news of the various major publishing houses vying for The Joy Luck Club. 

"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 our table, and she'd talk to her agent, and she'd come back, and 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.'"

Even after, she was still expecting to hit the reset button, and success caught her very much off guard. "And when it took off, did I expect it?" she said. "No, I did not."

Do you ever feel that way? Maybe not becoming a million or more copy bestseller, but even in smaller accomplishments. Has a reader come to see you at a convention and told you what your stories have meant to them? I had a reader pick up one copy of each book on my table once, and I still can't believe it. 

We have such a hard time accepting success sometimes. 

As Tan says:

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.

Fiction and Truth

Okay, moving on. This in-depth look at the life and the process of Amy Tan also has a lot to say about the nature of writing fiction and what goes into it, not just learning to accept it (and accept who you are). 

What is fiction according to Tan?

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.

I've covered this a lot on the blog, so I won't go too deeply into it right now, but for a thing called "fiction," stories are filled with truth. Truth about the way human beings act. Truth about what drives us. Truth about what we do when we don't get what we feel we deserve. Perhaps the biggest truth is that off being true to yourself as a writer. 

And I said, you have to write what's personally important to you. Every author has the same need to understand their own lives.

But don't confuse that truth with some sort of message or moral. That's not it at all. It's something intrinsic to you as you write, more akin to theme than some kind of propaganda or add-on social or political issue. Says Tan:

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.

Connection with Readers

"Being bi-cultural is an asset for a writer," Isabella Ayende says during an interview in this documentary. "It gives you curiosity. You want to ask questions. You want to understand deeply. And uh, in the answers, you get stories."

It's a strength that Amy Tan plays into as a writer. As a first-generation child of immigrants, she is as much American as she is Asian. She had, in effect, two lives, two cultures, to ways of being that provide a place from which to tell stories, starting with the story of her mother. 

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.

Her mother was a well she returned to for stories, in particular for The Kitchen God's Wife. 

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, that's not how fiction is written. It's not really about true stories."

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."

By connecting with her mother, with her past, with her family history, Amy was able to connect with readers all over the globe. 

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 backstories that I knew about and could relate to from my family 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.

Be Open to Opportunities

In closing (because this one's getting longer than I prefer for a movie review), there's one last tidbit I want to address. It is this: Be open for opportunities that are unexpected. 

In my writing career, that meant the weird kismet of having a writer I picked up for an indie only magazine becoming an editor at a top 5 comic book publisher who was able to get me a dream gig. 

For Amy Tan, if was the opportunity to branch into screenwriting. 

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 way as a as a writer.

So, one of them was to make writing my focus. Don't get involved with things like film.

Ron Bass, who was 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. "

Ron stood firm, demanded she take part. 

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. "

So she relented. 

And he said, "Well, just try. 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.

But it all started with her family, her family's story, the past. 

Amy: 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.

Interviewer: Mm-hmm.

Amy: 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.