A Pilgrim's Progress... in China: Amy Tan's Luncheon at M on the Bund About Writing and Shanghai Lit Festival

Amy Tan Shanghai, Life and writing. at M on the Bund
Literary Festival The last time she was here, she talked about making "the Bone Setter's daughter" into an opera in San Francisco. I finished reading her book on her trip into Mynamar, starting in Lijiang, and as I had just returned from there, it was resonant. I thought of the "canterbuy tales' as she has 12 trippers who tell their various stories, or live them out...testing moral limits. As a Chinese American, which she firmly holds onto, she thinks of herself first as American, and then as Chinese.

Amy's mother told her, "you are not Chinese" and she cannot speak Chinese very well...lacking vocabulary. She has three sisiters; one lives in Pewaukee, outside Milwaukee, whom she visits. She focusses on her grandmother who might have been a courtesan, as she has the same outfit as the "10 beauties" of Shanghai...and her grandmother was raped and then married off to a man who liked to associate himself with Du the gangster. She was raped at 8 years old...she was taken into a rich house as a concubine and bore the man his first son, for which she was honored. But she killed herself...

Amy, herself, was abused by a church official and then by a gynecologist. She thinks women have to stand up for their rights. Her mother told her never let a man make you do something you don't want to do.   I am most impressed by her talk after the luncheon when queried about why she writes: She says, "writing is proof I am alive". It helps me know what I am thinking. It is about myself and my relationship to life.

When asked, what else would she have considered doing? She says, "being an artist". She made a drawing and then her uncle changed it: it was not about improving the drawing. He seemed to be changing my identity.

She says it is important to have "attitude". Then, you can do it. For example, her band is about connecting...They are the :remains" of the Remainders..

Her mother asked her when she died 'What will you remember?" When she wrote the Joy Luck Club, her mother "understood"...she said Amy didn't get enough "credit"; she did not take dictation from the wome...her mother wants her to make the next book about her, which she does, "The Kitchen god's wife".

Her uncle asked, "Why bring up the past?" Her friends claimed they were characters in the books. One can change history by telling the history so well, that everyone knows that we suffered...

When asked what her novels "mean", she says it is difficult to deconstruct your own work. I do not reread my own novels once pubished; I will find too many things that need change.

What does a writer need? VOICE.

She found she was in "Cliff Notes". usually reserved for dead writers.

Playing Chinese chess. "Don't make a big stink over nothing". Leisure is the power of women for example, playing mahjong.

One cannot live someone elses' s life ; one needs cultural context. Tensions must be valid, imaginable.
to be continued...

I would like to have been a composer. Composing is like writing. I am reminded that she worked closely with the composer, when she wrote the libretto for the opera. She says she revises 100x per page.

She explains that there is considerable "revisionist" history in their family. She says she has thown out 7 novels, after 200 pages which is painful..because as her editors says, "They were not felt'...one needs to know the emotional context.   All of the Chinese in her books, like herself, are very Westernized. She says sometimes the story thread is lost in the contrivance of the story...

In 1987 when she returned to Shanghai, she knew how American she was...I was here, then. She felt so much a minority, and they did not notice her husband, Lou, but herself. Her mother always fought with everyone in SF, but here she fought even more because she knew the language.   Sister lived here in two small rooms, but that chcanged into a five bedroom and a villa on the Bund. The house on Julu Lu was theirs; we had a tour there.Her grandmother lived in Chong Ming Island and after giving birth to a son, killedherelf. Her grandmother, like my mother died on New Years Day eve. It is a story of "privilege and tragedy".

Amy feels writing begins with "images".   Highlights events and thinks about it; need a srong sense of place.    Deterimine voice immediately. She imagines voice of mother and grandmother...both of which are too hoest. her mother wanted her to be neuro surgeonad a transaloror on the side...