The Opposite of Fate

Contents

A NOTE TO THE READER

FATE AND FAITH

the cliffsnotes version of my life

how we knew

a question of fate

faith

CHANGING THE PAST

last week

my grandmother's choice

thinly disguised memoir

persona errata

scent

AMERICAN CIRCUMSTANCES AND CHINESE CHARACTER

fish cheeks

dangerous advice

midlife confidential

arrival banquet

joy luck and hollywood

STRONG WINDS, STRONG INFLUENCES

what she meant

confessions

pretty beyond belief

the most hateful words

my love affair with vladimir nabokov

LUCK CHANCE, AND A CHARMED LIFE

inferior decorating

room with a view, new kitchen, and ghosts

retreat to reality

my hair, my face, my nails

the ghosts of my imagination

A CHOICE OF WORDS

what the library means to me

mother tongue

the language of discretion

five writing tips

required reading and other dangerous subjects

angst and the second book

the best stories

HOPE

what i would remember

to complain is american

the opposite of fate

Copyright © 2003 by Amy Tan
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Published simultaneously in Canada

G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Publishers Since 1838
a member of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014

Information on previous publication history appears on page 400.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tan, Amy
The opposite of fate : a book of musings / Amy Tan.
p. cm
ISBN 978-1-1012-0041-4
Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

Book design by Claire Naylon Vaccaro

ALSO BY AMY TAN

FICTION
The Joy Luck Club
The Kitchen God’s Wife
The Hundred Secret Senses
The Bonesetter’s Daughter

FOR CHILDREN
The Moon Lady
The Chinese Siamese Cat

GRATITUDE

I owe thanks to many for the existence of this work: among them, Sandy Dijkstra and Carole Baron for suggesting the book when it seemed impossible for me to write another sentence; Aimee Taub for guidance, organization, and cheerfulness in making the overwhelming merely whelming, even fun; Anna Jardine for saving me from public disgrace; Raphael Stricker, M.D., for restoring my brain to sentence-writing strength; and Faith Sale and Daisy Tan, eternal muses, for inspiration, insight, and sense of purpose.

With love to Lou DeMattei, who knows the fiction and nonfiction of my life, as well as all that cannot be put into words.

A NOTE TO THE READER

T
hese are musings on my life, including the metaphors I used as an eight-year-old child, sensing books as windows opening and illuminating my room, and the thoughts I had as I wrote my mother’s obituary, trying to sum up who she was and what legacy she had bequeathed to me.

I call this a book of musings because the writings are mostly casual pieces rather than formal essays. Some are long, versions of conversational talks I gave at universities. Others are short, particular to the desperate hour in which I wrote them, for example, the eulogy for my editor, the incomparable Faith Sale; or the e-mail sent to friends after an unexpected disaster resulting in my near-demise made the national news. There is also a love poem to my husband, which counts as my most difficult exercise in brevity.

I have included such longer pieces as my ruminations about the making of the film
The Joy Luck Club.
A reporter had faxed me questions, and I sent back the answers, written off the top of my head, ending with my wondering what would happen next; in a footnote, I explain what did. I offer as well a portion of my journal entries from a 1990 trip to China in which I was smothered in the
bosom of family and had to acquiesce rather than follow my typical American ways. I offer it here for fun, and because it shows how nearly everything in my life turns into obsessive observation, images, questions, and if I am lucky, the beginnings of stories, however ragtag they may be. The last reflection in this book was written only recently, and for a fateful but hopeful reason.

Some of the pieces have ignominious origins. “Mother Tongue” was written hastily, as an apologia the night before I was to be on a panel with people far more erudite than I on the topic “The State of the English Language.” The speech was later published in
The Threepenny Review
and then selected for inclusion in the anthology
The Best American Essays 1991—
leading me to wonder whether all my essays should be written at two in the morning in a state of panic. A version of “Mother Tongue” has also been used for the Advanced Placement SAT in English; this unanticipated development delights this author to no end, since her score in the 400s on the verbal section of the SAT made it seem unlikely, at least in 1969, that she would even think of making her living by the artful arrangement of words.

In gathering these pieces for the book, I made a new realization, so obvious that I was stunned I had not seen the pattern a hundred times before. In all of my writings, both fiction and nonfiction, directly or obliquely but always obsessively, I return to questions of fate and its alternatives. I saw that these musings about fate express my idiosyncratic and evolving philosophy, and this in turn is my “voice,” the one that determines the kinds of stories I want to tell, the characters I choose, the details I decide are relevant. In my fictional stories, I have chosen characters who question what they should believe at different moments in
their lives, often in times of loss. And while I never intended for the pieces in this current nonfiction book to explain my fiction, they do.

Thus, although each of these writings came about for its own reasons, collectively they hold much in common, and at times they overlap in my mention of ideas, people, and pivotal moments. They are musings linked by my fascination with fate, both blind and blessed, and its many alternatives: choice, chance, luck, faith, forgiveness, forgetting, freedom of expression, the pursuit of happiness, the balm of love, a sturdy attitude, a strong will, a bevy of good-luck charms, adherence to rituals, appeasement through prayer, trolling for miracles, a plea to others to throw a lifeline, and the generous provision of that by strangers and loved ones.

I see that these permutations of changing fate are really one all-encompassing thing: hope. Hope has always allowed for all things. Hope has always been there. My mother, who taught me the many permutations of fate, was hope’s most stubborn defender. If fate was the minute hand on a clock, mindlessly moving forward, she could find a way to force it to go back. She did it often. She, who adamantly believed I would grow up to be a doctor, would later brag to anyone who listened, “I always know she be writer one day.” And in so saying, fate was changed and hope was fulfilled. And here I am, a writer, just as she predicted.

FATE AND FAITH

My mother believed in God’s will for many years. It was as if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said “fate,” because she couldn’t pronounce that “th” sound in “faith.”

And later, I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you’re in control. I found out the most
I
could have was hope, and with that I was not denying any possibility, good or bad. I was just saying, If there is a choice, dear God or whatever you are, here’s where the odds should be placed.

•
The Joy Luck Club

• the cliffsnotes version of my life •

S
oon after my first book was published, I found myself often confronted with the subject of my mortality. I remember being asked by a young woman what I did for a living. “I’m an author,” I said with proud new authority.

“A contemporary author?” she wanted to know.

And being newly published at the time, I had to think for a moment before I realized that if I were not contemporary I would be the alternative, which is, of course, dead.

Since then I have preferred to call myself a writer. A writer writes—she writes in the present progressive tense. Whereas an author, unless she is clearly said to be “contemporary,” is in the past tense, someone who once wrote, someone who no longer has to sharpen her pencil, so to speak. To me, the word
author
is as chilling as rigor mortis, and I shudder when I hear myself introduced as such when I lecture at universities. This is probably due to the fact that when I was an English major at a university, all the authors I read were, sad to say, not contemporary.

What compels ardent readers of my work to ask me questions concerning my time-limited authorhood? In lecture halls and on live radio shows, I have been stunned by questions as
deadly as these: “What would you like written on your tombstone?” “Which book would you like people to remember you by?” “Does it make you feel honored that your books probably will be in circulation at the library long after you’re gone?”

I don’t find those questions nearly as appalling as this one: “Are you loaded?” which is what a nine-year-old girl in Nashville once asked me at a book signing. I wondered whether the child might have just come from a school program on crime prevention or substance abuse and was now worried that all adults carried loaded weapons or were loaded on drugs. I said to her gently, “What kind of loaded are you worried about?”

“You know,” the girl snapped, “loaded like filthy rich.” I glanced over to her mother, expecting that she would reprimand her daughter. And the mother looked right at me and said, “Well,
are you?
”

I’ve grown accustomed to public scrutiny. Yet nothing prepared me for what I consider the ultimate reminder of an author’s mortality. It happened when I was at yet another bookstore, about to give yet another reading. I was waiting in the wings, as the store manager delivered a long introduction on my credentials as an author. Glancing to my side, I saw a wire book rack crammed with cheap and familiar booklets. They were CliffsNotes, self-proclaimed as “your key to the classics.”

As we all know, CliffsNotes have served as the midnight salvation of many a literature student, and if the sad truth be known, this former honors English major used them to write incisive papers on—dare I say it?—
Ulysses, Lord Jim,
and
Hamlet.

Imagine: There I was, in a bookstore, recalling these past sins, about to read from my own published work. I gave a silent apology to my fellow authors Jim Joyce, Joe Conrad, and Bill
Shakespeare, may they rest in peace. And then my eyes landed on another familiar title:
The Joy Luck Club.
I stared at those CliffsNotes, thinking to myself,
But I’m not dead yet.