Amy Tan: Looking back on ‘The Joy Luck Club,’ strong women, the power of secrets

MANILA, Philippines – The millions who have read Amy Tan’s novels, such as The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, and her latest, The Valley of Amazement, must feel like they know her through her vivid and intimate portrayals of characters.

Her stories of daughters and their relationship with their mothers as well of the Asian-American experience of being between two worlds, fitting in neither, and of uncovering secrets pasts left behind in the old country, resonate with readers who share similar stories of heartache, love, redemption, and acceptance.  

 

Many see themselves as one of her archetypical modern Asian characters, be it Waverly Jong, Rose Hsu Jordan, Lena St. Clair, or June Woo.

To those who have seen the cinematic as well as the theatrical adaptations of The Joy Luck Club, their vision of Tan and her world may even be more specific and detailed. Her stories are their stories. Her characters are them. She is is both familiar and as familial. 

Meeting Amy Tan

Tan confesses that there are even fans who cosplay her at book signing events and literary symposiums. “I always find it very strange when I see people dress like me. And it’s a tribute. The hairstyle, the flowing robe, or carrying a little dog with anywhere I go, which I’m known for. That is pretty hilarious,” she says. 

But she adds, “There are people who write to me that their mother is dying, and that they watched the movie or read the book together in the last moments of their mother’s life.” 

In person, she gives nary a hint of the epilepsy that was caused by Lyme disease infection that she contracted in 1999 but went undiagnosed until 2003. She is both relaxed and poised. Her accent is only mildly American. She talks the way she writes: clear, concise, disarming, and warm. She confesses to conscientiously maintaining her the persona that her readers have come to know.

Still, there are a few surprises to her colorful, striking personality. Tan is also vocalist and tambourine player for the rock band Rock Bottom Remainders, playing alongside fellow famous authors and artists like Stephen King, Mitch Albom, and Matt Groening, to name a few. She reveals even this has made its way into her books. “There’s always a little bit of rebellion, the qualities of that,” she explains. 

Despite pouring so much of herself into her novels, Tan, much like her writing, continuous to exercise the power to pleasantly surprise and reveal even more insights. Her exploration of mother-daughter relationships among Asian Americans is a rich vein still worth mining for literary gems.

“There is still the underlying question even as I write about mothers and daughters. And that is who I am and how do I discover what that is.” In an interview with Rappler, Tan reveals how the people in her real life populate her fiction. 

 

Finding family 

Tan confesses that her father often appears in many of her novels albeit never as a crucial protagonist. “He has been in many of them. He is the father who dies early. In many of the novels he is the absent father…In the Kitchen God’s Wife, there’s a father who chokes on a fishbone and he dies. In every one of them, there’s a father. In Joy Luck Club there’s one father in the beginning who remains throughout the story. He’s the one who tells June about her mother’s wish for her. But people have wondered why don’t I write about my father…The way I remember him is through his absence.”

Such characterization simply mirrors real life. Her father was John Tan, a baptist minister and electrical engineer, whose religion and love for science complemented and tempered her mother Daisy’s traditional beliefs, while he was alive. 

But when he unexpectedly died of a brain tumor when she was just the age of 15, just six months her brother John Jr. died of the very same illness, all her mother’s traditional Chinese beliefs in ghosts, karma, and geomancy were unbound. 

Later, she would discover that her mother had a previous marriage in China with a physically abusive man and that she had three half sisters still in mainland China as well as a baby brother who died in infancy – the basis for the story of The Joy Luck Club.

It is her mother Daisy who provides the mold for wise matriarchs weighed down by the baggage of superstition and custom and haunted by secret pasts left behind in the old country.

She reveals, “I never knew her from her past, when she was glamorous and rich and admired in society and had perfect Shanghainese. She wrote beautifully. She had excellent writing skills. I never knew her that way before… The thing about women who have left their country is that they often leave secrets behind. And they are secrets that have something to do with something unflattering that they didn’t want to bring with them. Those secrets have a power to them.” 

 

It was the death of her brother and her father and the consequent revelations about her mother that led Tan to become a novelist. In 1985, she began writing after attending a fiction workshop at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in an attempt to make sense of it all. She explains, “There was a moment when my life changed and that was the reason I became writer. And the reason I became a writer was the year my father and brother died of brain tumors.

My father had been a minister. And the year that happened all my mother’s beliefs came out. All the ghosts came out. All the notions about karma, superstitions, and blame and miracles and things in the earth and feng shui and everything was unleashed. 

And because of everything that was going on, all my beliefs got called into question. I had to know what was true and why things happened. I believed my father that if I believed hard enough a miracle would happen and they would all be cured. They didn’t. My brother died and my father died. And I lost my faith. I didn’t believe in anything. I had to start over. And this is a perfect thing for a writer.”

One person that Tan adamantly refuses to include in her books is her husband Lou DeMattei to whom she has been married to for 40 years since having first met him on a blind date in 1974. This reluctance perhaps explains the longevity of their marriage. 

Courtesans, concubines, and skeletons in the closet

Tan’s latest novel The Valley of Amazement delves into the world of courtesans in pre-revolutionary China. Just as her her debut novel The Joy Luck Club revealed the spousal abuse her mother endured in her first marriage in China, her latest novel is inspired by evidence that recently came to light that seemed to belie that her grandmother was a conservative and traditional Chinese woman. 

 

She admits, “I’ve never had an objection to anything that I’ve written except with this latest book. And that’s because it was inspired by a photograph of my grandmother and another one that I found that suggested that my grandmother might have been a courtesan. She definitely was a concubine. 

“…For some reason people think a being a courtesan is a personal decision. It was not. Many of the girls who were forced to become courtesans had been kidnapped and sold. And so their fate is just as demeaning as that of a concubine,” she explains. 

Tan notes,  “How clever these women were as businesswomen. And they had to. They were teenagers. So they had the emotions of adolescents. They wanted to be loved just as any adolescent would want. But they were cast into a world where if they wanted to survive beyond their early 20s when their careers would end, they had to be clever businesswomen…If they let their hearts get in the way and go for the cute guy, they were putting their life in jeopardy.” 

Tan emphasizes, “These women were innovative. They had to create their own fashions. They were a huge influence in bringing western culture into Shanghai and making it popular. In so many ways there were an interesting group of women…Women who were victims but who rose above that and found their way in a very limited society.” 

She says that is the world she entered in creating this story – even though the book, the characters, are not about her grandmother.

Ultimately, she sees reason for pride in her grandmother’s apparent flouting of contemporary Chinese conventions. Amy Tan declares, “It illuminated who she was, just to see her in those clothes, whether she was or not, it countered this family myth that she had been traditional, old-fashioned, and quiet. And when I saw her in those…I knew what those clothes meant. She was not those things. I am not those things. My mother was not those things. How could she have been, of course she wasn’t. And suddenly, she became more real. And in my mind, I felt that she would say, ‘Yes, you’ve discovered me finally. Here I am.’”

Tan is in town for the Philippine Literary Festival, which features a panel discussion with her, and also features Korean-American novelist Chang Rae Lee. New York-based writer, the great Eric Gamalinda, will also be launching his latest book, which will be internationally released here in the Philippines – one of the activities at the festival. – Rappler.com

Writer, graphic designer, and business owner Rome Jorge is passionate about the arts. Formerly the Editor-in-Chief of asianTraveler Magazine, Lifestyle Editor of The Manila Times, and cover story writer for MEGA and Lifestyle Asia Magazines,Rome Jorge has also covered terror attacks, military mutinies, mass demonstrations as well as Reproductive Health, gender equality, climate change, HIV/AIDS and other important issues. He is also the proprietor of Strawberry Jams Music Studio.