Amy Tan
Chinese-American writer and member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, most famous for her novel The Joy Luck Club.
Why are you attracted only to Chinese nonsense?
Now that I'm angry at Harold, it's hard to remember what was so remarkable about him.
My father has asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club. I am to replace my mother, whose seat at the mah jong table has been empty since she died two months ago. My father thinks she was killed by her own thoughts.
Your father is not my first husband. You are not those babies.
I was writing for businesses. I think my mother was a little skeptical in the beginning, but fortunately, as a free-lance writer I was successful almost immediately. And so she was very proud, because she measured success in terms of money, which is what I started to do as well. My goal then, became to increase the amount of money that I made each month. Not simply each year, but each month — I mean, talk about pressure — to have more billable hours each month. So that by the end of my third year of being a free-lance writer, I was billing 90 hours a week. I had no time to sleep. I had no life. People said I was crazy, that I was a workaholic. And I couldn't understand how it was that I had these wonderful clients, and I was making all this money, and I wasn't happy and I didn't feel successful. That's when I started to write fiction.
Look at this face. Do you see my foolish hope?
I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?
Only two kind of daughters. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!
I have always known a thing before it happens.
I was no longer scared. I could see what was inside me.
On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.
People look at me as this very, I don't know, Confucius-like wise person — which I'm not. They don't see all the shit that I've been through.
I began to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.
It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.
I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.
I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.
Reading for me was a refuge. I could escape from everything that was miserable in my life and I could be anyone I wanted to be in a story, through a character. It was almost sinful how much I liked it. That's how I felt about it. If my parents knew how much I loved it, I thought they would take it away from me. I think I was also blessed with a very wild imagination because I can remember, when I was at an age before I could read, that I could imagine things that weren't real and whatever my imagination saw is what I actually saw. Some people would say that was psychosis but I prefer to say it was the beginning of a writer's imagination. If I believed that insects had eyes and mouths and noses and could talk, that's what they did. If I thought I could see devils dancing out of the ground, that's what I saw. If I thought lightning had eyes and would follow me and strike me down, that's what would happen. And I think I needed an outlet for all that imagination, so I found it in books.
That was the night, in the kitchen, that I realized I was no better than who I was... And I no longer felt angry at Waverly. I felt tired and foolish, as if I had been running to escape someone chasing me, only to look behind and discover there was no one there.
Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself.