Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello, I'm Amy Tan.
I'm here today to talk about my book,
The Joy Luck Club.
I think if you ask everybody,
if you ask yourself, I bet you'd say,
"Yeah, I have a story in me."
What is the reason you have a story in you?
You have a way of looking at the world
that's different from anybody else.
You know, with a book
it's like windows and doors to my mind
and I can go out of these windows,
I can go anywhere, I can explore different lands
and it's magic.
And I still feel that today.
Confusion is the best place to start a story
as is conflicts, ambiguity, ambivalence...
All these things where you're sort of standing on an edge
You're about to fall...
You know, that is a great place to start a story.
And when you read a book
you get somebody's story,
you go through these same things,
you go through joy, and sudden tragedy, and loss,
and you feel it, and you come out of that and you say,
"That was me. That was my life."
My parents spoke Chinese
and in the home they spoke Mandarin together.
My parents didn't force me to speak Chinese
because they thought, erroneously,
that if I learned Chinese
it would affect my ability to learn English.
I heard my mother speaking Mandarin to me
as she's always saying all these terrible things to me,
like, you know, "Go to bed."
Um... But she used to sit around a table with friends
and they would be preparing food
you know, they would be shelling these fava beans
or they would be chopping vegetables
or gutting fish.
They had a newspaper spread out over the table
and they were also talking.
They were talking about the old days.
And I think that what happened was
that I absorbed some of these stories,
that I somehow knew things
in an unconscious way.
Starting at about the age of eight,
I used to read the thesaurus.
It had so many words in it,
and those words had many meanings to me,
they had many possibilities.
And each of those words
were like little stories to me.
I remember this one word
that I thought was the most exciting word that day
and it was "precipitous."
And it was also related to a precipice
and it was related to a cliff.
And what I could see with that word was
a sense of danger
and my standing on the edge of a cliff and falling.
I always grew up with this sense of danger,
I think because my mother had so many warnings.
She was very worried I would fall into
a situation where I'd ruin my life.
She'd say that I had to be careful crossing the street
and she wanted me to remember.
And she said, "You don't watch out,
somebody run you over, smash you flat,
just like one of those pom-pom fish
two eyes, both, one side of your face."
Now at the time she said these things
I didn't understand. I didn't want to listen.
And in part it was because
I didn't realize where these warnings came from.
And they came from her life.
I didn't know what her life had been in China.
Her mother had been the daughter of a scholar
and a very beautiful intelligent woman.
And the father died when she was two.
Here she had been the wife of a scholar,
and now she was destitute.
My mother felt that shame that her mother had.
And she used to say to me,
"This is a stain you cannot wash off your back."
And my mother said, "You don't understand.
that was China back then."
And I realized that
I had to understand more of what that was.
And when I started to imagine
and put myself into that time
and into that family,
and what her circumstances were,
I began to understand those warnings
and they weren't meant to simply scare me,
they were really her way of saying she loved me.
I wrote letters when I was a kid
and that's because we moved every year,
sometimes every six months,
and when I moved I lost my friends.
So I would write letters to these friends
and I started to make up things.
I gave myself a different name:
Effie May Hoodwinkle.
I don't know why I chose that name
Effie May Hoodwinkle had many adventures.
She could fly!
She had shoes that allowed her to fly over the sidewalk.
And so it was obvious they were fictional stories
but my first readers
were the friends I left behind when I moved.
The first time I entered a library
I was six years old.
It was this giant brick building.
I walked in and the ceilings were huge,
the room echoed,
and there were so many books there.
And I would go to a shelf
and all the little books for kids
were down low so you could sit on the floor
and just pick out the books you wanted.
A lot of those early books were fairy tales,
Grimm's Fairy Tales had a lot of
very gruesome things in there as well,
and I progressed.
I think they ended up
organizing it so that as you got older
the books, you know, sort of went higher.
I remember feeling very grown up
when I read a book called, "To Kill A Mockingbird."
That was a very difficult book for me to read.
The words were bigger,
I had to keep in mind a lot more things,
but I was really, really proud
that I was able to read that book.
There was a book, and I don't remember
how old I was exactly
except that I was probably in my adolescence.
And I read a book called "Jane Eyre."
She was a little girl like me
who seemed to be misunderstood
by a lot of people.
And she seemed to have no friends.
I was going through a very unhappy time
and I felt my mother was like
that step-aunt that Jane Eyre had.
And that what happened to her friend,
when her friend died in the orphanage,
that that was me.
You know, all of a sudden I was alone.
It was that feeling there was a friend,
the friend was in a book,
but the friend was there,
and I could turn to that friend whenever I wanted.
And I thought,
"That's me. That book is about me."
There was a book that was
very important to me as a writer,
and that was "Catcher in the Rye."
It was important not so much
because of what was in there,
it was because that book was taken away from me.
It was a banned book
and my father's friend had seen me
reading that book and he told my father.
They took the book away from me.
And that just meant I had to buy it again.
And I read it and it didn't seem
like it was that dangerous.
But I decided after that
that I was never going to let anybody
tell me what I should read and not read.
That I think is something
that is a part of me today.
I had taken an IQ test
when I was six years old.
I didn't do that well on the verbal portion.
I did extremely well on the math portion.
And the psychologist gave the results to my parents
and she said I could become a doctor,
that I had good math skills.
And my parents took that as
you know, the rule for the rest of my life.
I'd play the piano, be a concert pianist...
I'd become a doctor...
and I believed that as well.
It never occurred to me that I should challenge it
until I was out of high school.
My father was dead by then,
and I was in college,
and I realized that
I didn't have to take pre-med.
I could become an English major!
Because actually, even though those tests
said I was not very good in the verbal areas,
I loved to write.
I have imagery in English
and I have imagery in Chinese
and sometimes they meld and sometimes they don't.
I hear my mother saying things to this day
and maybe they were not the things she actually said
but I can think of the way she would have said it,
the imagery she would have used.
There's not these pat phrases,
it's the way she saw things.
She used metaphors a lot
and that is, um, I think one of the
most important parts of a writer's imagination.
You make these associations
and they're experiential, they're visual,
they're sensorial, they're everything.
They're emotional, they are your meaning in life.
You connect meaning to metaphors.
Starting at the age of twelve,
my mother and I
seemed to have a lot of disagreements.
And I think it was typical
because I wanted to be independent.
I didn't want to listen
to everything my mother said, because
that was like being my mother.
And I was my own person.
She would tell me these same warnings.
As an adult, she would look over my shoulder
and she would say, "Oh Amy, you work so hard.
Squeeze all your brain out onto this paper."
And it's a horrible image, you know
but that's how she would say things,
very visceral, very, um, almost violent imagery.
Those images stayed with me
and I realized that
in an image of a fish, lying in a store,
with both eyes on one side of the head,
you have the whole story.
The words "Joy Luck"
had a lot to do with your circumstances
and that in life you're handed something.
It has to do with where you were born,
and what happened,
and if you went through a war...
if you lost your money, your identity...
and so there was bad luck,
but, just as easily, there could be good luck
and it could change all that.
And when it changed you would have joy.
Joy and luck was part of my life
since the earliest of my memories
and that was because
there really was a Joy Luck Club.
My father had named it.
And it was a group of Chinese friends
who had immigrated to this country.
And they got together about once a month
and they played Mah-Jongg,
and they played cards,
and they cooked Chinese food at midnight
They had what we call "***-fan,"
a rice porridge,
and all kinds of goodies,
and we kids would be there
during part of it, just listening,
and at midnight we'd get up
and get some of the food.
So we grew up Joy Luck,
that's very ordinary words to me.
I look back and there's no one moment
where I said, "Oh, I should be a writer!"
I wanted to be an artist,
I wanted to draw.
And I think that it was the same,
in one sense, wanting to be an artist
was also wanting to be a writer.
You wanted to represent
your way of seeing the world
and you wanted to do that creatively.
I didn't make a decision to become a writer
until I was published as a writer.
I was writing these stories
and I considered myself a beginning writer.
I think we often mistake being a writer
as being a published writer.
Being a writer is trying
to write about things that are meaningful.
I write for many reasons
I write because I love to write...
um... I love words.
I write because
I love the craft of writing,
of creating a story and then
looking back at it
as a creation, a form of art,
just as people create other things.
They create art, they create dance.
Writing to me is about revision.
People think that I start writing,
Page one... ch ch ch ch...
page 300 and I'm done.
That's what makes you a professional writer,
that you make no mistakes,
it all comes easily,
everybody says it's so hard,
how can you do it?
It is harder.
Stories push you
and you have to go deeper.
You have to, in some sense, survive.
Whether it's emotionally or,
you know, whatever you're doing,
you have to survive.
And that's when you discover things.
I think that when people go through great change,
great happiness, great trauma,
that is when those questions
get forced to the top.
I learned that when people were telling me
what they got out of The Joy Luck Club.
Suddenly I had people saying,
"Well, that's my story!
You know, my mother was like that."
And I felt like saying,
"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that."
But, you know, what they were saying
is that they became that.
This whole idea that your imagination,
now you've become that person,
and you come out of it and say,
"That's me." And now I take away from it
um, who I am even more.
Even though you became that person for a while.
It's a really wonderful, magical,
thing that happens when you are reading.
You know, when I started writing
The Joy Luck Club,
I really thought I was writing stories.
I was trying to learn the craft of writing
and I didn't even write these stories
based on my life.
I never thought my life was that interesting.
And so I didn't write about that at first.
And then these stories began to
seem so much about my mother and me
and about these conflicts,
and in ways that I had not thought about.
The structure of The Joy Luck Club
always sounds very impressive when people,
somebody else, analyzes it.
In fact, I loved reading
The Joy Luck Club Cliff Notes.
Because it just explains how brilliant I was
in coming up with this structure of
four parts, and mothers and daughters,
eight characters, you know, revealing the past
and the present, and blah blah blah.
And it wasn't like that. It was, you know,
everything in my life starts with confusion,
and that's good.
So that confusion is
that I start off writing one story,
and then I wrote another one,
and I wrote another one,
and they were all different.
They were different families, different characters,
and I started adding more stories,
and I wanted more stories, because
I wanted the variety of
writing a story with different conflicts.
And then at the end I had this mess
of sixteen stories.
My editor looked at them and she said,
"They're about mothers and daughters."
and it was the first time that I realized it.
I thought I was writing a story
that was at first just stories,
you know, the craft of fiction.
And then it became a story
about my mother and me.
And so I thought to myself, well,
I can create a community.
And there was already a
built-in community in my family.
And that was The Joy Luck Club.
So now that we had these stories,
and so many different characters
and things going back and forth,
you know, there was this question
of how to structure it.
And I just started throwing the stories down,
according to what it felt like.
Here's a story about a secret
and something a mother never told her daughter
that was so important
now her mother is dead.
And this is a girl who never
found herself because she was trying
to live up to the expectations
of a mother she didn't really know.
The story about Suyuan
leaving her girls behind, the twin baby girls,
that had some basis in my mother's life.
She left behind three daughters in China.
Imagine how you would feel
if you left kids behind
and then you didn't see them for 30 years.
And then you have your daughter
growing up in this other country
with all the opportunities
and, you know, she doesn't appreciate you,
and you want to say,
"I have these other daughters
and they would have been just happy
to have me by their side, protecting them,
and giving them good advice."
And those kind of conflicts were always present
and I didn't know what they were from,
I didn't know I had sisters in China.
The very last thing that I wrote
is the very first page
that a reader would read in this book.
And it's called
"Feathers from a Thousand Li Away."
The feathers from a thousand li away...
the mother has bought this duck
and the duck, it became a goose,
it was even better...
and then it became a swan,
it just keeps getting better and better and better.
And she's taking this swan
to prove to her daughter
things can get better,
it can be more than what you hoped for.
And, um, and instead,
somebody takes it away from her.
You know, and that happens in life, too.
All of a sudden, it's gone.
She has just one swan feather and she's
determined still to give that to her daughter.
And this is what she is going to give,
the most precious thing she's going to give,
and the daughter just, like, poof, you know...
I couldn't have written that
until I got to the end of the book because
that was what the book meant to me.
My mother, she had been my ally,
she had been the one who protected me the most,
and taught me these strengths,
and she was also my enemy,
in a strange way.
She was the one who could wound me
with any little thing she would say.
"Oh, not so good," or,
"You should've practiced,
why did you get an A-minus?"
Um, you know, they would be so wounding
and I felt I could never satisfy her,
I could never meet her expectations,
so why should I try?
So I didn't really set out
to write about my mother and our relationship.
It just came to the surface.
And that is what I think writing is about,
discovering things that you never could express.
And it was as though the craft of writing
had tricked me into
thinking about things I hadn't thought about.
In the end, it turned out that
these stories were from my mother.
They were for me in the beginning,
But I realized that
they were saying I listened.
And when she read that book,
it was the first time, I think,
she felt that she didn't have to
tell me these same words of advice.
At the end of reading the book
she said this comment,
she said, "So easy to read."
It didn't mean that my English was
simply easy for her to read,
It meant that it
went down so easily in her heart.
And that she now recognized
how much she meant to me.
I knew this later on, too, because
she was arguing with somebody
and she was trying to tell me
how mad she was at this person,
going into all the details...
"And I said this, then she said this,
because she promised,
and then she lied later on..."
And this is going to be one of her stories,
her diatribes that was going to go on
for three hours, and days and days,
and I'd have to listen to this.
And she stopped, and she said,
"No, I don't have to tell you,
you understand, you're just like me."
That's what she got out of the book.
To me, I would say that
that the biggest thing
that this book is about,
to me, is hope.
The qualities of hope and
what our mothers believed about hope.
Over the years, you know,
I think there were a lot of people,
especially women, who say,
"Oh, you know, I've become just like my mother."
And what they mean by that is
Oh my God, I'm saying these horrible things
these warnings, and, you know,
"If you fall down don't come
crying to me" kind of stuff.
But in another sense, I'll tell you what
is more revealing to me
in becoming my mother,
and that is that I have taken on
the way that she believes.
And what I mean by that is that
there is no one set of beliefs
that govern the way the world works for me.
And that I have to find these answers
by asking my own questions.
My mother believed in all possibilities.
She believed in miracles, she believed in God,
she believed in curses, she believed in ghosts,
she believed in fate, she believed in luck,
and ancestors and reincarnation,
She believed I was a reincarnation
of somebody she wronged in a past life
because I had come back to torture her.
She believed in, she believed in so many things,
and it's not to say she was inconsistent,
and she, you know, was crazy. It was more that
She believed in whatever was...
what would give her the most hope.
And that's what she did,
she taught me the qualities of hope.
I've developed this personal theory
about hope and imagination
and it is the ability to associate
so profoundly that you are in that place
That level of empathy is like compassion.
So, to me, imagination is
the closest thing we have to compassion.
We certainly need a lot of compassion in this world.
I write because it is about the meaning of my life.
We all find meaning in different ways.
We find it through families,
we find it through work,
we find it through friends,
we find it in the kinds of things
that make us happy and sad.
And I have the time to think about
all of that when I am writing.
I just... I just feel like it's a great luxury.
I think if you ask everybody,
if you ask yourself, I bet you'd say,
"Yeah, I have a story in me."
What is the reason you have a story in you?
You have a way of looking at the world
that's different from anybody else.
My epitaph, if I had to choose
one right on the spot it would be:
She believed in all possiblities
and she found some of them.
Now I'm ready for the revision!
That was just the draft!