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From time to time, I have wondered how I might have turned out had my father married one of these other women. They were single, had unencumbered pasts—no sociopathic husbands or wailing abandoned daughters in the background. They were also college-educated and spoke English as well as any other American. I must have met them among the various aunties who attended the same church for more than fifty years: accomplished, kind, levelheaded women now in their seventies and eighties.
My father sent the cable saying, “Yes, come!” to the woman who would be my mother, the Shanghai divorcee who had just been released from prison. And that was how my mother came to the United States and married my father. It was God’s will and some other woman’s bad luck.
According to my mother, though, God had less to do with it than fate. Consider how she and my father met, she would remind me. It was around 1941, during the war. She was on a boat, making her way to the city where her husband, a Kuomintang army pilot, was based. My father and his brother were on that same boat. She and my father chatted in a friendly way. They were attracted to each other, although they did not acknowledge this. The boat docked a few days later, and they went their separate ways.
That right there could have been the end of the egg and the sperm that would have made me. Instead four years passed. The war ended. My mother by then had tried numerous times to leave her abusive husband. “That bad man” was how she always referred to him. That bad man once put a gun to her head to force her to sign fake divorce papers. She gladly did this, no gun to her head was necessary, but immediately after she signed, he raped her.
Meanwhile, my father was gadding about in some other part of China, happily single. Many a pushy Chinese mother tried to engage his interest in her daughter. One mother had three daughters, all of them beautiful, talented, and photogenic. I saw the pictures. Because of his excellent language skills in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin, my father was able to work for the U.S. Information Service. He wore a U.S. Army uniform and visited local newspaper stalls and bookshops, gathering any magazines or reports that made mention of the United States, good or bad. One of my uncles told me that my father was recruited by the United States to be a spy. He also said my father used to smoke and drink and was quite the playboy in China. My mother laughed off those assertions. (To this day I wonder who was right. What about the visa to the United States that I found among my father’s belongings? It said he was already married. Did he have another wife? Will I one day receive a letter announcing: “Surprise! I am your long-lost sister. Your other seven sisters and I arrive tomorrow and will stay at your house for a month or two, unless you would like us to visit longer…”)
But let us go back to 1945 and assume my mother’s version of the story is true. My father, now in his early thirties, is still single. He is working in Tientsin, in the north, thousands of miles from the southwestern river where he and my mother first met. My mother happens to be in Tientsin visiting her brother and sister-in-law, who are working underground for the Communists. She is going up the street the very moment my father is coming in the opposite direction. They bump into each other. They confess it was instant love when they met four years before, because that love has only grown stronger all this time they have been missing each other.
This was not chance that they met twice, my mother would tell me whenever she recounted this story. It was fate. Love proved that it was. So that is how I was born to a mother with a convoluted secret past. I became the daughter of a woman who believed I was part of her fate.
Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie’s mom down the block might say, “Honey, look both ways before crossing the street.” My mother’s version: “You don’t look, you get smash flat like sand dab.” (Sand dabs were the cheap fish we bought live in the market, distinguished in my mind by their two eyes affixed on one side of their woebegone cartoon faces.)
The warnings grew worse, depending on the danger at hand. Sex education, for example, consisted of the following advice: “Don’t ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can’t stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill youself.”
The consequences of not heeding my mother’s advice were grave. When I was six years old, she took me to the funeral of my playmate Rachel from down the street. As I stared at Rachel’s sunken eyes, her bloodless hands crossed over a Bible, my mother whispered to me: “This what happen you don’t listen to mother.” My mother went on to say that Rachel died because she had not washed her fruit—a health precaution I ignored too often. (Years later, when pesticides on fruit were proven to cause cancer, I learned that my mother’s warning had not been off base after all.)
I remember a day not too long after Rachel died, when I was sitting on the piano bench, sulking. My mother was scolding me for not practicing enough, for being lazy. She went on and on about how much the lessons with Miss Towler cost, how Daddy had to work overtime. And for what—so she could listen to me make the same mistakes? She then posed an important question: “What you rather do: play piano and become famous, or play outside and become nobody?” Guess what I said.
She was quiet for a moment and then said, “Okay, go play.” As I happily slid off the bench, I heard her mutter that from now on I could do whatever I wanted. She would no longer tell me what to do. If I didn’t want to play the piano, fine. “Forever no more obey,” she said. “Don’t matter. Soon, maybe tomorrow, next day, I dead anyway.”
By then, I knew what dead meant, or at least what it looked like. But I didn’t yet know that my mother’s mother had killed herself in 1925. I didn’t know that my mother had seen this happen, when she was nine years old, that thereafter she would see suicide as the answer to any kind of unhappiness, that she would routinely threaten to die, sometimes weekly, sometimes daily, whenever she was displeased with me or my father or my brothers, whenever she felt slighted by her friends, whenever the milk spilled or the rice burned. I didn’t know that later her emotional terrorism would alternate between threats to kill herself or return to China and that this would lead me to think that China, like death, was an unpleasant place to go. On that day at the piano, when I was six and she first mentioned she was going to die soon, all I knew was fear.
Because of my mother’s moods, I lived in a state of high suspense. I often thought about death, about Rachel being lifeless, about my mother’s promise that soon she would be too. I also pictured in my mind the rat my father had recently shown us wide-eyed kids in the middle of the night: the rodent’s bloody body smashed in the trap, black eyes bulging. “See,” my mother had soothed, “now you no longer be scared what will eat you.” Until then, we had imagined the rat in our house resembled a cheery creature like Mickey Mouse.
Since death was on my mind a lot as a child, I naturally wondered about ghosts as well. In our house, we had two kinds. First, there was the one we could talk about in front of others; that would be the Holy Ghost. My father, after all, was an ordained Baptist minister. True, by the mid-1950s he had returned to electrical engineering so he could make a living wage, but his avocation was still the ministry, and he encouraged daily devotion in the family. We children were taught to believe the Holy Ghost sat at our dinner table and ate Chinese food. We laid out chopsticks and a bowl for our unseen guest at every meal.
The second kind of ghost belonged to my mother. These ghosts were Chinese. We were not supposed to talk about them, because they were bad, of a different religion, and were specifically banned by the laws of the Holy Ghost. Yet they were there. I could sense them. My mother told me I could. One time when I was about four, I remember, she ordered me to go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. Guests had arrived and I didn’t want to go to bed, so I said, “I can’t go in there.”
Why, my mother demanded to know.
“I’m scared,” I lied.
Why?
“There’s a ghost in there.”
Like most mothers might do, she grabbed my hand firmly and guided me to the bathroom. Most mothers would have flipped on the light switch and said, “See, there are no ghosts here—now brush your teeth.” My mother stood at the doorway and said in a voice tinged with hope and excitement: “Where are they? Show me.”
Much to my distress, for the rest of her life she continued to believe I had a talent for seeing ghosts. When I was older, she recalled this same bathroom incident: “I never teach you this word ‘ghost.’ So must be true. You see ghost!” It didn’t matter that I insisted I could not see or hear or feel anything. She thought it admirable that I was lying to protect my invisible friends.
She had other proof that the ghosts came to me: the fact that I knew things I wasn’t supposed to know. I don’t remember what I said or did to her to make her think this. Perhaps it was the way I said a certain name. Or maybe it was my likes and dislikes of a certain dish she cooked. My mannerisms, my preferences, my tone of voice were exactly that of someone else—that person being dead, and having died in mysterious circumstances. My mother believed in reincarnation and she believed I was someone from her past, a woman she had obviously wronged. Why else had I come back as her daughter to torment her so?
I did not want to think of myself as a dead person. But I was also afraid to contradict my mother, for that would send her tumbling into one of her pitch-black moods, those times when she threatened to kill herself. I had already seen her try—as when she opened the car door while we were zooming down the freeway and my father had to yank her back. I was afraid that if my mother died, I would then see a real ghost.
These were matters I could not talk about with my father. I adored him, and he adored me, but he also both adored and feared my mother. He was much more easygoing than she, and not easily riled. He told multilingual jokes and roused friends into singing after dinner. He read bedtime stories to me and my brothers with great expression. He did the Reader’s Digest “Word Power” quiz with me, making it seem the most fun a body could have. He read his sermons to me so I could serve as his best critic. He showed me his engineering homework when he was studying for his master’s, as though I could instantly absorb the intricacies of symbols and formulas. He was hardworking and loved his work, which went on seven days a week. He was an engineer, a volunteer minister, a graduate student, and the entrepreneur of an electronics business he conducted in our family room, winding electromagnetic transformers the size of LifeSavers. Only twice that I recall did he take time off, and then for only a few days, to go with us to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, and he still managed to perform a wedding along the way and visit an electronics firm that might be interested in buying the transformers he built in his “spare” time.
As smart and strong as he was, he always gave in to my mother’s demands. That meant that every six to twelve months we had to move to another house. Whenever my mother became unhappy, she wanted to move. And once she locked on to an idea, she could not let it go, until her unhappiness permeated the entire house and she made us ill with her nonstop complaints.
By the time I graduated from high school, I had attended eleven schools. I had learned to lose friends, to remain the loner until I finally found new ones. Each time I started at a school, I had to sit back quietly for the first month or so and observe who was popular, who was not, who was smart, who was the smartass. I had to show my new teachers that I was a good student, that I knew how to draw realistically. But I also knew not to do anything to stand out in any other way, lest I join the ranks of the pariahs. I understood that I had to be a chameleon to survive, that I should fit in quietly, and watch.
In hindsight, I see that this was excellent training for a budding writer. It sharpened my skills of observation. It deepened my sense of alienation, which, while not a prerequisite for a writer, is certainly useful as an impetus for writing. Many of the great novels of our time are based on alienated narrators. And yet I hated those feelings of loneliness. I cried every time my father announced that we were moving. He may have prayed to God for general direction in his life, but he received the specifics from my mother to move to Oakland, Hayward, Santa Rosa, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale.
Throughout my father’s life, he remained devoted to his beliefs in God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He practiced what he preached. He tithed ten percent. He didn’t smoke or drink or say “gee,” “gosh,” or “golly.” He prayed when he became impatient or lost his temper. He practiced charity to others. He made me feel good for giving away my best dolls to my poor cousins in Taiwan, the same cousins who today are millionaires. My father put his life in God’s hands, and he encouraged us, his children, to believe that if we had absolute faith, God would take care of the rest. Miracles would happen.
About ten years ago, I found some of my father’s diaries. In one of his last entries, written at the end of May 1967, he stated that he still firmly believed that God would grant him a miracle and save his sixteen-year-old son from dying of a brain tumor. He had absolute faith. By my father’s own handwritten definition: “Faith is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we still cannot see it ahead of us.”
He wrote this less than two months before my brother Peter died, and shortly after, he stopped writing. But this was due to loss of ability rather than loss of faith. By then, my father couldn’t hold a pen well enough to comment on the strange coincidence that he too, the father of the son who had become a ghost, had been stricken with a brain tumor.
These days I realize that faith and fate have similar effects on the believer. They suggest that a higher power knows the next move and that we are at the mercy of that force. They differ, among other things, in how you try to cull beneficence and what you do to avoid disaster. Come to think of it, those very notions are the plotlines of many novels.
Throughout their marriage, my mother, the minister’s wife, publicly avowed her trust in God. The other day I came upon a letter she wrote to a family friend in 1967, in which she commented about my father’s faith during his illness: “Most of the time, he spent in search of God, trusting deeply that God would take care of him. We were both easily moved to tears, for we felt deeply and were warmly touched by the warmth of the love that so many friends freely gave to us. We know from this that it is a blessing that is overflowing from our Lord.”
The words are actually not my mother’s writing. They are mine, written as a fifteen-year-old girl taking dictation, rendered with almost as much repetition as my mother provided to me, her reluctant scribe. Our sessions would go something like this: “Amy-ah, put this down. Say you daddy all the time, searching searching searching God, why this happen? Amy-ah, you searching too? Why this brain tumor second time? No, don’t write this down, I just asking you. Why so many bad things happen? …What you mean, don’t know? You don’t think! You don’t care! And why you don’t cry? You daddy, me, we cry so much. But you—look you face—no feeling! What’s wrong with you, you don’t cry? And why you make you hair that way? You look like Japanese girl. Ugly …Okay, put this down …Friends they so good to us. You daddy and I, we cry, tears so much overflowing, for sadness, for thanks so much.”
It was torture to write those letters. I had to compose the thank-you notes to friends for coming to the hospital, the cards acknowledging them for coming first to my brother’s funeral and then to my father’s. Extra-long letters went to those who sent memorial donations.
After my father died, my mother no longer prayed to God. This was strange to me at first, because we had once been a family who prayed at every meal, before every important occasion. Now when the meal was served, we ate in silence. Or rather, it was silence if we were lucky. At times, my mother would go into obsessive monologues about our tragedies, about the curse, punctuating with her laments every bite we took: “Why two brains tumors? Why same family? Why same time? Who else die? If someone next, let be me.” (Little did my mother know then that she may have already had a brain tumor. We learned of it in 1993 after she fell and suffered a suspected concussion. An MRI showed that she had a meningioma, a benign tumor, which, the neurologist said, had been growing probably for twenty-five years, meaning since 1968 or so, around when my brother and father had died of their brain tumors.)
To counter the curse, my mother began to call openly on the ghosts of her past. She prayed to a painting of her mother. She hired a geomancer to inspect the spiritual architecture, the feng shui, of our suburban tract house. What forces were aligned against us? She sought faith healers who taught her to speak in tongues, a gibberish that convinced me she was insane. She blamed herself for not moving from our current house, the one we had lived in longest, two years. In that neighborhood, she now realized, nine bad things had already happened. She counted them out on her fingers: The man down the street had had a heart attack. This one lost his job. That one was getting divorced. Every day, my mother would count these disasters out, asking herself uselessly why she had not seen them clearly before.
When my father died, more phantoms sprang from my mother’s past: ideas about karmic retribution, reincarnation, and the presence of ghosts as signaled by our barking dog, a misplaced object, a door slamming when a certain name was spoken. My mother was sure that what was uncertain in the real world could be accounted for in the supernatural one. There the possibilities of what happened and why were boundless. And because my mother still believed I was sensitive to the other world, she often asked me to use a Ouija board to communicate with the ghosts of my father, my brother, and sometimes her mother, my grandmother.
I had never met my grandmother. In 1925 she swallowed a large amount of raw opium, and my mother, then a girl of nine, watched her die. Yet in another sense I saw my grandmother every day. She was in our living room, in the form of an oil portrait my mother had commissioned, based on a sepia-toned photograph. In this portrait, my grandmother’s face was larger than life. She was a beautiful young woman in her thirties with straight-cut bangs and a neat bun. Her dress was blue with a high collar. Her expression was enigmatic, her gaze ethereal, eyes focused on a spot beyond the artist, out into the future. The painting hung near the piano, where I practiced every day for one hour, with my grandmother peering over my shoulder.
This was the face I also saw in my mind as I sat before the Ouija board. My fingers would be poised on the planchette, my tearful mother opposite me. She was always hoping for one last good-bye, one more message of love. “Do you still love me? Do you miss me?” It was heart-wrenching even to me, the heartless teenager who would not permit herself to show any kind of emotion. I would give the answers my mother hoped for: Yes. Yes.
Pragmatic woman that my mother was, she would eventually seek advice about daily living. For some reason, she thought the ghosts had as much interest as she did in the Dow Jones. “IBM or U.S. Steel?” she would say, hoping for insider-trading tips of the best kind. And I, the supposed purveyor of these spiritual answers from Wall Street ghosts, pushed the planchette to whatever came to mind just to get the ordeal over with. Buy. Sell. Yes. No. Up. Down. Upon reflection now, I see that my spurious advice was probably no worse than that of most stockbrokers. My mother did amazingly well in building up her modest portfolio.
She turned to the ghosts for child-rearing advice too: “Amy treat me so bad,” she once said as I prepared to divine the answer. “What I should do—send her Taiwan, school for bad girls?” The planchette deftly scooted to the correct answer: No.
Another time my mother wanted to know whether she should open a Chinese restaurant. Everyone loved her potsticker dumplings, and she dreamt she could make a million selling them. I pictured myself washing heaps of greasy bowls and pans with burnt dough stuck to the bottom. Bad idea, came the Ouija’s answer. Lose money.
In my memory, which I admit can be subjectively poor and riddled with a wild imagination, I recall that our sessions with the Ouija board were often accompanied by eerie signs that ghosts were indeed in the room. It would suddenly become not just cold but windy. A flower would snap from its stem as if in answer to an important question. A sound would be heard in the distance—first by my mother, then by me—seemingly the voice of a crying woman. And once the board rose in the air several inches, my fingers still attached to it, then crashed to the floor. That is what I remember, although logic tells me it was the result of either hysteria or peanut butter stuck to my fingertips.
Besides using the Ouija board, my mother continued to find advice in other, less traditional places. One time she looked under the kitchen sink, where she stored cleaning products. She was cleaning the kitchen after dinner, and my little brother and I were watching TV nearby. I saw her pick up a can of Old Dutch cleanser and stare at it as if it possessed the lucidity of a crystal ball. “Holland,” she announced to us. “Holland is clean. We moving to Holland.”
A few months later, my mother, my brother, and I boarded the SS Rotterdam. Our mother had sold the ranch duplex, the maple colonial furniture, and the Plymouth, and otherwise reduced our worldly possessions to the contents of three new Samsonite suitcases and a huge duffel bag. Once in Holland, my brother and I realized our mother had absolutely no plan. We stayed in The Hague, then Amsterdam, then Utrecht. In each city, my mother used idiosyncratic sign language to inquire after the nearest Chinese restaurant. We would find these miserable way stations, and there she would eat with the hunger of the starved, Chinese food tinged with Indonesian ingredients and prepared for a Dutch palate. Awful, my mother would pronounce, and drink copious amounts of tea to wash away the bad taste. (This would be her pattern in every city, town, and hamlet we visited in Europe over the next year—this hopeful search for Chinese food, her disappointment in every dish she tasted.)
We located an international school in a small town called Werkhoven, as well as lodging in a woman’s house. This landlady did not allow us to keep our lights on beyond nine at night, making it difficult for my brother and me to finish our homework. Equally bad, her housekeeping skills did not satisfy my mother’s notions of Old Dutch cleanliness.
After two weeks in Holland, we took a train to Germany and landed in Karlsruhe, where we lived as guests of a U.S. Army chaplain, an old friend of my father’s. We attended an American school, where students thought it a fun prank to aim lit Bunsen burners at one another. This, I told my mother, was not the kind of education she had had in mind when she had envisioned us studying abroad. With that, she bought a Volkswagen Beetle and a handbook of English-speaking schools, and off we went, heading south, letting ourselves be guided purely by the twists and turns of European highways.
By such maps of fate, we wound up in Montreux, Switzerland, at the shores of Lake Geneva. In this resort town, my mother quickly found our new home, a fully furnished chalet, complete with cuckoo clock and feather-tick beds, renting for the equivalent of one hundred U.S. dollars a month. The largest room served as living room, dining room, and my brother’s bedroom, and its entire length was lined with mullioned windows showcasing a spectacular view of the lake and the Alps. Every day, I would stare at this amazing scenery and wonder how I came to be so lucky. I would then remember that my father and older brother were dead, and that was the reason I was here.
Half a mile from our chalet, down a cobblestone path, lay an international school. It was within eyesight of Château de Chillon, where the dashing Lord Byron was said to have chained himself to write his poetry in religious agony. By happy chance, there were two openings for day students. My mother weighed the benefits of a four-to-one pupil–teacher ratio, the mandatory ski outings as physical education, the private piano lessons and one-to-one drawing classes, the Spanish teacher from Spain, the French teacher from France, and English teachers from England, and decided it was all worth the extravagant cost of six hundred dollars per year.
This marvelous school was attended by the sons and daughters of ambassadors and company presidents, rich kids the likes of whom I had never known. One girl wore a lynx coat atop a bikini to class, much to the amusement of the young male teachers. There were two Persian kids in the lower grades, a six-year-old boy and his nine-year-old sister, who were followed everywhere by bodyguards. The girl who became my closest friend had also recently lost her father, and she had a clothing allowance of a thousand dollars a month—this was in 1968, mind you—yet she was forever broke and showed no shame in bumming cigarettes and a few francs off me on a regular basis.
The male teachers were handsome, not that much older than the junior and senior students. I promptly fell in love with one of them. I was by then a somewhat pudgy girl, usually blind because I would not wear my glasses. I had thick glossy hair that fell to my waist, which complemented my flower-power mini-shimmy. Whenever I had to go to the piano practice room, I would sit on the window ledge there and smoke cigarettes, watching the swans and geese at the lake, thinking my cynical and silly thoughts, most of which concerned ways to sneak off to meet my boyfriend. In America, I had been a dateless dork, the sisterly friend to boys I had crushes on. In Switzerland, I was an exotique, sought after by the regular customers in the café, the young drifter from Italy, the factory worker from Spain, the radicals from Germany. At last, I was a popular sex object. Life had begun! This, sad to say, was the quality of my thoughts.
My boyfriend was the “older man,” as CliffsNotes described him. Franz was, in fact, the first boy who ever said he loved me. He wrote me a twenty-four-page love letter, all in German, of which I was able to translate the first line: “My darling Angel, who dims the heavens above me …” Who wouldn’t fall for that? He was a frizzy-haired hippie whose father had been a Nazi officer. Franz had deserted the German army and fancied himself a revolutionary along the lines of Che Guevara. He smoked Gauloises incessantly, and he despised the small-mindedness of people who thought one had to work to have a worthy occupation. He, in contrast, occupied his time listening to The Rolling Stones. He had plenty of friends, whom he met at the café, where they played foosball, a form of table soccer operated by moving two sets of handles with rapid adjustments and twists of the wrist. Since Franz played for hours every day, he was spectacularly good, rather like an international soccer champion, had anyone been wise enough to honor people who play table soccer in cafés. To a teenage girl in the late 1960s, nothing could be more romantic than the combination of attributes that Franz possessed.
I found out later that my Liebling had deserted the German army all right, but from its mental hospital. Oh, well. Mental illness was romantic and even revolutionary in its way.
My mother was, shall we say, less open-minded. It didn’t help matters that Franz once flipped her off, which she misinterpreted as his showing his fist in a threat to beat her up. I thought about telling her what the gesture really meant, then deemed it better that she think he was merely violent rather than disrespectful.
For the months Franz and I were together, ours was a romance of stolen kisses—and kisses only, I might add, although my mother was certain he had defiled me. She wore my ear down, telling me how lazy he was, that his breath stank, that he had no future. My little brother chimed in to say that he looked like Larry of the Three Stooges. My mother took to yelling at me, locking me in the bedroom, and slapping me. She grew frantic, then hysterical, and talked of killing herself so she would not have to see me destroy my life.
One day, sick of my mother’s tirades, I decided I should break up with Franz. Or was it that I was weary of Franz and wanted to use my mother as my excuse? In any case, I remember that our breakup came on the night before some big examinations. Until then I had been a straight-A student. Though I was a junior, I was graduating early and applying to colleges, so these exams were very important. I was looking forward to college, for therein lay the means by which I could escape my mother. Having a ne’er-do-well boyfriend did not fit into my new life as a serious college student. That was not what I told Franz, of course. I blamed my mother for the breakup.
That night, after I made my announcement, Franz threw himself on the train tracks and vowed he would let the next train from Lausanne squish him to pieces if I did not immediately change my mind, hop aboard the next train to Austria with him, and elope. I pleaded with him for an hour and more to please not do this. Then came the warning call of the train. Whoo-whoo! Which would it be—marry him or bury him?
A minute later, after a tearful embrace, we both hurried to the station. While waiting for the train to Vienna, I had a chance to ask myself whether I really wanted to be married to a man whose sole occupation was being the unofficial international champion of foosball. I found a pay phone and called my mother. I did what was only considerate, and let her know I wouldn’t be home for breakfast. Why? Oh, didn’t I tell you? Franz and I are at the train station, about to elope. Before the train took off, bearing me to a fate of certain marital unhappiness, my mother and the police arrived. And so I did not get married, but because of sheer mental exhaustion from a sleepless night of high drama, I flunked my exams.
After this escapade, my mother decided enough was enough. She hired a private detective, who was also the town mayor. Unbeknownst to me, my mother confiscated my diary, which I had written in Spanish, and the detective-mayor had it translated into French. The unintended confession provided in novelistic detail all the evidence the detective needed for the biggest drug bust in Montreux’s history.
This is not to say it was that big—only a small stash of psychedelic mushrooms was found, in a Volkswagen van belonging to some Canadian hippies. The largest part of the illegal goods, four kilos of Moroccan hashish, had already been tossed into Lake Geneva, where, I was told, it was joyfully devoured by the resident geese, which later that day were seen to be flying high.
Franz and his friends were jailed, then deported. Because of my young age, I was not, but I had to appear before a magistrate in Bern and promise I would not do anything bad ever again in my entire life. I would not smoke, not even one cigarette. I would always obey my mother, give her not even one word of defiance.
A few months later I graduated from high school, in my junior year. I returned to the States and in the fall started my freshman year in college as an American Baptist Scholar, chosen for my high morals.
That was my childhood. Told as is, it would not make for good fiction. It is too full of coincidences, too full of melodrama, veering toward the implausible in both tragedy and comedy. But my life is, I believe, excellent fodder for fiction. Memory feeds imagination, and my imagination is glutted with a Thanksgiving of nightmares.
Looking back, I’m convinced it was also my mother who affected my imagination to such a degree that I now hear and see things that others do not. I see connections in coincidences, ironies in lies, and truths in contradictions, all sorts of things that others do not.
But I also see and hear—how shall I say it?—the inexplicable: noisy apparitions, mysterious electrical phenomena, prophetic dreams, bodiless laughter, and the abrupt disappearance of objects more significant than the mates to socks. How would you explain it if you heard the Jeopardy! tune being whistled behind your back when you were alone at home; if paper plates at a funeral reception wafted up and down whenever the name of the deceased was mentioned; if your television set turned on by itself in the middle of the night, tuned to a religious channel; if your phone disconnected, but only when you were talking to your mother?
I’ve had discussions with my husband about this. I told him about hearing footsteps running up and down the stairs, doors slamming, and what resembled the raucous pounding of a couple taking lambada lessons in our bedroom. My husband said our house was old, it had funny acoustics. I brought up the fact that electrical equipment often shorted when I talked about my grandmother. I reminded him that some of these mysteries had followed me across the continent, to Denver, Austin, Atlanta, and New York, and even across the ocean, to London, Amsterdam, Milan, and Munich, where tape recorders and video equipment had malfunctioned, TV and radio stations had gone off the air—all while I was being interviewed. To all that, my husband shrugged. (What do you expect from a man who is a tax attorney? It’s his job to write things off.)
My mother, on the other hand, assured me that I was not crazy, that it was not my imagination or bad structural engineering. There were ghosts in my house, she said, in fact one that lived in the computer. Her proof was the first book I wrote, TheJoy Luck Club. Contrary to what CliffsNotes and reviewers had to say, she did not believe that I wove “intimate knowledge of [my] culture into a Chinese puzzle box.” No such thing. The way she saw it, in matters Chinese, I was an idiot. Only after I was published did my status rise to that of idiot savant.
This is how and why her opinion changed: While I was writing The Joy Luck Club, I asked her to tell me more about her parents, both of whom had died when she was a child. My mother revealed that my widowed grandmother had remarried—a disgraceful thing to do, my mother said, but at least she became the first wife to a rich man. Later my grandmother gave birth to a son; two months after that, she accidentally died, from eating opium while having too much of a good time.
When I wrote the story “Magpies,” I changed the details a bit; the young widow is raped by a rich man and becomes his fourth wife, a lowly concubine who gives birth to the man’s first son, the result of the rape. The baby is claimed by a higher-ranking wife, and this so enrages the fourth wife about the worthlessness of her life that she dies, not accidentally while having fun, but with the vengeance of suicide.
When my mother read this story, she asked me, “How you know you grandmother really the fourth wife? How you know what really happen? Why you can write about things you don’t know?” And then she remembered: I had always been able to talk to ghosts.
As a result of the truth of this fiction, my mother came to believe that my dead grandmother had served as my ghostwriter. Sometimes she would greet my computer as if her mother were listening. “Hey, it’s me,” she’d call in Chinese. “Are you there? Do you miss me?” And at times I too have thought that my computer was equipped with a grandmotherboard of sorts, that my keyboard was a high-tech Ouija board, that I was simply downloading stories from the Nirvana Wide Web. Because I too have wondered why I can write about what I don’t know.
Yet I do know things. I have always known them, I realize. I’ve known them from childhood, perhaps from listening to my mother and my aunties gossip about their secrets as they shelled the fava beans and pummeled the dumpling dough at the kitchen table. They spoke in Shanghainese, a language I now, as an adult, cannot speak. I must have intuitively understood it as a child. I must have paid close attention when their voices lowered and the rush of shameful words streamed out. How else is it that I know their secrets?
Or is it that I’ve known things because of all those suicidal threats my mother made when I was a child? I paid attention to her laments, what she said she wanted to forget. I’ve known things because we had to move so often, and I had a mother who believed happiness was a place she had never been. I’ve known things from listening to her talk about dangers of every form, unwanted babies, a man who will kiss you and ruin your life. She helped me imagine fully the unhappy consequences in all their gory details—what can happen if you don’t have a mother to listen to.
Today my mother is gone, but I still know certain things. They are in my bones.
There is a morbid fantasy I play with myself from time to time. I sit at my desk, trying to write a story. How do things happen?
And then I consider that I may not be who I think I am. I am not this person Amy Tan in CliffsNotes. The sad truth is, my mother’s gruesome worries were fulfilled when I was six or so, when I ran into the street and was smashed flat or when I ate unwashed fruit, I forget which, but the result was that I died or fell into a coma—it’s hard to say which, and which is worse. Whatever the case, this is the state I have been in since, this cocoon of a world where I dream that anything can happen. In this altered reality, I have dreamt everything that I think has happened to me from age six to the present. And now I am only dreaming that I am a writer.
To convince myself that this is not true, that I truly am alive, I do what writers do to make the fiction come true. I begin to recount all that has happened in my life, the smallest details, as if this memory of the order of my life will prove it is a real life, a life so fraught with complications and the mundane that it could not be anything but real.
I see my conception, my father’s and mother’s DNA combining into a hybrid form of fate and faith held together by a suspension of disbelief. I picture this newly created genetic code as mah jong tiles lined up one after another, curving this way and that, standing precariously in place, always on the verge of falling over to reveal the whiplike pattern of a dragon’s tail. That is what I was born, a water dragon, to my mother, a fire dragon. Is this a coincidence, or is this fate?
I let the pieces fall. I look back at the pattern that was created, the whole concatenation of events. And then I begin to sort the pieces according to my own design, asking myself: How are they connected? Which pieces should I choose? Which ones should I discard? How does each piece lead to another, from a street in Tientsin, China, to this moment in San Francisco, where I am sitting at my wooden desk, in a wood-lined room, in a wood-shingled house, wondering how things came to be?
How is it that I am so lucky to be a writer? Is it fate? Is it a miracle? Was it by choice? Is it only my imagination? Yes, yes, yes, yes. It is all those things. All things are possible.
HOW WE KNEW (#ulink_d6a8cb3b-6b0c-540c-ae95-b836b4cc7193)
One August afternoon, soon after we met on a blind date, we drove fifty miles to San Juan Bautista, a time-warped town with a mud-walled mission, false-front buildings, and a former dormitory for unmarried Indian women. As we wandered, we became the ghosts, he the vaquero who slept on a cot in the stable, I the Mutsun maiden who had slipped out of the dormitory window, leaving behind her button shoes and pinch-waist corset. We ran freely, stopping to kiss in cool, dark adobe corners.
At sunset, we walked toward the dance hall and saw a crowded wedding party. The mariachi band was blaring, the bride and groom were drunk with happiness, and they shouted for us to join them, pulled us in. Arms on shoulders in a chorus line, we pranced and yipped like coyotes. Later we tumbled out and lay on the grass, staring upward. Eternity, we were part of it. As if to celebrate our joy, stars streaked across the sky—“There!” “There!” “There!” it was the Perseid meteor shower, a billion-year celestial event put on annually by the universe. It was also our proof that we had lain here before, when he was the vaquero and I the Mutsun maiden, lovers who believed their passion was strong enough to survive scandal, pure enough to bind them into the next lifetime, two hundred years from now.
We are they now, in love, in awe.
A QUESTION OF FATE (#ulink_8fb2d18a-46bf-52cb-9725-0d6d3185916c)
This is a true story. Hours after my twenty-fourth birthday, my life began to change with strangely aligned events that today make me wonder whether they did not spring from the fictional leanings of my mind.
It was the Year of the Dragon, when my life’s tide was said by Chinese astrologers to be at its most powerful, when change was inevitable. But all this was nonsense to me, for I was an educated person, a doctoral student in linguistics at UC Berkeley.
I tell you what my major was, because it reveals, I believe, what my mental inclinations were at the time. I was in a field of heady theories, seeking random and fortuitous evidence. As linguists we could not prove much in any terribly convincing scientific way, for instance, that grammar is innate and organized in the brain. But we could convolute ad infinitum on why that was possible and then search for empirical findings that suggested the science. Our methods were descriptive, the everyday use of everyday language by everyday people, the best examples being those that made one ponder such inanities as how the p sound came to be in the word warmth and what rules led people to innovate words like hodgepodge, hocus-pocus, and hanky-panky. Intricate convolution was also how I liked to occupy my mind when it came to worries about myself and, in particular, about how I showed my ineptitude when compared with other students.
Early that year, I had been married for nearly two years. Although I knew I was with the right person, I had the usual angst of a young woman who felt she had traded her soul’s identity for a joint return. Lou and I lived in Danville, California, in a brand-new two-bedroom apartment with gold shag carpeting, a burgundy velour sofa, and a rotating variety of uncuddly pets, including a bull snake that was an escape artist and a tarantula that required a diet of live crickets.
To help us pay the rent, we had a roommate, Pete, a young man who was around our age, a bioengineering student also at Berkeley. He had pale blond hair, an amblyopic eye, and a Wisconsin accent. We had met him two years before, when we all worked at a Round Table pizza parlor in San Jose. We continued to work at Round Tables in Berkeley and Danville, where we often took the closing shift and wound up sharing conversations over after-hours pitchers of beer.
Pete liked to argue about what was impossible to know, from conspiracies to eternity. His philosophical meanderings depended on how much beer he had imbibed, and were often related to the intersection of philosophy and science—the physics of infinity, say, or the ecology of ideas. He had a particular fascination with the I Ching, that art of tossing three coins three times and divining a pattern out of heads and tails. Pete would begin with questions: What determined the pattern? Was it random? Was it a higher power? Was it mathematical? Wasn’t poker based on mathematical probability and not just luck? Did that mean randomness was actually mathematical? And if the I Ching was governed by mathematics, hey, wouldn’t that mean the I Ching was actually predictable, a prescribed answer? And if it was prescribed, did that mean that your life followed the I Ching, like some sort of equation? Or did the I Ching simply capture correctly what had already been determined as the next series of events in your life?
And so the circular discussion would go. Somewhere in this mystery, mathematics always held the answer. Don’t ask me how. I am only describing what I remember, what I never understood. We had such conversations during backpacking trips, while climbing the backcountry in Yosemite. At night, when we were not arguing over questions of eternity, we read H. P. Lovecraft tales around the campfire, shooed away marauding black bears, and identified the constellations from our sleeping bags, our chilled faces to the sky. Those are elements that strengthen any friendship, I think.
I remember enjoying many long conversations about secular transcendentalism, that motley union of the psychedelic and the physical. We had the sense that we were talking about what really mattered, the hidden universe and our souls. But perhaps that was also the atmosphere of the times, the 1970s, when all things were possible, particularly after eating brownies laced with goodies other than walnuts, when unorthodox speculation could be answered sufficiently with a reverential “Wow.”
Pete also talked a lot about his wife. She was a poet, naturally intuitive, a sexy earth-mother type. They were separated, the result of his own immaturity, he said, his predilection for recklessness and his not thinking enough about the consequences. He expressed hope that his wife might understand that he was sorry, and that they’d be together again one day. Several months after we met, while explaining how he had lost his wallet and hence his driver’s license, he told us how he had lost his wife.
They had been traveling by car through Nevada on their first trip from Wisconsin to California. A nineteen-year-old hitchhiker offered to spell them from driving, and they gladly let him take the wheel. Just outside Lovelock, while they were speeding through the pitch-black desert, a rear tire blew, and as Pete turned to tell him to let the car drift to a stop, the hitchhiker instinctively slammed on the brakes, and the car began to roll over. It all happened gently enough, Pete told us, that first roll, the kind of flip you experience in an amusement-park ride, with the car landing on its wheels, righting itself. For a moment, it appeared that they might be able to continue their journey with the only alterations a replaced tire, a slightly dented roof, and one hell of an adrenaline rush. But in the next breath, the car flipped again, this time with the vigor of increased momentum and lift, and when it turned over, it crashed down hard, on its roof, bringing Pete to guess that the car was now totaled. If they were lucky, they might get by with a few injuries, although broken bones seemed likely. And then the car sailed into its third roll, crunched down with the certitude of finality, and slid belly-up into clouds of dust and uprooted sagebrush. When all was quiet, Pete patted himself and found that he was alive and, even more miraculous, uninjured. In the next second, he felt around in the darkness and ascertained that his wife and the hitchhiker were alive as well, breathing hard and fast. But then they let out a final exhale, first the hitchhiker, then Pete’s wife, and he was alone. When the police and ambulance crew arrived and asked for his driver’s license, he realized that he had lost his wallet.
Two years after the accident, Pete reconciled with his wife in a dream. In fact there were two dreams, a week apart. In the first, which he related to Lou and me, two men, strangers to him, broke into his room, overcame him, and slowly strangled him to death. He described the sensation of absolute terror and the pain of not being able to breathe, and then a tremendous release from struggle. When it was over, he found his wife waiting for him.
Pete went on to say that the dream felt like a premonition. It was scary as hell, but he was at peace with it. His wife would be there. If anything happened to him, he said, he would like Lou and me to distribute his belongings among various friends and family: his guitar to one brother, his camera to another …
Stop, I said. Stop being ridiculous. I thought that he, like Lou and me, was nervous about the death threats the three of us had received from a gang whom we had thrown out of the pizza parlor. Two attempts on our lives had already been made, knives and clubs had been drawn, punches exchanged, and my shin nearly broken by a kick with steel-toed boots. Pete had made the mistake of winning one fistfight and breaking his opponent’s nose. The gang was now doubly committed to killing us. When we called the Danville police for help, they informed us that our personal thugs had arrest records for dozens of assaults, but there were no convictions, nor were any likely. The best way to deal with future attempts on our lives, someone told us, was to equip ourselves with guns, learn how to use them properly, and make sure that the bodies fell inside our door. Outside it was homicide, we were told, inside it was self-defense. Moving to another town was also not a bad idea.
The latter advice was ultimately what we decided to follow. A week after Pete had the disturbing dream he told us about, Lou and I helped him move to Oakland, into a studio apartment in an art deco building. We were placed on a waiting list for a one-bedroom apartment in the same building; for now we kept the apartment in Danville. Pete had few possessions: a bed, a TV set and a stereo, a small table and a chair, his guitar and camera, books, and an expensive calculator that he had purchased with my credit card. There was also a .22 automatic, which he had bought to defend himself in Danville.
