MCLC: Amy Tan's evolving sense of China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: Amy Tan's evolving sense of China
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (1/24/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/travel/amy-tans-evolving-sense-of-china.h
tml

Amy Tan’s Evolving Sense of China
By Kenan Christiansen

In 1949, Amy Tan’s mother boarded one of the last ships heading from
Shanghai to San Francisco before “China became Red China and the bamboo
curtain descended.” There, her mother reunited with her husband and the
couple relocated to Oakland, where a couple of years later she was born.

As a child, she knew little more about China than an “American pastiche of
stereotypes,” and that some of her family had been lucky enough to make it
out, while others had not. For years she organized her thinking around
those divisions, until revelations about her family and the country her
parents fled broke them down.

Below are excerpts from correspondence with Ms. Tan, 61, whose latest
novel is “The Valley of Amazement,” about how her relationship with China
changed over time.

Q. What were your earliest thoughts about China?

A. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I thought of China as a prison that
everyone wanted to escape. My parents considered themselves lucky that
they were able to leave before 1949. Other family members were not quite
as lucky and wound up in Formosa — that’s what we called Taiwan in those
days. They sent us letters that described hard work and lack of proper
food, hygiene and clothing. In their photos, they looked weathered and
shiny with sweat. We received no letters from China and prayed for those
silent ones whose whereabouts were unknown. If America was heaven, Formosa
would be limbo, and China would be hell.

Q. Were you ever in contact with those family members before visiting?

A. When I was 16, after my father died, my mother told me that she had
been married to another man in Shanghai before she met my father. I could
hardly comprehend this stunning news, when she added she also had three
daughters in China. She did not explain why they were in China, whereas
she was in California. Years later she would only say that her previous
husband had been a bad man. If I pressed her she would have said that I
did not understand because I was an American. That was her typical lament
when I did not seem to appreciate the tragedies of her life, like the
suicide of her mother, which left her alone — abandoned, really — at the
age of 9. 

She showed me their photos. The middle daughter, Jindo, was beautiful. She
resembled my mother. She also fit the stereotype of peasants I had
imagined in childhood. She wore a conical hat and farmer’s clothing, and
she was standing next to a rice field. That could have been my life.

Afterward, China was no longer an invisible jail. I now imagined myself
living there, wearing a conical hat and writing letters late at night to
my mother, in beautiful Chinese calligraphy like that of my newfound
sisters. “I dream every day you will return,” Jindo had written her. “When
you do, my happiness will be restored.”

Q. Did she return? 

A. Yes, in 1979, after a 30-year separation, my mother went to visit her
three daughters. Jindo lived in a village of rice farmers. She had married
a barefoot doctor, and they and several comrades served my mother a modest
feast in a shack whose walls were lined with newspaper to keep out the
cold.

Q. When was your first visit?

A. In 1987, my mother, husband and I went together. We stepped out of the
plane into an airport painted toothpaste green. I had assumed I would
blend in with the masses. Instead, I was surrounded by locals who gawked
at me and made open comments about my outlandish purple clothing.

These days, I go about once a year. The most gleamingly modern airports
I’ve been to are in China. The coolest and most technologically
challenging hotel I’ve ever stayed in is in China. The most tricked-out
hair salon I’ve been to is in China. The worst pollution I’ve endured is
in China. I keep going back for more of the most. Not everyone wants to
escape anymore. In fact, it is more often the case that Chinese students
go to the U.S. to study and return to start companies and make millions.

Q. Has your attitude on China changed?

A. I look at China not as a land of burdens and debt but the land of
origin that gave our family its improbable history. I once traveled with
Jindo on a long ferry ride to a mansion, the one on the island near
Shanghai, where my mother grew up, where Jindo also grew up. I listened to
her stories about working in the rice fields, where she wore the conical
hat and danced and yelled as she pulled leeches off her calves. She
eventually told me what happened to her after our mother left, about the
abuse she suffered at the hands of her father’s concubine. As Jindo
re-enacted the past, she flung her arms and beat her chest, and it must
have appeared that we were having a violent argument.

“It was not right,” she said repeatedly, and she meant what her stepmother
did to her, and also what her father did to our mother, and what my mother
did in choosing to be with a lover rather than with her three daughters,
and then in marrying that lover and having three children by him, one of
them a daughter, who was sitting next to her, listening to her cry.