The Opposite of Fate. Amy Tan

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      If Faith had stayed with us longer, I think she would have been seduced one way or the other by the Internet, as had been my plot. I know she touched her fingers to the keyboard at least a few times, once to send me an e-mail, other times to play solitaire and Freecell. And had she dabbled further, I think she would have discovered eBay, the great cyber bargain basement. We shared that—the art of the cheap deal. We used to go around the corner from her apartment on West Eleventh Street to an outlet called SubPrice, where we could buy stretch-velvet tops and leggings for five bucks.

      That love of a bargain was still very much in evidence the day before her final operation. I was telling her that I, a New York carpetbagger, was going to hold a fund-raiser in my SoHo loft for a certain political candidate, about whom Faith held, shall we say, ambivalent feelings. The fund-raiser would probably take place in March, some four months away. “Do you want to come?” I asked, and I tried to sound casual. In hearing her answer, I figured I could gauge how she felt about the upcoming surgery and her chances of surviving it. Faith immediately said, “Of course. But I’m not going to pay.”

      In Faith, I had not only an editor and a cohort in bargain shopping but a mentor and a friend, someone who knew my best intentions and intuitions as a writer and how these fit in with the rest of my life. She knew all the details of what I did, whom I saw, what happened on my vacation, what my mother said, what she didn’t say. Faith also called me during the last hour that my mother was alive.

      Whenever I gave Faith something to read, she’d ask me what I wanted from her as an editor. “Keep me from embarrassing myself in public,” was my usual answer. And she did keep me from exposing the glitches in my prose, but she also prodded me to go deeper, to be more generous in the story I had to tell, to not hold back, to show what was most important in my life and on the page. She had an unerring sense of what mattered—to me. She could help me find it, though there were many ways in which we differed in taste and opinions. Olives, for example. She could not abide any dish littered with canned olives, a favorite of mine. And music—who would want to assault his or her ears with anything less than classical music or Broadway musicals or the rocker Michael Parrish, her son-in-law? Then there was the matter of ghosts. I was raised with them. She was not. But here Faith was diplomatic. She indulged me. She listened with genuine interest when I told her about unseen visitors whistling in my kitchen, about the TV’s turning on by itself, about my version of ghostwriters, who, by the way, also provide research and editing on request. She was not going to argue scientific logic with me, since, delusion or not, ancestral spirits and reincarnation increased my material multifold. And for my part, I liked to remind Faith now and then that she, oh esteemed one, had after all served as editor for George Anderson, the world-famous talk-show host to the dead. And more than once I recalled for her benefit the time my mother had written her a note thanking her for “the book” and for helping her feel closer to “the other side.” Faith was quite touched; she thought that my mother was referring to The Joy Luck Club and that her own help in publishing it had brought my mother fond memories of her family. I had to break the news to Faith that my mother was talking about George Anderson’s book We Don’t Die. I’m not done tormenting Faith about this. I plan to have regular seances with her in which we discuss how and why she was wrong in her opinion about an afterlife.

      She was also wrong in one thing about me as a writer. She believed for some reason that writing came easily to me, that words poured onto the page with the ease of turning on a faucet, and that her role was mostly to help me adjust the outpouring toward the right balance. That belief had so much to do with her confidence in me. And I guess that is the role of both an editor and a friend—to have that confidence in another person, that the person’s best is natural and always possible, forthcoming after an occasional kick in the butt.

      I remember the proudest moment I had as her friend. We were at a medical clinic, and Faith was having her blood drawn. The nurse looked at Faith, then scrutinized me and said without any hint of the absurd, “You two are sisters, aren’t you?”

      And Faith looked at me without any hint of the absurd and said: “Yes. Yes we are.”

       CHANGING THE PAST

       If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude.

      • The Kitchen God’s Wife

      

       To the missionaries, we were Girls of New Destiny. Each classroom had a big red banner embroidered with gold characters that proclaimed this. And every afternoon, during exercise, we sang our destiny in a song that Miss Towler had written, in both English and Chinese:

       We can study, we can learn, We can marry whom we choose. We can work, we can earn, And bad fate is all we lose.

      • The Bonesetter’s Daughter

       LAST WEEK

      In the last week of my mother’s life, we were all there—my three half sisters and their husbands; my younger brother, John, and his fiancee; my husband, Lou, and I—gathered around the easy chair in which she lay floating between this world and the next. She looked like a waif in an oarless boat, and we were her anchors, keeping her from leaving us too soon for the new world.

      “Nyah-nyah,” she moaned in Shanghainese, and waved to an apparition on the ceiling. Then she motioned to me to invite her guests in and bring them refreshments. After I indulged my mother these wishes, I began to write her Chinese obituary, with the help of my half sisters, daughters from my mother’s first marriage. It was a task that kept our minds focused, unified us, made us feel helpful instead of helpless.

      “Daisy Tan,” I started to write, “born Li Ching.”

      “Not Li Ching,” someone interrupted. “It was Li Bingzi.” That was Yuhang speaking, my sister from Shanghai. “Li Bingzi was the name our grandmother gave her when she was born.”

      How stupid of me not to know that. I had always thought Bingzi was just a nickname my mother’s brother called her. Yuhang watched me write her important contribution to the obituary. She is sixteen years older than I, a short, ever-smiling, chubby-faced version of my mother. She speaks no English, but has read my books in translation.

      “Born Li Bingzi,” I duly put down in English letters, “daughter of Li Jingmei …” And then Jindo, my second-eldest sister, chided in Chinese: “No, no, Grandma’s last name was not Li. Li was the father’s side. The mother’s side was Gu. Gu Jingmei.” Jindo, who most resembles our mother, proudly watched me write her addition.

      By now, I sensed the ghost of my grandmother in the room. “Ai-ya!” she was lamenting. “What a stupid girl. This is what happens when you let them become Americans.” I imagined other wispy-edged relatives, frowning and shaking their heads.

      My third-eldest sister, Lijun, picked up the baton and added to the list of corrections: “After our grandmother die,” she said in passable English, “our mother receive the name Du Lian Zen, to show she is adopt by Du family.” Lijun was the one I relied on for rough translations, her English being on a par with my Chinese, the combination of which sometimes provided hilarious if not miserable renditions of what was actually meant. Her husband, Yan Zheng, wrote “Du Lian Zen” in Chinese characters, with the English next to that СКАЧАТЬ