The Opposite of Fate. Amy Tan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, The Joy 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

      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 СКАЧАТЬ