Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. Amy Tan

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СКАЧАТЬ I would not budge from my spot on the stoop, the place where my mother had left me.

      My little brother, John, who was nicknamed “Didi,” received love whenever he cried. He cried when his photo was taken, or when he was seated apart from our mother. He would cry when Peter and I would not let him play with our toys. He was not required to follow in Peter’s and my fast-paced footsteps. No overt demands or comparisons were made that might cause him to have a sense of inferiority. He was not told he should aim to become a doctor. Where were the impossible goals, the anxiety-inducing predictions? “Whatever will be will be” was my parents’ plan for him. They were never lackadaisical about anything to do with Peter or my education—or about anything, for that matter. But Didi could do no wrong. When my parents caught him eating gum he had peeled off the sidewalk, Peter and I were to blame for not watching him more carefully. When he broke our toys or stole our Halloween candy, our parents said that we should have shared instead of being selfish. Our parents unintentionally seeded Peter’s and my resentment toward our younger brother. Didi always got us in trouble, and we avoided him as much as possible.

      My mother told me when I was an adult that she and my father treated John differently because they felt guilty that they spent relatively little time with him. They neglected him, she said. With Peter and me, they had been fully devoted from the start of our lives. They took us to parks, pointed out errors, helped us with our homework, monitored our progress, accompanied us to the library, and gave us piano lessons. As the years went by, my father became increasingly busy. He was simultaneously a full-time electrical engineer, a graduate student, a substitute Baptist minister, and an entrepreneur who had the same aspirations of many Silicon Valley engineers in the 1960s who were starting their niche companies in a garage. My mother had a full-time job as an allergy technician and ran a home business selling wigs. They were too tired to goad yet another child to improve his grades and practice the piano. My father did not spend hours helping Didi learn all twelve multiplication tables in one night, as he did with me. He was not forced to learn calligraphy in the second grade, as I was, as a method for improving penmanship. They allowed him to watch cartoons for hours as he lay splayed across the sofa, wrapped in his ratty blanket. My parents simply wanted John to feel loved and happy in a more expedient way.

      My resentment toward my little brother changed during the year both of us stood on the sidelines, largely invisible, during the twelve months when both Peter and my father were dying of brain tumors. Family, friends, ministers, and church members surrounded our parents, prayed for miracles, spoke to our comatose brother, listened to my father recite the latest doctor’s report, sat with them in the hospital during each surgery, and laughed and cried as they recounted anecdotes of happier days. My mother saw every involuntary twitch of my comatose brother as meaningful. That year, they paid little attention to anything John and I did. He and I were equally neglected, equally criticized for not being helpful during crisis, equally buffeted by our mother’s depression, equally uncertain about her sanity when she brought in teams of faith healers and karma adjusters. We were equally scared when our mother wondered if there was a curse that would kill all of us. Who was next? When we complained of headaches or stomachaches, we were hauled down to the hospital for tests. We did not know how to grieve. We could not be crazy like our mother.

      John and I survived that year of failed miracles. With my father gone, we stopped saying prayers at the dinner table. Our mother’s will to live collapsed and surged, from day to day. She would weep and ask aloud, “Why did this happen?” and then count out the imagined reasons. At other times, she was seized with a manic outpouring of ideas for our future—a restaurant, a souvenir shop, going to Taiwan so John and I could learn manners and to speak Chinese, or moving to Holland, simply because it was clean. Only we understood all the ways our family had fractured and why our mother would never heal. It was both natural and necessary that John and I became compatriots who could depend on each other for the rest of our lives.

       Easter 1959: In the park after church.

      My parents loved their children so much they wanted us to have the best opportunities an immigrant family could find. That required having the best models for success. One was Albert Einstein, who had also been an immigrant. I can’t imagine my parents truly believed we could be as smart as Einstein. But why not aim high and then fail just a little? That was their thinking. The only glimmer of Einstein they saw in me was his well-known trait of daydreaming and ignoring those around him. They had read a story that when Einstein was off in his own little world, his mind was actually exploding with ideas. My mind was not. I was not paying attention.

      There was another Albert—Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who had the best morals. He won a Nobel Prize for having gone into the jungles of Africa, where he risked life and limb to cure gaunt-faced children of terrible wasting diseases. My father, a minister, also cited him as one of the highest examples of a good Christian. Goodness would not have motivated me to be like Dr. Schweitzer. The magazine stories about his heroism included photos of his patients’ crusted feet eaten away by leprosy. Dr. Schweitzer’s work was not suitable for a child with precocious anxiety and a morbid imagination.

      The other model of success was musical. Mozart was the standard-bearer for many ambitious parents, ours included. My mother told me that Mozart started composing when he was five. No coincidence that I was five when she said that. That was also when a luminous black piano, a Wurlitzer spinet, arrived at our house and took its place along the entire length of a wall in our small living room. The Wurlitzer transformed our lives all at once. Our parents told us that the piano cost a lot of money, and this made me believe we had suddenly become rich. My mother had always complained that we were poor, in part because we gave away so much money. My father tithed 10 percent to the church and also sent money to his brothers and their families, who were refugees in Taiwan. We were shown photos of their sun-browned faces to make us proud to be good-hearted children. We also had to take care of my mother’s half brother and his family, who had left a life of wealth and privilege and arrived in the United States, unable to speak English, and unaccustomed to doing the kind of menial work that many Chinese immigrants had to do. They came during a time when my mother was attending nursing school and working part time in a hospital, a job that required her to empty bedpans, change soiled sheets, and wash people’s bottoms. One time, she had to listen to a newborn baby cry unceasingly. It had been born without an anus, she said. They could not feed it. She heard that baby cry throughout her night shift. It was agonizing. The next night, it was still crying. The following night, she heard no crying. She told us horror stories like that to show how much hardship she had to endure for our sake. She spoke of her life being so pitiful she almost “could not take it anymore.” When that expensive piano arrived, she was so happy I thought the pitiful days were over.

      My mother warned us not to damage its perfect surface—no dings, dents, scratches, stains, or sticky fingerprints. The bench was also very expensive, she said, and we were scolded for sliding across with bare legs to make squeaky farting sounds. She became the detective who matched fingerprints to culprits. She was the terrifying interrogator when the first scratches appeared. Who did this? Who? When no one confessed, we were all sent to bed without dinner. This instrument, so powerful and yet so fragile, was now our mother’s most prized possession, and she let us know often that she and my father had sacrificed a great deal in coming to America so that we children could have a better life, which included learning to enjoy music.

       1955: Me at age three, posing for my father’s Rollei.

      I did not understand until I was an adult what she meant by “sacrifices.” They were all that she had left behind in Shanghai, where she had had a life of privilege, starting from the age of nine, when her widowed mother married the richest man on an island outside of Shanghai. She went from being the honorable widow of a poor scholar to a wealthy man’s fourth wife—one of his concubines, СКАЧАТЬ