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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ could discover only by asking an ornithologist. But in writing fiction, the truth I seek is not a factual or scientific truth. It has to do with human nature, which is tied to my nature. It is about those things that are not apparent on the surface. When I set out to write a story, I am feeling my way through a question, often a moral one, and attempting to find a way to capture all its facets and conundrums. I don’t want an absolute answer. When writing fiction, I am trying to put down what feels true. Even though the story may not ostensibly be mine, it contains knowledge based on my personal history. It is my experiences that have coalesced into a situation that holds sad irony or horrific clarity. I want to bring forth what I cannot see, what is not there, or is there but nearly indiscernible because the million pieces that make up its whole are scattered all over the place, and extend from past into present. While writing I allow my brain to circumnavigate all the possibilities, but I am not confined to one conclusion. No truth is permanent. Irony is not an intractable fact. Imagination is fluid in flowing to any alluvial ditch of emotions, personal idiosyncrasies, or memories that appear when the flood subsides.

      If my curiosity is innate, it has been greatly enhanced by involuntary apprenticeship to my mother and her school of wonderment. She questioned everything, from fishy odors to fishy explanations, both of which pointed to a faulty character. She saw significance in coincidences, and coincidences in just about any juxtaposition of events. On one occasion, it was my saying a word—so ordinary I can’t recall what it was—at the same time that the head of a rose in a vase fell off its stem. My mother stared at me and said, “Are you my mother?” My grandmother had killed herself in 1925, and the idea that I was her reincarnation made me queasy. I insisted I wasn’t her mother, yet I wondered if I might be. How would a person know who she had been in a past life? You don’t journey from one lifetime to the next with luggage tags. “You don’t have to hide,” my mother said. She continued to give me odd looks throughout the day. “Why you say you bored?” she asked at one point. “My mother said that, too.” She wondered aloud if I was her karmic punishment for not showing her mother enough concern. My mother’s brand of wonderment combined curiosity, nosiness, hypothesis, loose opinion, suspicion, seeing what you believe, and seeking what you hope, including miracles, and the reincarnation of your mother into the form of your bad American daughter.

      Coincidences abound in my life as well. Just an hour ago, as I was writing the above paragraph, my keyboard switched midsentence to writing only in Chinese characters. I cannot read or write Chinese. My immediate reaction was “hackers,” and not “karmic retribution.” I checked for signs of illegal log-ins, changed my password, reconfigured my settings, printed out current drafts, and rebooted my computer. After a hair-raising forty-five minutes, my computer was once again a monolingual speaker of English. I still don’t know why the unwanted translation happened. But I do allow it might have been a little joke played on me by my mother. I would have preferred something less exciting, like a beheaded rose.

      Nature sketching will remain an important part of my life and not simply because of the wonderment it inspires. It allows me to regard imperfection as normal. Fiction writing, on the other hand, does not allow me to ever feel satisfied with what I’ve done. If I thought to myself that a draft of anything I wrote was “good enough,” let alone, “great,” that would be the sign of a neurological disorder (one of my mother’s early signs of Alzheimer’s disease was her lack of concern over an increasing number of dings and dents on her car). When I draw, however, I allow myself to be as sloppy as I want. If I draw birds that are too large and clumsy to fit onto the limits of the paper, I buy a bigger drawing pad. When the next drawing is too big for the new pad, I cut off the crown or tail or wings, and it need not be in an artistic fashion. I once gave a curlew an overly curved bill so that it would fit on the page. It made the curlew look like it had gotten its bill stuck in an electrical socket. I have drawn many free-form arrangements of feathers that would never enable a non-helium-propelled bird to fly. I once unintentionally drew the optical illusion of a branch passing in front of a bird and exiting from behind. I see the imperfections and laugh. They’re hilarious. I post my drawings on the Nature Journal Facebook page. I show them to my husband and friends. I foist them on strangers with the eagerness of a woman showing off photos of her scowling grandkids. I am the girl I was in kindergarten who said to my parents: “Look what I did.”

      I might even show my drawings to my former art teacher. He and I maintain a yearly Christmas correspondence that includes updates on our health, the books we’ve read, and the museums we’ve visited. I’ll send him a drawing or two and remind him about the comment he made on my report card when I was seventeen. I’ll tell him I’m glad I failed to become an artist.

       Fresno, 1952: The poor minister, his frugal wife, and growing family.

      At the age of eight, I learned I had a knack for writing, one with financial benefits. I had written an essay on the assigned topic “What the Library Means to Me” and won in the elementary school division. The prize was an ivory and gold tone transistor radio. There was a reason I won. I wrote what I knew the librarians and supporters of a new library wanted to hear: I was a little kid who loved to read, that I loved the library so much I had donated my life savings (eighteen cents) so that a new library could be built. I knew to mention my age and the amount of my estate. I already had very good intuitions about what pleased people, that is, I knew how to be calculating.

      Yet there is something in that library essay that I would later recognize as an early glimmer of my imagination and my disposition as a writer. It lies in sentences from the middle of the essay: “These books seem to open many windows in my little room. I can see many wonderful things outside.” That was the sign: rooms and windows as a metaphor for freedom and imagination, one being the condition for the other. And there was also the fact that I liked to be alone in my little room. Throughout childhood, my little room—or rather, the little rooms of many successive houses from birth to seventeen—became my escape hatch from my parents’ criticism, where I was safe from scrutiny. I was in a time machine propelled by the force of a story, and I could be gone for hours having adventures with newly sprung skills—breathing underwater with a goddess, answering riddles posted by sages disguised as bearded beggars, riding bareback on a pony across the plains, or enduring cold and starvation in an orphanage. Gruel was delicious, like Chinese rice porridge. I found companionship in Jane Eyre, a girl who was independent minded and brave enough to tell her hypocritical aunt that she was unkind and would go to hell. Jane Eyre taught me that loneliness had more to do with being misunderstood than being alone.

      Throughout most of my school years, I submitted to expectations and gave the appearance that I had conformed. I was a compliant writer, dutifully putting forth what I thought teachers and professors wanted to read. In grade school, good writing was largely directed to punctuation, spelling, grammar, and penmanship. The words and sentences with errors were circled in red. I tended toward sloppiness and the second-language learning errors of my mother’s speech—“I love to go school.” Only a few essays received any comments other than “Watch your spelling.” I unearthed a report card from the seventh grade, which showed that my lowest grade was for English and the next lowest was for Spanish. (I’m glad to report that these grades did not dissuade me from receiving my B.A. in English and M.A. in linguistics.) In college, I wrote essays according to what I knew my professors wanted to read: themes on social class and the cultural shape of the ideal, or the impossibility of avoiding moral complicity as a soldier in battle. I once deviated from the formula for an essay on Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which I disliked for reasons I can no longer remember. But I vividly recall the professor sitting on the edge of his desk, facing the class, and reading aloud my essay, without identifying me as the writer. He delivered each sentence in a mocking tone and would pause at the end of each paragraph to refute what I had said. He angrily concluded, “This student knows nothing about great literature and has no right to criticize one of our greatest American writers.” Thereafter, I did not write essays that offered a true opinion of what I had thought of any book. I became a facile writer, a compliant one. Based on that criterion, СКАЧАТЬ