AMY TAN'S `SENSES' LEAP INTO THE OTHER WORLD
By Ellen Emry
Heltzel, Oregonian, Oct 15, 1995
Amy Tan's popularity is easy to figure out. Her
novels are simply written and her themes universal, with the charming overlay
of East meets West. Read Bobbie Ann Mason if you want meatloaf and chips; if
you prefer dim sum and green tea, take Tan.
Tan's newly released book, ``The Hundred Secret
Senses'' (G.P. Putnam's Sons, $24.95), is to ``The Joy Luck Club'' as a
religious holiday is to a family vacation. ``Joy Luck'' focused on mother-daughter
relationships; ``Senses'' takes a leap to the ethereal world.
This time, Tan has picked a subject that's more
difficult for her to get her arms around, both literally and figuratively. But
given Tan's loyal legions, the book has the sensibility and storytelling style
to become her third best seller.
Do you believe in ghosts? Does Tan? In a recent
phone interview, the Bay Area writer hedged her bets, noting that the term
ghosts has such bad connotations.
But Tan fans can find out more when Tan speaks
Thursday evening Oct. 19, 1995, at Linfield College
in McMinnville, where she'll
make her second stop on a two-month tour promoting her new book. The Oregon
Independent Booksellers Association will sponsor the 8 p.m. event, and the $5
admission fee will benefit the Kidney Association of Oregon.
``The Hundred Secret Senses'' is not a ghost
story in the traditional sense, and the metaphysical questions it poses are
wrapped around a love story that also embraces Tan's favorite topic, the joy
and burdens of family relationships. In her latest offering, the ties that bind
most tightly are those between the narrator, Olivia, and her older half-sister,
Kwan. Kwan, Olivia's father's only progeny from his first marriage in the old
country, comes to America to join Olivia's family after the father dies.
Olivia's initial thrill at gaining a sister fades quickly: Instead of being the
exotic princess the young girl had dreamed of, Kwan is a dumpy peasant woman
who doesn't subscribe to the same rules of logic as her much-cherished,
American-born half-sister.
Kwan, in fact, believes she possesses a sixth
sense; put in cultural context, she claims to have ``yin eyes'' that allow her
to see ghosts. In her own mind, at least, Kwan is in continuous communication
with the afterworld, the other world and whatever, to the extent that the young
Olivia helps get her temporarily committed to a mental institution -- an act of
disloyalty that causes her great guilt later in life.
As an adult, Olivia either becomes more tolerant
of Kwan's strange ways, or at least finds them more useful (after all, there's
the ghost of her boyfriend's former girlfriend to banish from his thoughts).
Building from that base, Tan spins a tale of how Olivia's skeptical, thoroughly
American self evolves into a person more receptive to the powers of that which
cannot be seen, heard or felt.
``I've always been like Olivia,'' said Tan, who
was 200 pages into another novel and stricken with writer's block when ``The
Hundred Secret Senses'' began to take shape in her head. ``But I've actually
seen things I can't explain and had prophetic dreams. . . .
``My mother has always believed that I had the
gift of seeing and talking to ghosts. I've always discounted it. This was my
opportunity to let go.''
The background for Tan's spiritual framework is
complicated. She started with by-the-book Christianity: Her grandfather had
gone to missionary school in China and her father was an ordained minister.
When Tan was 15, however, first her older
brother and then her father died of brain cancer. The statistical improbability
of their deaths remains unresolved -- Tan says doctors never determined whether
genetics or environmental factors played a role. Nevertheless, the tragedy
pushed Tan's mother back to the Buddhist and Taoist traditions with which she
had been raised. Tan was introduced to ghosts, superstition and the practice of
praying to ancestors.
She was, on the surface at least, unaffected by
this turn to Eastern mysticism. But now, looking over her life, the 43-year-old
writer noted that she and her husband, Lou, have always lived in houses with
``noise problems''; at one point, they both thought they were hearing the same
thing, a badly whistled version of the theme song from the TV game show
``Jeopardy.''
And then, in the process of writing ``The
Hundred Secret Senses,'' Tan says there were countless coincidences she can't
explain, such as the time she was looking for a certain reference and the book
she needed literally fell off the shelf and opened at the proper place.
Although Tan regards such experiences as less
mystical than they are serendipitous, she acknowledges a greater sense of
ambiguity about such matters than she felt in the past. She also sees a direct
connection between love and hope, and between hope and the power to believe.
``Many of the things we believe have to do with.
. . . whether we see a world beyond this one, and whether we think our
relationships with people serve a larger purpose,'' she said. ``The questions
are all quite open.''
AMY TAN: PARENT'S DISAPPOINTMENT LED TO LITERARY
SUCCESS
By Ron Cowan,
Salem Statesman Journal, March 26, 1990
Amy Tan returned to her alma mater, Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore., recently, a successful novelist returning to
the place where she gave her parents an enormous disappointment two decades
ago:
The 1989 novel about Chinese-American women and
their families still is on best-seller lists and has been called an
extraordinary book which mixes tenderness, irony, wit and sorrow.
The fiction and the writer are not inseparable,
however, despite the links.
"It's a surprise because people assume it's
my own life. It's a fiction," Tan said as she visited the campus for a
lecture and an overnight stay.
A soft-spoken woman with an easy, unpretentious
manner, she divorces herself from many of the book's details of
Chinese-American life, especially the idea of unhappy marriages.
She is married to Lou DeMattei, the tax attorney
she met at Linfield. They live in San
Francisco.
Nor is the book, personal and intimate as it
seems, a form of self- therapy for a troubled youth.
"Fiction doesn't necessarily look for
resolution. Fiction looks to stir up conflicts.
"It's not therapy in that you understand
all the connections. It's not as neat as that."
Tan's life, as the daughter of Chinese
immigrants in a working class neighborhood of Oakland, Calif., was that of the
only Chinese-American in school - an oddity.
She said it wasn't easy, not with the outsized
ambitions of her parents - they wanted her to be a concert pianist as a hobby -
and the death of her father and brother from brain tumors when she was 15.
After her mother took her to Switzerland, Tan
rebelled by taking an obnoxious German boyfriend and getting herself arrested.
Ironically, at the time of her arrest she won a
Baptist scholarship which she used for Linfield
- the farthest she could get from home.
"It was a really mixed life and a really
fortunate life for a writer in that it was so awful in so many ways."
Tan seems anything but a rebel, but in person
and in her book she voices the strains that Chinese-American children feel with
the ambitions of their parents.
"Since the book has been published, I have
met so many Chinese concert pianists," she said with gentle humor.
"I think there were too many of us to
experience that resentment."
Her parents and those in "The Joy Luck
Club" came to America from China losing wealth and social standing. The
burden was on the children.
"They are the ones who will make up for the
losses that the parents had to undergo. The whole expectation is that you are
only as much as your family thinks you are."
Tan's life has its contradictions, however.
Her family, once anguished by her choices, is
now proud of her success and fame, and she now appreciates the discipline and
demands that she once hated.
Tan and her husband, who accompanied her to Linfield to reminisce about old times, don't
have children. But if they did, she would bring a new understanding to their
upbringing.
"If there was anything I discovered writing
the book, it's that I don't have to choose would I go the Chinese or the
American way.
"The focus would be to instill some strong,
important values in my children, as well as a healthy strain of independence."
Tan, who developed her book out of magazine
stories, said she has been surprised by the success of "The Joy Luck
Club."
"I'd have to be an egomaniac to expect what
happened. I did not expect it to get published.
"I spent the first six months denying that
it changed my life. I finally had to admit that it has."
Now she is scared.
"I feel tremendous expectations from my
publisher, from myself."
She is due to turn in her next book, also with
Chinese-American characters, on Thursday, but it isn't finished. In April, she
leaves for a lengthy European tour.
Tan, who has used her own life to illuminate her
fiction, had some advice for those who would be a successful novelist:
"Find your voice. So many writers become
enamored with other writers and use their voices."
"The Joy Luck Club," published by G.P,
Putnam's Sons, is available in a 288-page hardback for $18.95 at most
bookstores.
