The hidden history of Amy Tan
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Amy Tan is not the type of writer who packs light, especially when it comes to emotional and historical baggage.
This can be said about much of her fiction, with her poignant portrayals of Chinese-American family relationships and her juggling of the mystical and the factual, the historical and the present-day.
It also applies to Tan on a personal level.
During a recent telephone interview, for example, the San Francisco author seemed by turns anxious, grateful and a little apprehensive about being on the road again to promote her new novel, "The Bonesetter's Daughter" (Putnam, $25.95).
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"It's going well, and well for me means basically getting eight hours of sleep and three meals a day," she said of her first full-scale book tour in five years. She's speaking from her room at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., shortly before that night's reading.
"I'm so relieved that I was finally able to finish," she says of the book. "I was jubilant to see that I could still write."
Tan worries about herself perhaps more than most people, she admits.
"My mother raised me in a world of danger," she said in a ghost-storyteller voice.
"I see danger in almost everything."
She offers a recent trip to China as proof.
Tan packed a special device to counteract nausea, antibacterial wipes, remedies for both hypothermia and extreme heat exposure, among many other things. She always wears an ionizing device around her neck on airline flights to ward off the flu virus.
"I had all the medicines you'd need for everything from simple illness to the plague," Tan said with a slight chuckle.
People in her travel party laughed at her caution.
The world has shrunk around Tan since her last novel, "The Hundred Secret Senses," was published in 1995. And she gets the strange feeling that because of technology, people know everything about her now, that they can simply call up a Web site on the Internet and extract the minutest details of Amy Tan, the woman's life.
Fans know, for instance, that she travels with both of her Yorkshire terriers, Lilli and Bubba.
"One's a spare," she quipped.
All that information makes her kind of nervous. So does the adulation that's been heaped upon her since "The Joy Luck Club." Her first public reading from that book was at Elliott Bay Book Co. She's returning to read from "The Bonesetter's Daughter" at Town Hall.
The success of "The Joy Luck Club" was widely credited with bringing literature about the Chinese-American experience into the mainstream.
But she is not comfortable with the idea of being a cultural icon because of the book.
"I always caution people who read it for literature classes not to look at it as a template for Chinese culture, Asian culture," Tan said. "The characters are fictional and if they are based on anything, they are based on a personal history, not a larger one."
And then there are those who consider Tan a personal inspiration, which is flattering and scary at the same time.
A woman once came up to her, she recalls, and told Tan that she filed for divorce after reading "The Joy Luck Club."
Tan will get similar reactions from people who relate to "The Bonesetter's Daughter," which is also a story that deals with the personal but somehow feels epic.
The multilayered book centers partly on the strained relationship between Ruth Young, a Chinese-American ghostwriter of self-help books who lives in San Francisco, and her mother, LuLing, whose memories are slipping away like scraps of paper as Alzheimer's disease takes hold.
But the book has an even deeper core: that being the mysterious life of LuLing's childhood caretaker, Precious Auntie, who helped raise LuLing in China.
It turns out that LuLing, who managed to flee China for the United States, comes from a family of ink makers in the ancient mountain village of Xian Xin, the site where scientists unearthed Peking Man in the 1920s.
The family is connected to the famous Bonesetter who works in the village. This doctor, among other things, resets the bones of men crushed in the quarry where the Peking Man excavation takes place.
The arduous process of picking through history to reveal long-hidden truths operates as a metaphor for the entire book, as Ruth recovers key pieces of her mother's past, most importantly her real last name, before she dies.
"The name is sometimes the only thing that remains as proof of someone's existence," Tan said. "But by the time the name comes, it comes with a lot of other things that were even more important to know."
The author has already heard from a few people who say the new book has inspired them to think more about their own parents' and grandparents' lives.
Every family has secrets that can enlighten and redeem, she said.
Still, "I don't take either credit or blame for people who achieve reconciliation with their parents, or for divorces or marriages.
"Fiction becomes its own entity when it's in the hands of the reader," Tan said. "It helps them see correlations to their own lives."
Her theory works for writers, too.
Over the past couple of years, Tan has seen a world of loss. Two weeks after her own mother's death from Alzheimer's in 1999, Tan's friend and longtime editor Faith Sale died of a rare cancer.
Secrets revealed
The novel changed drastically after this period, mostly because of revelations Tan and her sisters uncovered about their mother, whose mental capacities slowly deteriorated until her death.
For starters, they had never known Daisy Tan's given name. Daisy had been adopted and her father died when she was a baby. The family lineage was muddled.
The sisters determined that Daisy's birth name was Li Bingzi and that her mother's name was Gu Jingmei.
Tan had already finished "The Bonesetter's Daughter" when her mother died. But she sat down and completely revised it, incorporating aspects of her real-life experience into the story.
At times, the story bears uncanny resemblance to Tan's own experiences: first accepting the fact that her mother was ill, then watching her mind unravel in the years leading up to her death, then discovering details about her past.
"That's how I felt towards the end of my mother's life - like I had been digging up pieces of her," Tan said, reflecting on the archaeology theme.
Tan dedicated "The Bonesetter's Daughter" to her mother and grandmother. She refers to them in the introduction as her ghostwriters.
Left speechless
The character Ruth also is a reflection of Tan.
Both the fictional daughter and Tan have suffered bouts of speechlessness brought on by fear, grief and perhaps the pressure of things left unsaid.
Tan said that for 10 years after a good friend was murdered in 1976 (she was the one who identified the body), she would fall mute on her own birthday. A year before that, Tan was robbed at gunpoint. Her brother and father died of brain tumors a year apart in the late 1960s.
The book may be deeper and more personal after the changes, but it's not autobiographical, Tan warns.
Still, the process of writing and then rewriting "The Bonesetter's Daughter," against the backdrop of imminent death and mourning, taught Tan some things about herself. She was basically living two lives: novelist and caretaker for her ailing mother.
"I had to live very much in the present," she said, recalling that time. "Illness can be a different lens for how you see the present," she continued. "Suddenly beliefs change. Things that were irritating just become trivial.
"It's a change in perspective one has when one's newly in love, for example. It's the same in dealing with imminent loss, impending sorrow. It was also the kind of tension that feeds into writing."
Tan didn't throw herself into prolonged mourning, though. She channeled that energy into writing.
An hour after finishing "The Bonesetter's Daughter" revisions at 1 in the morning last August, Tan started her next book.
"When I've finally found the end of the thread, it's a feeling of elation," she said. "I can't sleep. There's a million ideas running through my head."
The next book
Tan said she definitely doesn't want to take so much time to finish her next book.
She has grown weary of people talking about how long it took her to complete this one.
"I only hope it's not another five years or that people won't have to say, 'And now, her loooooong-awaited new book, started 30 years ago, when Chinese people were still a minority and English was the dominant language,'" she joked.
Even if having fans know everything about her life makes her squeamish, Tan will be satisfied if people are still curious about her imagination, whenever it strikes.
"I still have this disbelief about why people read my books," she said. "But I'm glad."