Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 147

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Where the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination," by Amy Tan:

The characters arrive with stiff personalities or histrionic ones. They will remain caricatures until I can truly feel them. At several points in the writing, I will realize I have embarked on an impossible task. I will have fewer than a hundred pages, always fewer than a hundred, and they are all bad. I will be seized with paralyzing existential dread that I will never finish this book. Who I was an hour ago no longer exists. This is not writer’s block. This is chaos with no way out. The metaphoric connections have been cut. The wonders are gone. The worst has happened. I am no longer a writer. And then, after another five minutes of self-flagellation, I start writing again. 

I played the minuet for hours, trying to overcome an old habit and ingrain a new one. I went into memories of a church hall and its echoing sounds of applause, its odd-smelling piano, the cold folding chairs, the short bench , the loose-toothed ivory, the missing sheet music— all that kept me from moving forward. I eventually played it perfectly— again and again, until it was 2: 00 A.M. and my fingers ached. I had overcome the mistake, and changed the habit. I remembered the folds of my mother’s skirt where I had hidden my face and had sobbed because I had failed, and sobbed even harder when I realized I had already been forgiven.

Shanghai-style wealth and prestige are not subtle. Disdain is openly expressed. Once, at a dinner party for patrons of the arts, I was enjoying a lively conversation with a young Shanghainese man sitting next to me. I knew by his last name and a few details he casually dropped that he descended from a prominent family with vast wealth. He evidently thought my family was of similar stature—otherwise why would I have been invited? He asked what my grandparents’ business was. I explained that my grandmother was the widow of a poor scholar and later married a wealthy man as his fourth wife. He abruptly stopped talking to me, turned away. He never looked at me again the rest of the evening. I was shocked, and while I have never been the submissive type, in this room of wealthy patrons, I could do nothing to jeopardize the organization’s dependence on their patrons’support. A moment later I realized that the man’s insult was an unintended gift to a fiction writer: the punch in the gut that enabled me to viscerally feel what my mother and grandmother had endured, what I had tried to capture in stories. My pain was temporary. Theirs was an unalterable part of life. 

A few months after The Joy Luck Club was published, a relative complained to my mother that she should not be telling me all these useless stories. “She can’t change the past,” he said. My mother told him: “It can be changed. I tell her so she can tell everyone, tell the whole world, so they know what my mother suffered. That’s how it can be changed.” My mother gave me permission to tell the truth. She wanted the secrets exposed so that the power of shame could be replaced with outrage.