The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life Read online

  We watch a young man with dusty hair grab a wriggling black eel. The eel’s mouth is wide open, its tongue moving back and forth. I cannot hide my anthropomorphic sentimentality. It looks as if the creature is crying for help. And then—whack!— the head is sliced off with the short knife. The eel’s mouth continues to open and close, and the body writhes as the young man slowly slices it open—straight down the back, causing chills to run up mine. Robert clicks off pictures. The bucket is now a mass of eels swirling in their own bright blood. I can’t help it: my lips spread out in disgust. And the young man, sensing I am a judgmental foreigner, shouts and waves Robert and me away.

  When Aiyi points to the eels and asks me whether I want to eat them, I answer, “They taste good, but look ugly.” She takes this as my enthusiasm to eat eels tonight. Upon trying to bargain with this free-market vendor, she discovers he has jacked his prices up. She argues with him a bit, and he grunts and motions his thumb toward me. She gives up and, grabbing my elbow, directs me toward one of the enclosed government markets where the prices are fixed.

  Here the vendors sell steamed baskets of xiao loong bao, the dumplings Shanghai is famous for—delicately flavored rounds of meat and vegetables encased in a thin rice-flour pastry. Aiyi motions for me to stand off to the side, encouraging me to disappear the best I can with a roomful of people staring at me from my red lipstick to my cowboy-style boots.

  I get the sense this place sells food only to bona fide workers. As the interloper, I’m reminded of the children’s story “The Little Red Hen.” “And who will help me make this bread?” the Little Red Hen asked her fellow commune animals. “Not I,” said the pig. I’m the lazy capitalist pig who did no work and now wants to eat up the bread.

  Aiyi stands in line, pretending she doesn’t know me. At the head of the line is a lectern that towers over the customers. Behind that, a woman dispenses little pieces of paper. As much as I can gather from our limited means of discourse, Aiyi is going to buy chits for some xiao loong bao.

  Customers sit on stools, hunched over round tables. A grandmother tosses dumplings into her grandson’s mouth. Workers down huge bowls filled with dumplings; once they are finished, they stand up and push away from the table. Their places are immediately taken by other customers, one of whom pours a basketful of dumplings into an abandoned bowl and begins to eat with used chopsticks. Ma would not approve. According to her, such dirty habits are not Chinese, they are Communist—sharing everything, including germs.

  At a window, women wearing round white caps take our order for dumplings, and after five minutes our number is called and we walk away with two baskets. Aiyi goes to a table, picks up a pair of chopsticks perched on a used bowl, and with them heaves the steaming dumplings into the food saver. This done, she motions for Robert and me to follow, although not too closely. There are bargains still to be found, and she won’t have us interfering with her superb shopping skills.

  We are outside again, only this time on the other side of the market square. Here we find long stalls covered with awnings, where we can buy all manner of assorted breakfast goodies—a fried version of xiao loong bao, various noodle soups cooked in broth, bean curd soup, and da bing, “big bread.” It smells and looks wonderful, I’m instantly starved, and I want to taste everything.

  It is now six-thirty a.m., and the stalls are jammed with customers. The outdoor eating tables are full, every bench space taken. More people are lined up to buy breakfast, and they turn and stare as we approach, this curious entourage of short sixty-year-old Chinese lady, younger Chinese-American woman wearing black Lycra stretch clothes, and silver-haired man wearing thousands of dollars’ worth of photography equipment around his neck. Supertourist. Out here, people stare but also smile. A woman wearing pajamas stares at my boots. A young man comes up to Robert and says, “Hello.”

  “American,” Robert says, pointing to his chest.

  “Meigwo-ren,” I translate. “Jyou jin-shan.” Old Gold Mountain, the name still used in China to refer to San Francisco. The man asks me if I’m American too. I nod, then add that my mother is Shanghainese. He nods and smiles.

  Aiyi goes to stand in the da bing line. I stand behind her, watching the activity. A man sporting what I have come to identify as the official government cook’s cap rolls the bing out in fat doughy balls. He then smashes each of the balls down the middle in one motion, pats each out with a swirl of his palm, then slaps it against the side of a coal-fired oil drum. Using only his fingers, he peels off the bing that have turned golden-brown—never mind tongs or hot pads when your hands are as good as asbestos-coated from daily trials by fire. Each bing is tossed onto a board, brushed with a thin gloss of oil, then sprinkled with sesame seeds.

  After four or five bing undergo this ritual, Aiyi is at the head of the line. I watch her order and pay with grime-coated slips of paper the size of stamps, the weight of tissue paper. The chits are tossed into a plastic bowl, along with other colored stamps. Together they look like confetti. I cannot figure out this system of accounting, one that could be easily upset by a puff of wind.

  And now Aiyi returns to us. Success! She displays the plastic sacks filled with steaming rounds of mouthwatering da bing.

  “Let’s go home!” she says.

  Aiyi will not eat breakfast with us, despite Ma’s insistence. And so it’s just Robert, Ma, and I around the small Formica table, neighbors from the buildings next door pointing to us. Our very first breakfast in China: the wonderful treats Aiyi bought at the market, along with rice porridge, purloined airline peanuts, and Nescafé we bought, seasoned with airline dairy creamer. As we eat, we meticulously set aside portions for Aiyi, including airline peanuts.

  Immediately after breakfast, Xiao-dong arrives and we leave for the market again, this time to buy ingredients for lunch. Aiyi, Yuhang, and Ma lead the way to the vegetable stalls and the tubs of fish and eels. I walk behind with Xiao-dong. We take turns pointing to things in the market. He names them for me in Mandarin, I name them in English. I have my videocamera resting on my shoulder, filming from a distance. Robert lags behind shooting pictures, waving to us to go on without him, he’ll catch up. He is doing his best not to be commandeered by four strong-willed Chinese women. We’ll see how long he can last.

  Back home, the morning’s take is unwrapped in the kitchen. We have bought eel, small freshwater blue crabs, still alive, and all manner of vegetables. The crabs, Ma tells me, cost 165 renmenbi. There are eleven, so they cost fifteen renmenbi each, about four U.S. dollars, more than what an average Chinese worker makes in a day. Yuhang has paid for these herself, her tribute to our mother and to me, her little sister. I do not tell Yuhang that I do not like crab.

  “Look here,” Ma says to me. “Two tastes. This one female, this one male.” For some reason my mother has selected this opportunity—in a cramped kitchen in Shanghai—to try to teach me how to cook. Perhaps this is for Yuhang’s benefit as well—the cooking lessons a mother would have taught her daughter.

  “Female best,” she continues. She shows me how they are the ones with rounded bottoms, while the males are flat, so there is less to eat. “You eat all the juicy insides that pour out.”

  Aiyi and Yuhang press the legs of the crabs inward and then tie them with white string. They are immobile, alive and awaiting their steam bath.

  “The crabs,” Yuhang says, “have very bad tempers. Very fierce.”

  All at once I hear loud explosions. I can’t help it, I think about guns, soldiers shooting. I head for the sitting room. “What’s that?” I ask Xiao-dong in Chinese. He looks up from a Time-Life picture book about China that I brought. He acts as if he hasn’t heard anything.

  “That noise,” I say. The explosions continue.

  “Ah,” he says. “Pian pao.” He pantomimes lighting something on the ground, watching it explode. Oh, firecracker.

  I feel foolish. “Did someone get married?” I ask.

  He stands up, looks out the window. “It may be a wed
ding,” he says in Mandarin. “Although probably it’s to congratulate someone who has finally moved into a new home in the neighborhood.” I recall my niece’s telling me that the waiting list for individual apartments is very long, one has to wait for seventeen years.

  And now lunch is ready for serving. Aiyi brings the steaming crabs to the table. She sets down two bowls of dipping sauce: a dark soy sauce mixed with rice vinegar and ginger. The crabs are still bound in their ropes. Their bright blue has faded to gray. Yuhang picks a fat one for Ma, another fat one for me. Xiao-dong and Robert help themselves.

  “Oyo! Lucky you, you got a female,” Yuhang tells me. “Look.” She taps the bottom of the crab, the rounded stomach. She snips off the strings. I feel like a child, fearful about eating the crab, unable to say no, completely at the mercy of my mother and Aiyi. Robert has no such qualms. He loves crab.

  Ma demonstrates how to break open the body. Crack! I feel as if I were in sixth-grade science class. Behold, the internal organs. Xiao-dong is sucking on his little crab. Yuhang has broken a leg off hers and is using it as an entrenching tool. She watches as I poke at my crab. “Eat this part first,” she says. I stare at an orange mass.

  “What is it?” I whisper to my mother.

  “Don’t ask,” she says. “You no wanna know. Eat.” I stare at the orangy part again, certain it must be crab brains.

  “Eat,” commands Yuhang. “That’s the best part. Eat it before it turns bad.”

  “How will it turn bad?” I say.

  She reaches over with her crab leg and picks out the orange stuff. “Eat before it gets cold.”

  I had promised myself that my attitude about living in China would be “Come what may, take what comes.” I pour a heavy dose of sauce and put the orange goo in my mouth. It has a creamy texture, and is slightly fishy. I don’t like it, but I have not yet retched.

  “Eat this.” Yuhang dredges out more orange goo. “Don’t waste any of it. It’s too good.”

  I crack off a leg and dutifully begin to dig and shove and swallow, dig and shove and swallow, dig—

  “Don’t eat that!” I hear my mother say.

  Yuhang looks over to see what I am doing to my crab. She laughs and then scolds me. “Oyo, don’t eat that.” She points to something that to me is indistinguishable from the orange stuff they said was so exquisite.

  “Why?” I ask. “Why is this part different?”

  “Anh!” she exclaims—perhaps she can’t believe she has such a stupid sister. “Da bien.” She pinches her mouth shut.

  I stare at my crab. Da bien. Poop. I think about that American expression used to describe stupid people. Shit for brains. That’s what I have in front of me. A miniature toilet bowl.

  My mother takes the crab out of my hands and quickly removes the offending part. “Eat.” She digs out a piece of fleshy meat, then gives the crab back to me.

  I slowly start to eat again. This part does not taste so bad. I dip the meat in the vinegary sauce and eat with concentration, glad to be almost halfway through this ordeal. This part actually tastes quite good. Xiao-dong is relishing this feast. He has almost finished his crab and is poking and sucking at every possible crevice.

  “Don’t eat that!” I hear my mother say again.

  “Don’t eat what?” I ask.

  She points. I don’t understand what she is pointing to. “This.” It is a six-sided piece, what looks like a soft piece of cartilage. “If you eat it,” she explains, “it leaves the body cold.”

  “How does it do that?”

  “Don’t eat it,” she says.

  “But why does it leave the body cold? What does that mean?”

  “Ai!” my mother says. “Don’t ask why. It’s enough that I tell you not to eat it.”

  Yuhang shakes her head. “Don’t eat it.” She points to another grayish mass. “And don’t eat this part.” To me it looks the same as the rest of the crab meat. I’m confused, a hostage forced to obey the advice and opinions of my elders.

  I think about the tiny softshell crabs, of eating them, of my upcoming two weeks of life in China. The legs are bound up, movement restricted. There are exquisite tastes to be found, but the moment when one can find them is brief, transitory. If one waits too long, the flavor is lost, the taste becomes ordinary. And inside these crabs is knowledge, the kind I don’t have: what is good, what is bad, and why, and why I shouldn’t ask, and what will happen if I don’t listen.

  Welcome back to China.

  • joy luck and hollywood •

  This was written in response to interview questions posed by the Los Angeles Times. I sat down one night and e-mailed my answers. A version of those was used for a story that ran on September 5, 1993.

  I was an unlikely person to get involved with filmmaking. I’ve never had a particular infatuation with Hollywood or tabloid stories of its stars—well, maybe I’ve taken a glance now and then at gossip having to do with Robert Redford. For the most part, though, I’ve always preferred to daydream about characters of my own making. At the same time, I didn’t hold any grudges against movies as an art form. I wasn’t tearing my hair out, vowing, “As God is my witness, I’ll show the world how movies really should be made!” To put it simply, I was neither fan nor foe.

  During the last decade, in an effort to control how I consumed my time, my appetite for television and movies dwindled to anorexic level. I spent whatever available hours I had reading or writing. Until recently, I was not in the habit of going to the movies, although, because of a nine-month book promotion schedule, I sometimes saw them as “in-flight entertainment” but on anemic screens. Occasionally, I rented videos of former box-office hits. My choices took into consideration which movies my husband might enjoy as well. In other words, no tearjerkers about reincarnated lovers and such.

  But there was a period in my life, childhood, when I thought movies were the ultimate luxury. Perhaps once a month, my parents gave my brothers and me fifty cents each to see a matinee with friends—real doozies like The Angry Red Planet, The Fly, Around the World in 80 Days, Flower Drum Song, but not The World of Suzie Wong (too adult, according to my parents). I also saw The Parent Trap, 101 Dalmatians, Old Yeller, The Absent-Minded Professor—a lot of Disney movies. I wanted to draw the cartoons that went into animated films.

  Mostly I saw old movies on television, my favorite being The Wizard of Oz, which I watched faithfully every year on our black-and-white set, and continued to be awed by, especially when I saw it on another family’s color television. I identified with Dorothy, a girl who felt she was misunderstood and went searching for a sense of home. Plus she had the greatest shoes, ruby slippers, which could take her anywhere her heart desired. But Kansas? If I had been in her shoes, I would have stayed in Oz and started a new life as a torch singer.

  Shoes became an imaginative device for me as a fiction writer, especially if I was writing about a period outside my life experience. I would place myself in my character’s shoes, look down at them, and start walking. When I looked up, I would see the scenery in front of me, say, China in the 1920s. I would note what was around me: To my left, a doorway, the light streaming through. To my right, a group of people staring at me critically. Up close, a coffin holding a woman, who no longer saw falseness or faults in others.

  Now that I think of it, perhaps my imagination has always worked like a movie camera, at least in terms of visual framing. Like the camera, I do five or six “setups,” as I now know them to be called, those camera angles required to capture each scene from various audience perspectives. In fiction, however, I am both the audience and the character. And I never see the back of my own head.

  Moreover, fiction, as opposed to film, allows me to include any characters I want; I don’t need a casting agent. I can write a scene with a thousand angels dancing in the sky; I don’t worry about costumes, or special effects, or choreography, or liability insurance. In fiction, I can revise ad nauseam, tossing out countless pages at a time, as well as the exp
ensive locations that come with them. I can invent new characters, remove others. I’m not on a seventy-seven-day writing schedule. No union fines me if I make my characters work through the scenes with me after midnight or on weekends. My characters do not become upset when I tell them I’ve eliminated their scene. Nor do they ever change my lines and ad-lib something they think is better.

  A fiction writer has the perquisites of solitude, artistic freedom, and control. She has the luxury to go into a funk for two weeks and not get anything done. Why would any writer in her right mind ever consider making a movie instead? That’s like going from being a monk or a nun to serving as a camp counselor for hundreds of problem children.

  I can say only that I went to Hollywood for many of the same reasons Dorothy found herself in Oz. I met a lot of remarkably nice people along the way. And they had heart and brains and courage.

  Didn’t Anyone Warn You?

  In 1988, before The Joy Luck Club was published, I attended a screenwriting workshop at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in northern California. I went partly because it was a plum to get into the program, and largely because I felt I could learn techniques about character development that would benefit my fiction.

  Ten others and I attended these sessions to discover where our best stories came from—the answer being from our worst life experiences. We collaborated on an adaptation of a short story, during which I discovered how much I preferred working solo. Writing with others seemed a feat of coordination not unlike those three-legged races I used to run as a kid. How many different ways can a character enter a doorway? Ask four screenwriters.