The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life Page 17

  I’ve now seen the movie about twenty-five times, and I am not ashamed to say I’ve been moved to tears each time.

  By the time you read this, I will have seen the movie with my mother and my half sister, who just immigrated from China. She is one of the daughters my mother had to leave behind when she came to the United States. So that will be my version of life imitating art, or sitting in front of it. I’m nervous about what my mother will think. I’m afraid she’ll be overwhelmed by some of the scenes that are taken from her life, especially the one that depicts the suicide of her mother.*

  I hope audiences are moved by the film, that they connect with the emotions and feel changed at the end, that they feel closer to other people as a result. That’s what I like to get out of a book, a connection with the world.

  As to reviews, I’ve already imagined all the bad things that can be said. That way I’ll be delighted by anything good that comes out. I’m aware that the success of this movie will depend on good reviews and word of mouth. But there comes a point when you’ve done all you can. And then it’s out of your control. Certainly I hope the movie is a success at the box office, mostly for Wayne’s and Ron’s sakes, as well as for the cast and crew who dedicated themselves in a manner that made me feel it was not “just another job” for them. And certainly I hope Disney thinks it was more than justified in taking a risk on this movie. By my score, however, the movie is already a success. We made the movie we wanted to make. It’s not perfect, but we’re happy with it. And I’ll be standing in line, ready to plunk down seven dollars to see it.

  In the meantime, I have a whole mess of Chinese lucky charms absolutely guaranteed to bring the gods to the theater.

  I’ve Learned My Lessons

  At various times in the making of the movie, I vowed I’d never do this again. It’s too time-consuming. There are too many ups-and-downs. There’s so much business, too many meetings. I’ve developed calluses and sangfroid about some of the inherent difficulties of filmmaking.

  Yet against all my expectations, I like collaborating from time to time. I like fusing ideas into one vision. I like seeing that vision come to life with other people who know exactly what it takes to get there.

  My love of fiction is unaltered. It’s my first love. But yes, I’ll make another film with Ron and Wayne. It will probably be of my second book, The Kitchen God’s Wife. We’ve already started breaking the scenes out with page counts and narrative text. We began the day after we saw the rough cut of The Joy Luck Club.*

  STRONG WINDS, STRONG INFLUENCES

  I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect from others, and eventually, though neither of us knew it at the time, chess games.

  • The Joy Luck Club

  • what she meant •

  In 1988, I received a contract to write a book titled The JoyLuck Club. I had completed three stories, and I had thirteen proposed stories to go, many of which were supposed to be set in China, more than a few of them during World War II.

  Months before, I had hastily outlined these story ideas in a proposal that my new editor had bought. I believed I was not to deviate from this plan, and now I was worried over the parts that involved the war, a subject I was ill equipped to write about. It was time to do some serious research.

  I called my mother. “Hey, Ma, what was it like during the war?”

  My mother considered the question, paused to cast back to her life in China. “War? Oh, I was not affected.”

  I assumed by her answer that she had been tucked away in free China, that her experiences with World War II were similar to mine with Vietnam: observed from a safe distance. Ah well, some parents have interesting war stories to tell. My mother did not.

  So it was not until later in our conversation that I learned what my mother really meant by her answer. She was telling me about her first marriage, to a pilot to whom she could never refer by name, only by the words “that bad man.” And now, she told me, somebody had sponsored that bad man to come visit the United States as a former Kuomintang hero.

  “Hnh! He was no hero!” my mother exclaimed. “He was dismissed from air force for bad morals.” And she began to tell me details of their life in China—of bombs falling, of running to escape, of pilot friends who showed up for dinner one week and were dead the next.

  I interrupted her. “Wait a minute, I thought you said you weren’t affected by the war.”

  “I wasn’t,” insisted my mother. “I wasn’t killed.”

  Her answer made me realize, once again, that my mother and I were at times oceans apart in our view of the world. When I was growing up, I too was “not affected.” I had no idea that China had ever been involved in World War II—let alone that the war in China had started in 1937. And for the first ten years of my life, I did not know of my mother’s first marriage. She kept it a secret from my brothers and me, from her closest friends. When she finally did tell me, I did not ask her any questions. In part, I did not want to think that she could have once loved a man other than my father. And when I grew older, I still did not ask her about her early life in China. Why bring up the pains of her past? Of course, the questions were still there. I wondered, I imagined, I assumed what the answers might have been.

  When I set out to write my second book, I remembered that conversation with my mother, about her marriage to a man she grew to despise. I decided to write about a woman and her secret regrets, and used my American assumptions to shape the story: that this woman’s first marriage, while ending in hate, surely must have been born out of love. Why else would she have stayed in her marriage for twelve years?

  That’s what I started out writing. Fortunately, writing has a way of showing me how false my assumptions can be. My character rebelled against this fiction I had imposed on her. “No,” she protested. “This was not love. This was hope, hope for myself.” She refused to go along with the plot, and I found the story at a dead end.

  And so I began again. I began by asking myself about hope. How does it change, transform, endure according to life’s quirky circumstances? And what of the circumstances themselves: Do we believe they are simply a matter of fate? Or do we view them as the Chinese concept of luck, the Christian concept of God’s will, the American concept of choice? And depending on what we believe, how can we find balance in our lives? What do we accept? What do we feel we can still change?

  Eventually I wrote a book in which a mother poses these questions as she tells her daughter the secrets of her past. Since the story takes place during wartime, before my birth, I had to do quite a bit of research. I read scholarly texts and revisionist versions of the various roles of the Kuomintang, the Communists, the Japanese, and the Americans. I read wartime accounts published in popular periodicals—with different perspectives on these same groups. And of course, I needed a personal account of the war years to fact-check some of the mundane details of my story: How long did it take to travel from Shanghai to Yang-chow? What was a typical dowry for a bride from a well-to-do family? For those answers, I went to my mother, who in response gave me more than I asked for. The question of the dowry alone led to a three-hour remembrance of things past—not simply about wedding gifts, but about family gossip and Shanghai manners, about a gangster who showed up at her wedding, about her innocence—her stupidity!—in marrying a man she hardly knew.

  My mother, photographed by my father, Tientsin, China, 1945.

  I know readers will wonder: How much of the story is true? With The Joy Luck Club, I met readers who assumed everything in my book was true, my fiction simply a matter of fast dictation and an indelible memory. My mother complained of having to deny over and over that she was one or all of the mothers in my first book. “It’s all fiction,” she told her friends. “None of it is true. My daughter just has a wild imagination.”

  While I was writing my second book, she made sure to give me some motherly advice. “This time,” she said, “tell my tru
e story.” And with her permission—actually, her demand—how could I refuse? How could I resist? After all, the richest source of my fiction does come from life as I have misunderstood it—its contradictions, its unanswerable questions, its unlikely twists and turns.

  So, indeed, some of the events in The Kitchen God’s Wife are based on my mother’s life: her marriage to “that bad man,” the death of her children, her fortuitous encounter with my father. But with apologies to my mother, I confess that I changed her story. I invented characters who never existed in her life: Auntie Du, Helen, Jiaguo, Old Aunt and New Aunt, Peanut, Beautiful Betty, Bao-Bao Roger. I took her to places that do not exist: to a tea-growing monastery in Hangchow, to a mountaintop village called Heaven’s Breath, to a scissors-making shop in Kunming, to an American dance that in real life she decided not to attend. With those imaginary details in place, I can honestly say the story is fiction, not true.

  And yet it is as close to the truth as I can imagine. It is my mother’s story in the most important of ways to me: her passion, her will, her hope, the innocence she never really lost. It is the reason why she told me, “I was not affected,” why I can finally understand what she truly meant.

  • confessions •

  My mother’s thoughts reach back like the winter tide, exposing the wreckage of a former shore. Often she’s mired in 1967, 1968, the years my older brother and my father died.

  1968 was also the year she took me and my little brother—Didi—across the Atlantic to Switzerland, a place so preposterously different that she knew she had to give up grieving simply to survive. That year, she remembers, she was very, very sad. I too remember. I was sixteen then, and I recall a late-night hour when my mother and I were arguing in the chalet, that tinderbox of emotion where we lived.

  She had pushed me into the small bedroom we shared, and as she slapped me about the head, I backed into a corner, by a window that looked out on the lake, the Alps, the beautiful outside world. My mother was furious because I had a boyfriend. She was shouting that he was a drug addict, a bad man who would use me for sex and throw me away like leftover garbage.

  “Stop seeing him!” she ordered.

  I shook my head. The more she beat me, the more implacable I became, and this in turn fueled her outrage.

  “You didn’t love you daddy or Peter! When they die you not even sad.”

  I kept my face to the window, unmoved. What does she know about sad?

  She sobbed and beat her chest. “I rather kill myself before see you destroy you life!”

  Suicide. How many times had she threatened that before?

  “I wish you the one die! Not Peter, not Daddy.”

  She had just confirmed what I had always suspected. Now she flew at me with her fists.

  “I rather kill you! I rather see you die!”

  And then, perhaps horrified by what she had just said, she fled the room. Thank God that was over. I wished I had a cigarette to smoke. Suddenly she was back. She slammed the door shut, latched it, then locked it with a key. I saw the flash of a meat cleaver just before she pushed me to the wall and brought the blade’s edge to within an inch of my throat. Her eyes were like a wild animal’s, shiny, fixated on the kill. In an excited voice she said, “First, I kill you. Then Didi and me, our whole family destroy!” She smiled, her chest heaving. “Why you don’t cry?” She pressed the blade closer and I could feel her breath gusting.

  Was she bluffing? If she did kill me, so what? Who would care? While she rambled, a voice within me was whimpering, “This is sad, this is so sad.”

  For ten minutes, fifteen, longer, I straddled these two thoughts—that it didn’t matter if I died, that it would be eternally sad if I did—until all at once I felt a snap, then a rush of hope into a vacuum, and I was crying, I was babbling my confession: “I want to live. I want to live.”

  For twenty-five years I forgot that day, and when the memory of what happened surfaced unexpectedly at a writers’ workshop in which we recalled our worst moments, I was shaking, wondering to myself, Did she really mean to kill me? If I had not pleaded with her, would she have pushed down on the cleaver and ended my life?

  I wanted to go to my mother and ask. Yet I couldn’t, not until much later, when she became forgetful and I learned she had Alzheimer’s disease. I knew that if I didn’t ask her certain questions now, I would never know the real answers.

  So I asked.

  “Angry? Slap you?” she said, and laughed. “No, no, no. You always good girl, never even need to spank, not even one time.”

  How wonderful to hear her say what was never true, yet now would be forever so.

  • pretty beyond belief •

  I once asked my mother whether I was beautiful by Chinese standards. I must have been twelve at the time, and I believed that I was not attractive according to an American aesthetic based on Marilyn Monroe as the ultimate sex goddess.

  I remember that my mother carefully appraised my face before concluding, “To Chinese person, you not beautiful. You plain.”

  I was unable to hide my hurt and disappointment.

  “Why you want be beautiful?” my mother chided. “Pretty can be bad luck, not just good.” She should know, she said. She had been born a natural beauty. When she was four, people told her they had never seen a girl so lovely. “Everyone spoil me, the servants, my grandmother, my aunts, because I was pretty beyond belief.”

  By the time she was a teenager, she had the looks of a movie starlet: a peach-shaped face, a nose that was rounded but not overly broad, tilted large eyes with double lids, a smile of small and perfect teeth. Her skin bore “no spots or dots,” and she would often say to me, even into her seventies and eighties, “Feel. Still smooth and soft.”

  When she was nineteen, she married. She was innocent, she said, and her husband was a bad man. The day before their wedding, he was with another woman. Later he openly brought his girlfriends home to humiliate her, to prove that her beauty and her pride were worth nothing. When she ran away with the man who would become my father, her husband had her jailed. The Shanghai tabloids covered her trial for months, and all the city girls admired her front-page photos. “They cried for me,” she avowed. “They don’t know me, but they thought I too pretty to have such bad life.”

  Glam shot of me at age twelve, with my cat Fufu.

  Beauty ruined her own mother as well. A rich man spotted my grandmother when she was newly widowed, strolling by a lakeside. “She was exquisite, like a fairy,” my mother reported. The man forced the widow to become his concubine, thus consigning her to a life of disgrace. After she gave birth to his baby son, my grandmother killed herself by swallowing raw opium.

  Although my mother chastised my adolescent beauty, she sometimes lamented my lack of it. “Too bad you got your father’s feet,” she would say. She wondered why I had not inherited any of the good features of her face, and pointed out that my nostrils and lips were too coarse, my skin too dark. When I was nineteen, after a car accident left my nose and mouth askew, she told me she was sorry that she could not afford the plastic surgery to fix this, as well as my misshapen left ear. By then I didn’t care that I would never meet my mother’s standards of beauty. I had a boyfriend who loved me.

  In the last years of my mother’s life, when she had developed Alzheimer’s disease, she never forgot that she was a beauty. I could always make her giggle by telling her how pretty she was, how I wished I had been born with her good looks. She whispered back that some of the other women in the assisted-living residence were jealous of her for the same reason. But as she lost her ability to reason and remember, she also came to believe that my face had changed.

  “You look like me,” she said. I was moved to tears to hear her say this. Time and age had allowed us to come closer. Now we had the same lines formed by cautious half-smiles. We had the same loss of fat above the innocent eye, the same crimped chin holding back what we really felt. My psyche had molded itself into my mother’s face.


  Since my mother died, I find myself looking in the mirror more often than I did when I was twelve. How else is my face changing? If beauty is bad luck, why do I still want it? Why do I wish for reasons to be vain? Why do I long to look like my mother?

  • the most hateful words •

  The most hateful words I have ever said to another human being were to my mother. I was sixteen at the time. They rose from the storm in my chest and I let them fall in a fury of hailstones: “I hate you. I wish I were dead. . . .”

  I waited for her to collapse, stricken by what I had just said. She was still standing upright, her chin tilted, her lips stretched in a crazy smile. “Okay, maybe I die too,” she said between huffs. “Then I no longer be your mother!” We had many similar exchanges. Sometimes she actually tried to kill herself by running into the street, holding a knife to her throat. She too had storms in her chest. And what she aimed at me was as fast and deadly as a lightning bolt.

  For days after our arguments, she would not speak to me. She tormented me, acted as if she had no feelings for me whatsoever. I was lost to her. And because of that, I lost, battle after battle, all of them: the times she criticized me, humiliated me in front of others, forbade me to do this or that without even listening to one good reason why it should be the other way. I swore to myself I would never forget these injustices. I would store them, harden my heart, make myself as impenetrable as she was.

  I remember this now, because I am also remembering another time, just a few years ago. I was forty-seven, had become a different person by then, had become a fiction writer, someone who uses memory and imagination. In fact, I was writing a story about a girl and her mother, when the phone rang.