The Opposite of Fate Read online

  According to family lore, he immediately cabled her back, saying, “Yes, come!” Yet I imagine he must have taken a few minutes or even hours to weigh his obligation to her and his future obligations to the ministry. Could he marry the woman with whom he had committed adultery? Could he, a moral example to his flock, bear to be reminded of their sin for the rest of his life? And what would his parishioners think if his wife was a divorced woman? And how could she, his pampered beloved, who was accustomed to servants, to a sable coat, to smoking cigarettes, take on the austere existence of a poor minister’s wife? I imagine him praying for God to “shine Your answer upon my face.”

  He may have turned to God also for guidance on how to break the news of his impending marriage to the young women friends he escorted to church picnics and on private outings. Lucky for me, he documented those friendships well. He was an amateur photographer who prized his Rollei and spent hours in the darkroom. He liked to pose his subjects, telling them to lean against a wall and tilt their head up toward the sunlight, to drape an arm over a wooden rail and cross their ankles and point their toes—the same directions he would give me when I was a child. The photos were meticulously pasted into an album, which I would later peruse. Some of the pages, however, had no photos inserted in the black corner tabs. The photos had been removed and discreetly placed in a shoe box, which I also found—such as the close-up of a young woman lying in the grass, another one artfully running her fingers along her feet, encased in small embroidered shoes. There was nothing lewd about these poses, nothing to suggest that this outing was more than a simple photography shoot. Yet the expression in their eyes is pure adoration. I sense them holding their breath in anticipation as my father looks at them through the viewfinder.

  What do they see? He is handsome, a snazzy dresser. He knows exactly what words to say to put them at ease. He is more than your basic nice guy. Despite the fact that he is a an impoverished student at the divinity school, he is a good catch: a superb dancer, a witty conversationalist, a man given to romantic gestures and eternal pledges, plus he is about to become a minister, a man who will be certifiably of the highest morals, greatly respected, a leader. In the summer of 1949, when the minister of his church announced to the congregation that John Tan’s bride-to-be was coming from China, several young women gasped and fled the church hall in tears.

  From time to time, I have wondered how I might have turned out had my father married one of these other women. They were single, had unencumbered pasts—no sociopathic husbands or wailing abandoned daughters in the background. They were also college-educated and spoke English as well as any other American. I must have met them among the various aunties who attended the same church for more than fifty years: accomplished, kind, levelheaded women now in their seventies and eighties.

  My father sent the cable saying, “Yes, come!” to the woman who would be my mother, the Shanghai divorcée who had just been released from prison. And that was how my mother came to the United States and married my father. It was God’s will and some other woman’s bad luck.

  According to my mother, though, God had less to do with it than fate. Consider how she and my father met, she would remind me. It was around 1941, during the war. She was on a boat, making her way to the city where her husband, a Kuomintang army pilot, was based. My father and his brother were on that same boat. She and my father chatted in a friendly way. They were attracted to each other, although they did not acknowledge this. The boat docked a few days later, and they went their separate ways.

  That right there could have been the end of the egg and the sperm that would have made me. Instead four years passed. The war ended. My mother by then had tried numerous times to leave her abusive husband. “That bad man” was how she always referred to him. That bad man once put a gun to her head to force her to sign fake divorce papers. She gladly did this, no gun to her head was necessary, but immediately after she signed, he raped her.

  Meanwhile, my father was gadding about in some other part of China, happily single. Many a pushy Chinese mother tried to engage his interest in her daughter. One mother had three daughters, all of them beautiful, talented, and photogenic. I saw the pictures. Because of his excellent language skills in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin, my father was able to work for the U.S. Information Service. He wore a U.S. Army uniform and visited local newspaper stalls and bookshops, gathering any magazines or reports that made mention of the United States, good or bad. One of my uncles told me that my father was recruited by the United States to be a spy. He also said my father used to smoke and drink and was quite the playboy in China. My mother laughed off those assertions. (To this day I wonder who was right. What about the visa to the United States that I found among my father’s belongings? It said he was already married. Did he have another wife? Will I one day receive a letter announcing: “Surprise! I am your long-lost sister. Your other seven sisters and I arrive tomorrow and will stay at your house for a month or two, unless you would like us to visit longer. . . .”)

  But let us go back to 1945 and assume my mother’s version of the story is true. My father, now in his early thirties, is still single. He is working in Tientsin, in the north, thousands of miles from the southwestern river where he and my mother first met.

  My parents, John Tan and Du Ching (Daisy), Tientsin, China, 1945.

  My mother happens to be in Tientsin visiting her brother and sister-in-law, who are working underground for the Communists. She is going up the street the very moment my father is coming in the opposite direction. They bump into each other. They confess it was instant love when they met four years before, because that love has only grown stronger all this time they have been missing each other.

  This was not chance that they met twice, my mother would tell me whenever she recounted this story. It was fate. Love proved that it was. So that is how I was born to a mother with a convoluted secret past. I became the daughter of a woman who believed I was part of her fate.

  Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie’s mom down the block might say, “Honey, look both ways before crossing the street.” My mother’s version: “You don’t look, you get smash flat like sand dab.” (Sand dabs were the cheap fish we bought live in the market, distinguished in my mind by their two eyes affixed on one side of their woebegone cartoon faces.)

  The warnings grew worse, depending on the danger at hand. Sex education, for example, consisted of the following advice: “Don’t ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can’t stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill youself.”

  The consequences of not heeding my mother’s advice were grave. When I was six years old, she took me to the funeral of my playmate Rachel from down the street. As I stared at Rachel’s sunken eyes, her bloodless hands crossed over a Bible, my mother whispered to me: “This what happen you don’t listen to mother.” My mother went on to say that Rachel died because she had not washed her fruit—a health precaution I ignored too often. (Years later, when pesticides on fruit were proven to cause cancer, I learned that my mother’s warning had not been off base after all.)

  I remember a day not too long after Rachel died, when I was sitting on the piano bench, sulking. My mother was scolding me for not practicing enough, for being lazy. She went on and on about how much the lessons with Miss Towler cost, how Daddy had to work overtime. And for what—so she could listen to me make the same mistakes? She then posed an important question: “What you rather do: play piano and become famous, or play outside and become nobody?” Guess what I said.

  She was quiet for a moment and then said, “Okay, go play.” As I happily slid off the bench, I heard her mutter that from now on I could do whatever I wanted. She would no longer tell me what to do. If I didn’t want to play the piano, fine. “Forever no more obey,” she said. “Don’t matter. So
on, maybe tomorrow, next day, I dead anyway.”

  By then, I knew what dead meant, or at least what it looked like. But I didn’t yet know that my mother’s mother had killed herself in 1925. I didn’t know that my mother had seen this happen, when she was nine years old, that thereafter she would see suicide as the answer to any kind of unhappiness, that she would routinely threaten to die, sometimes weekly, sometimes daily, whenever she was displeased with me or my father or my brothers, whenever she felt slighted by her friends, whenever the milk spilled or the rice burned. I didn’t know that later her emotional terrorism would alternate between threats to kill herself or return to China and that this would lead me to think that China, like death, was an unpleasant place to go. On that day at the piano, when I was six and she first mentioned she was going to die soon, all I knew was fear.

  Because of my mother’s moods, I lived in a state of high suspense. I often thought about death, about Rachel being lifeless, about my mother’s promise that soon she would be too. I also pictured in my mind the rat my father had recently shown us wide-eyed kids in the middle of the night: the rodent’s bloody body smashed in the trap, black eyes bulging. “See,” my mother had soothed, “now you no longer be scared what will eat you.” Until then, we had imagined the rat in our house resembled a cheery creature like Mickey Mouse.

  Since death was on my mind a lot as a child, I naturally wondered about ghosts as well. In our house, we had two kinds. First, there was the one we could talk about in front of others; that would be the Holy Ghost. My father, after all, was an ordained Baptist minister. True, by the mid-1950s he had returned to electrical engineering so he could make a living wage, but his avocation was still the ministry, and he encouraged daily devotion in the family. We children were taught to believe the Holy Ghost sat at our dinner table and ate Chinese food. We laid out chopsticks and a bowl for our unseen guest at every meal.

  The second kind of ghost belonged to my mother. These ghosts were Chinese. We were not supposed to talk about them, because they were bad, of a different religion, and were specifically banned by the laws of the Holy Ghost. Yet they were there. I could sense them. My mother told me I could. One time when I was about four, I remember, she ordered me to go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. Guests had arrived and I didn’t want to go to bed, so I said, “I can’t go in there.”

  Why, my mother demanded to know.

  “I’m scared,” I lied.

  Why?

  “There’s a ghost in there.”

  Like most mothers might do, she grabbed my hand firmly and guided me to the bathroom. Most mothers would have flipped on the light switch and said, “See, there are no ghosts here—now brush your teeth.” My mother stood at the doorway and said in a voice tinged with hope and excitement: “Where are they? Show me.”

  Much to my distress, for the rest of her life she continued to believe I had a talent for seeing ghosts. When I was older, she recalled this same bathroom incident: “I never teach you this word ‘ghost.’ So must be true. You see ghost!” It didn’t matter that I insisted I could not see or hear or feel anything. She thought it admirable that I was lying to protect my invisible friends.

  She had other proof that the ghosts came to me: the fact that I knew things I wasn’t supposed to know. I don’t remember what I said or did to her to make her think this. Perhaps it was the way I said a certain name. Or maybe it was my likes and dislikes of a certain dish she cooked. My mannerisms, my preferences, my tone of voice were exactly that of someone else—that person being dead, and having died in mysterious circumstances. My mother believed in reincarnation and she believed I was someone from her past, a woman she had obviously wronged. Why else had I come back as her daughter to torment her so?

  I did not want to think of myself as a dead person. But I was also afraid to contradict my mother, for that would send her tumbling into one of her pitch-black moods, those times when she threatened to kill herself. I had already seen her try—as when she opened the car door while we were zooming down the freeway and my father had to yank her back. I was afraid that if my mother died, I would then see a real ghost.

  These were matters I could not talk about with my father. I adored him, and he adored me, but he also both adored and feared my mother. He was much more easygoing than she, and not easily riled. He told multilingual jokes and roused friends into singing after dinner. He read bedtime stories to me and my brothers with great expression. He did the Reader’s Digest “Word Power” quiz with me, making it seem the most fun a body could have. He read his sermons to me so I could serve as his best critic. He showed me his engineering homework when he was studying for his master’s, as though I could instantly absorb the intricacies of symbols and formulas. He was hardworking and loved his work, which went on seven days a week. He was an engineer, a volunteer minister, a graduate student, and the entrepreneur of an electronics business he conducted in our family room, winding electromagnetic transformers the size of LifeSavers. Only twice that I recall did he take time off, and then for only a few days, to go with us to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, and he still managed to perform a wedding along the way and visit an electronics firm that might be interested in buying the transformers he built in his “spare” time.

  As smart and strong as he was, he always gave in to my mother’s demands. That meant that every six to twelve months we had to move to another house. Whenever my mother became unhappy, she wanted to move. And once she locked on to an idea, she could not let it go, until her unhappiness permeated the entire house and she made us ill with her nonstop complaints.

  By the time I graduated from high school, I had attended eleven schools. I had learned to lose friends, to remain the loner until I finally found new ones. Each time I started at a school, I had to sit back quietly for the first month or so and observe who was popular, who was not, who was smart, who was the smartass. I had to show my new teachers that I was a good student, that I knew how to draw realistically. But I also knew not to do anything to stand out in any other way, lest I join the ranks of the pariahs. I understood that I had to be a chameleon to survive, that I should fit in quietly, and watch.

  In hindsight, I see that this was excellent training for a budding writer. It sharpened my skills of observation. It deepened my sense of alienation, which, while not a prerequisite for a writer, is certainly useful as an impetus for writing. Many of the great novels of our time are based on alienated narrators. And yet I hated those feelings of loneliness. I cried every time my father announced that we were moving. He may have prayed to God for general direction in his life, but he received the specifics from my mother to move to Oakland, Hayward, Santa Rosa, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale.

  Throughout my father’s life, he remained devoted to his beliefs in God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He practiced what he preached. He tithed ten percent. He didn’t smoke or drink or say “gee,” “gosh,” or “golly.” He prayed when he became impatient or lost his temper. He practiced charity to others. He made me feel good for giving away my best dolls to my poor cousins in Taiwan, the same cousins who today are millionaires. My father put his life in God’s hands, and he encouraged us, his children, to believe that if we had absolute faith, God would take care of the rest. Miracles would happen.

  About ten years ago, I found some of my father’s diaries. In one of his last entries, written at the end of May 1967, he stated that he still firmly believed that God would grant him a miracle and save his sixteen-year-old son from dying of a brain tumor. He had absolute faith. By my father’s own handwritten definition: “Faith is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we still cannot see it ahead of us.”

  He wrote this less than two months before my brother Peter died, and shortly after, he stopped writing. But this was due to loss of ability rather than loss of faith. By then, my father couldn’t hold a pen well enough to comment on the strange
coincidence that he too, the father of the son who had become a ghost, had been stricken with a brain tumor.

  These days I realize that faith and fate have similar effects on the believer. They suggest that a higher power knows the next move and that we are at the mercy of that force. They differ, among other things, in how you try to cull beneficence and what you do to avoid disaster. Come to think of it, those very notions are the plotlines of many novels.

  Throughout their marriage, my mother, the minister’s wife, publicly avowed her trust in God. The other day I came upon a letter she wrote to a family friend in 1967, in which she commented about my father’s faith during his illness: “Most of the time, he spent in search of God, trusting deeply that God would take care of him. We were both easily moved to tears, for we felt deeply and were warmly touched by the warmth of the love that so many friends freely gave to us. We know from this that it is a blessing that is overflowing from our Lord.”

  The words are actually not my mother’s writing. They are mine, written as a fifteen-year-old girl taking dictation, rendered with almost as much repetition as my mother provided to me, her reluctant scribe. Our sessions would go something like this: “Amy-ah, put this down. Say you daddy all the time, searching searching searching God, why this happen? Amy-ah, you searching too? Why this brain tumor second time? No, don’t write this down, I just asking you. Why so many bad things happen?. . . What you mean, don’t know? You don’t think! You don’t care! And why you don’t cry? You daddy, me, we cry so much. But you—look you face—no feeling! What’s wrong with you, you don’t cry? And why you make you hair that way? You look like Japanese girl. Ugly . . . Okay, put this down . . . Friends they so good to us. You daddy and I, we cry, tears so much overflowing, for sadness, for thanks so much.”

  It was torture to write those letters. I had to compose the thank-you notes to friends for coming to the hospital, the cards acknowledging them for coming first to my brother’s funeral and then to my father’s. Extra-long letters went to those who sent memorial donations.