Note: Usually I reserve my book responses for iluv2read, but I may start cross-posting them here… Not sure yet.

The Kitchen God’s Wife was not my favorite Amy Tan book, but I did love it. More than any other, this focused on the mother’s story in China, and it was a wrenching one. (Usually there’s a pretty good balance between the mother and daughter generations.) Because of what I read in The Opposite of Fate, Amy Tan’s memoir of sorts, I found myself thinking of this as her own mother’s true story, which may or may not be a fair assumption. And my heart broke for this woman and all that she endured, all her suffering, the lows and — thankfully — the eventual highs. It made me wonder about my own mother, how little I know, how much she might have to tell me. Will we wait until we think it’s almost too late to finally share all our secrets with one another? Will I have to reconstruct her life in a novel in order to understand her?

Anyway, good book. Check out my iluv2read post for favorite passages.

The book had been more difficult to write than she expected. The swirl of important ideas and powerful epiphanies seemed diminished on the page. They became fixed words and were no longer fresh internal debate. Still, she finished, and was excited and nervous to see what people would think, how her work might change their lives. It could have a ripple effect. She did not want to get her expectations up too high, yet writing about personal discovery could prove to be her calling.

And then she could not find a publisher. She kept sending out the manuscript and received only rejections or never heard back. It had been a waste of time to write the damn thing. She was going to throw it in the trash–it pained her to see it, this big lump of wasted time. But then she reconsidered. She was stronger than that. It wasn’t a failure. She simply had not come out of the jungle yet. She needed perspective. She needed to revise her life before she could revise her book.

No more excuses about obligations. No more thinking she was indispensable. She bought a ticket for Paris. On the plane, she conjugated verbs that would soon have real meaning: Je crie au monde. J’ai crié au monde. Je crierai pour que le monde m’entende. I will shout to the world to hear me.

- Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning, p 459

After recently reading The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan, I’ve come to the realization that she is without question one of my favorite authors. And given that I’ve only read one or maybe two books by the other people I’d put in that category, she’s probably got the most legit claim. Her and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Anyway, I really liked and identified with what she had to say (in an interview in the Sonoma Independent) about why she writes.

“I think that the other reason that I’ve become a storyteller is that I was raised with so many different conflicting ideas that it posed many questions for me in life, and those questions became a filter for looking at all my experiences and seeing them from different angles. That’s what I think that a storyteller does, and underneath the surface of the story is a question or a perspective or a nagging little emotion, and then it grows.”

My whole life I’ve been able to sympathize with both the black and white of life. If I were a politician, I’d probably be accused of “flip-flopping,” but I prefer to think of it as exercising my prerogative as a woman to change my mind, or attributing it to my halved nature (Chinese and American, Scorpio and Sagittarius). Only in the past five years or so have I come to the conclusion that the truth usually lies in the gray. But wherever something sits on the spectrum, I think that my compulsion to empathize is part of what fuels my interest in so many different characters and stories, and that my inability to let something go until I’ve resolved it is what keeps me working and writing.

More from Tan:

“Conflicts. Tragedies in life,” she concludes, beginning to list her own biography. “Difficulties. A mother who was depressed. A father and a brother who died. Being the only Chinese girl in a school. Moving every year. Graduating from a private school in Switzerland among rich people and not being rich.

“You know, those are the things that make you either psychotic or a fiction writer.”

Exactly! Well, not exactly. But in other words, just be glad I’m not crazy.

Yes, yes, I’m sure it was 1864. I remember now, because the year sounded very strange. Libby-ah, just listen to it: Yi-ba-liu-si. Miss Banner said it was like saying: Lose home, slide into death. And I said, No, it means: Take hope, the dead remain. Chinese words are good and bad this way, so many meanings, depending on what you hold in your heart. (p 32)

More from/about Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses at iluv2read.

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Andy and I are off to Disney World tomorrow morning. See ya next week!

Rule #1: Do your own thing.

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Every now and then, I get into a phase. Some might call it obsession. Me, I just call it enthusiasm.

Among my past phases: Sanrio, the Spice Girls, boys, and Harry Potter. Because I’m extremely nostalgic, and still a kid at heart, I will love each and every one of them until the day I die, but (thankfully) the intensity of that love will fade.

(Making room for NEW intensity!)

Right now I think my friends would agree, Dooce is my big obsession current phase.

I’ll be honest, I’m addicted. But I do think I’m learning a lot by reading each and every post in her archives. Sometimes it’s useless info (like what she was reading on July 30th of 2004) but sometimes it’s truly brave, or hopeful, or heartbreaking (in the most beautiful way), or just plain hysterical.

Her ability to turn anything — the ordinary – into a captivating story, it’s spectacular. It’s what I’m enjoying, and what I’m trying to learn.

That’s why I originally had “learning to be funny one dooce at a time” as the subtitle in my header image. But as Andy pointed out, that sort of gives the impression that I’m copying her, that I’m not that original, that I’m not doing my own thing. And that isn’t true.

(I’ve since changed the subtitle to “always leaping before she looks,” which IS true. I plan to change the header every few months anyway.)

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I FINISHED ANOTHER SHORT STORY!! YAAAAHHH!!!

Now I have to revise.

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In general, I don’t do well with things that are hyped up. Like, god forbid I take part in a trend, right? So I refuse and resist beyond all reason (just ask Angie) and I deny myself the wonder of things like capri pants, ballet flats, and Harry Potter. FOOL! (And yes, Angie, you were right about all of the above.)

In short: me? Not so good with the fads. And in literature, writing in the first person seems to be a very, very big fad right now. It’s something I’ve always sort of thought of as a cop-out, like, shouldn’t you be able to tell a story without having to pretend that YOU are actually telling the story?

BUT. (Butt!) I’ve read a lot of great books written in first person (like anything by Paulo Coelho and Amy Tan) and I know that this stupid prejudice of mine is just that: a STUPID PREJUDICE.

Not only that, but I’ve been thinking. And let me tell you, me thinking only leads to bad things. (Often tears. My own, of course. I don’t make other people cry.) In this case, the bad thing I thought of is that I probably need to rewrite The Good Daughters. In first person.

(I bet if I’d asked Angie, she would have told me that from the start.)

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“The problem with being funny,” she said, “is that then no one thinks of you sexually. Unless you’re funny about sex. But personally, I’d rather sex be good than funny.”

I’m not sure whether I can work that into a story or not, but it came to me in the shower a few nights ago, so I thought I’d share. I guess it’s part of my attempt to learn how to be funny. I think I still have quite a way to go…

(Why is humor so difficult for me??)

In other news, I finished Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate on my business trip last week, and I was blown away. It had been sitting on my shelf for the past 4 years (I kid you not) and now I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time before experiencing it. I give it a 5 out of 5 stars (as reflected on both GoodReads and Amazon) and highly recommend it to anyone who

• likes Amy Tan
• has an Asian parent (or knows one decently well)
• has a motherAND/OR
• likes good books.

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