The Opposite of Fate (35 page)

“Don’t make it too commercial.”

“Don’t disappoint the readers you’ve already won over.”

“Make sure it doesn’t look like a sequel.”

“But what about Updike? What about stories that multiply like Rabbit’s?”

“Seriously, what are the themes that will shape your oeuvre?”

“What’s an oeuvre?”

“Forget oeuvre. Don’t even think about themes.”

“Just don’t make it exotic. That’s too obvious.”

“Just make sure the men are portrayed in positive roles this time.”

“No, no, if you think about political correctness, you’re dead.”

“Think about sources of inspiration.”

“Don’t
think about the advance.”

“Don’t
think about how much every single word on this page is worth.”

“Don’t think.”

With all these imaginary people weighing me down, I developed a pain in my neck, which later radiated to my jaw, resulting in constant gnashing, then two cracked teeth, and a huge dental bill. The pain then migrated down my back, making it difficult for me to sit up straight during the long hours necessary for writing a Second Book. And while I was struggling to sit in my chair, with hot packs wrapped around my waist, I did not write fiction: I wrote speeches—thirty, forty, fifty of them, all about the old book, a book that was rapidly becoming the source of my irritations.

And when I was not writing speeches, I was giving them. And when I was not giving speeches, I was answering telephone calls or responding to letters asking me to appear at a fund-raiser, to give a talk at a university, to blurb the book of a first-time novelist, to donate money to a worthy cause, to judge a writing contest, to teach at a creative-writing workshop, to serve on a panel on the Asian-American experience, to write an introduction to someone’s book, and so on and so forth. For a while, I averaged a dozen requests a day. For a while, I tried to answer them all. I said yes to many. But I also said no to many: No to being a judge for the Miss Universe contest. No to posing for a Gap ad. Thanks but no thanks to the five or six people who offered to let me write their complete life stories, fifty-fifty on the royalties since I was already a proven author. And when I found that I still had no time to write, that fully nine months out of the past year had been spent on the road and in strange hotel rooms, that I had no more than three consecutive days at any given time to write fiction, I started to say no to all of the requests. I wrote long, guilt-ridden letters of apology. And when I had written about a book’s worth of apologies, I moved and changed my phone number.

I
n between my bouts of back pain, jet lag, and guilt, I did start writing my Second Book, or rather, my second
books.
For example, I wrote eighty-eight pages of a book about the daughter of a scholar in China who accidentally kills a magistrate with a potion touted to be the elixir of immortality. I wrote fifty-six pages of a book about a Chinese girl orphaned during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. I wrote ninety-five pages about a
girl who lives in northeast China during the 1930s with her missionary parents. I wrote forty-five pages about using English to revive the dead Manchu language and the world it described on the plains of Mongolia. I wrote thirty pages about a woman disguised as a man who becomes a sidewalk scribe to the illiterate workers of San Francisco’s Chinatown at the turn of the twentieth century.

By my rough estimation, the outtakes must now number close to a thousand pages. Yet I don’t look on those pages as failed stories. I see them as my own personal version of cautionary tales—what can happen if I
do
watch out, what can go wrong if I write as the author everyone thought I had become and not as the writer I truly was. What I found myself writing was a Second Book based on what I thought various people wanted—something fairy tale–like, or exotic, or cerebral, or cultural, or historical, or poetic, or simple, or complex. Simultaneously, I found myself writing the imagined review that the book was clichéd, sentimental, contrived, didactic, pedantic, predictable, and—worst of all, for the literary writer—a saga, perfect for a miniseries.

Perhaps these stories would have, or should have, died of their own accord before they could have reached their own happy or unhappy ending. But some of the stories could have been saved, the weedy bits trimmed away, as with any writing, until the true seed could be found, then taken as the core of the real book. It could have been a single image, part of a character, an imagined sound.

But those books were not meant to become anything more than a lesson to me on what it takes to write fiction: persistence
imposed by a limited focus. The focus of a pool player, who sees none of the posturing of the opponent, only the trajectory of the object ball to its pocket. The focus required of a priest, a nun, a convict serving a life’s sentence.

What I am talking about is idealistic, of course—to think that any writer could really ignore praise, criticism, phone calls, dinner invitations, let alone a spot on the rug, a spice rack in need of alphabetical organization. All these things demand attention.

So what I did was more mundane. I let the answering machine take my calls. I put on earphones and listened to the same music day in and day out to obliterate my censoring voice. And I wrote with persistence, telling myself that no matter how bad the story was, I should simply go on like a rat in a maze, turning the corner when I arrived there. And so I started to write another story, about a woman who was cleaning a house, the messy house I thought I should be cleaning. After thirty pages, the house was tidy, and I had found a character I liked. I abandoned all the pages about the tidy house. I kept the character and took her along with me to another house. I wrote and then rewrote six times another thirty pages, and found a question in her heart. I abandoned the pages and kept the question and put that in my heart. I wrote and rewrote one hundred fifty pages and then found myself at a crisis point. The woman had turned sour on me. Her story sounded like one long complaint. I felt sick for about a week. I couldn’t write. I felt like the rat who had taken the wrong turn at the beginning and had scrambled all this way only to reach a dead end. It appeared that my strategy simply to plow ahead was ill fated.

Who knows where inspiration comes from? Perhaps it arises
from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of muses. Whatever the case, one day I found myself asking, “But
why
is she telling this story?” And she answered back: “Of course I’m crabby! I’m talking, talking, talking, no one to talk to. Who’s listening?” And I realized: A story should be a gift. She needs to
give
her story to someone. And with that answer, I was no longer bumping my nose against a dead-end maze. I leapt over the wall and on the other side mustered enough emotional force to pull me through to the end.

So what I have written finally is a story told by a mother to her daughter, now called
The Kitchen God’s Wife.
I know there are those who will say, “Oh, a mother-daughter story, just like
The Joy Luck Club.
” I happen to think the new book is quite different from the old. But yes, there is a mother, there is a daughter. That’s what found me, even as I tried to run away from it.

I wish I could say that was the end of writing my Second Book, that I found my inspiration, and the rest was clickety-clack on the keyboard. But no, that happens only in fiction. In real life, I had hundreds of moments of self-doubt. I deleted hundreds of pages from my computer’s memory. And one incident made me laugh out loud. When I was still some two hundred pages from finishing the book, a friend called with my first “review.” It turned out that a woman in a book club in Columbus, Ohio, had stood up at the end of a discussion on
The Joy Luck Club
and announced with great authority: “Well, I just read Amy Tan’s second book, and believe me, it’s not
nearly
as good as the first!”

I still wonder what book the woman in Ohio read. Was this indeed proof of the apocryphal tale of publishing that puts fear
in every writer’s heart—that you’re doomed to fail before you even start? No matter, because I would be the first to agree with the woman in Columbus. My second book was awful. After all, even I couldn’t bear to finish it—that tale about the elixir of immortality. And the third book—about the orphan girl who becomes a con artist—that wasn’t very good either. Thumbs down also on my fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh books. But the eighth book—eight is always a lucky number—the eighth book is
The Kitchen God’s Wife.
And regardless of what others may think, it is my favorite.

How could it not be? I had to fight for every single character, every image, every word. And the story is, in fact, about a woman who does the same thing: she fights to believe in herself. She does battle with myths and superstitions and assumptions—then casts off the fates that accompany them. She doesn’t measure herself by other people’s opinions. “What use?” she says. “Then you are always falling, falling, falling, never strong enough to stand up by yourself and go your own way.” She is no innocent. She sees her fears, but she no longer lets them chase her.

And sometimes, in secret, she lets her imagination run wild with hope. She would not mind, not really, if someone came up to her at a literary luncheon and said, “How does it feel to have written your best book second?”

• the best stories •

This was written as an introduction to
The Best American Short Stories 1999.

F
orty years ago, not long before I turned seven, my father started reading to me from a volume of three hundred sixty-five stories with an equal number of pages.

The stories were supposed to be read in sequence, a tale a day, beginning with a sledding caper on a snowy January 1. They concerned ongoing events in the lives of children who lived in lovely two-story homes on a block lined with trees whose changing leaves reflected the changing seasons. Each of the children had a father and a mother, as well as two sets of grandparents, and these older folk conveyed simple truths while taking out cookies from a hot oven or fish from a cold stream. Each day, the children had small adventures with baby animals, balloons, or bicycles. They enjoyed nice surprises, got into small troubles, and had fun problems that they could solve. They made thingamajigs out of mud and stone and paint, which wound up being the prettiest ashtrays Mommy and Daddy had ever received. Within each of those three hundred sixty-five stories, the children learned a valuable lifelong lesson, which they promised never to forget.

By the middle of the book, I had learned to read well enough to finish a book in one day. And being impatient to know what happened to the children the rest of the year, I polished off the remaining stories in one sitting. On the last day of the year, the children went sledding again, completing the happy circle. Thus I discovered that between January 1 and December 31, those children had not changed much.

I was glad, for that was the year I accumulated many worries, which I numbered on my fingers. One was for the new home we had moved to, the fifth of more than a dozen we would occupy during my childhood. Two was for the dead rat crushed in a trap that my father had showed me, believing this would assure me that it was no longer lurking in my bedroom. Three was for my playmate Rachel, whom I saw lying in a coffin while my mother whispered, “This what happen you don’t listen to mother.” Four was for the operation I had had on my tonsils, which made me think I had not listened to my mother. Five was for the ghost of my playmate, who wanted me to come live with her. Six was for my mother’s telling me that when she was a child her mother had died, and the same sad fate might befall me if I didn’t appreciate her more. Eventually, I ran out of fingers.

That year, I believed that if I could make sense of my worries, I could make them stop. And when I couldn’t, I would walk to the library. I went there often. I would choose my own books. And I would read and read, a story a day.

That girl from forty years ago has served as your guest editor for
The Best American Short Stories 1999.
I felt I should tell you about my earliest literary influences, because I’m aware that if you scan the table of contents you might suspect that I have been
reactionary in my choices. You may wonder whether they are a vote against homogeneity, a vote for diversity in preordered proportions.

This collection holds no such political agenda. The stories I have chosen are simply those I loved most among those given to me for consideration. This is not to say my literary judgment is without personal bias. I am a particular sort of reader, shaped by all kinds of influences—one of them being those bedtime stories of long ago, for I still do most of my reading in bed.

I also now realize that I dearly loved those stories. In fact, I regret that I finished them so quickly that my father no longer had to read them aloud to me each night. For what I loved most was listening to his voice. And what I love most in these twenty-one stories is the same thing. It is the voice of the storyteller.

A
t the beginning of 1998, the year the stories collected here first appeared in magazines, I found myself in an airport lounge in Seoul, waiting for a connecting flight to Beijing. For reading material, I had brought with me
The Best American Short Stories 1992,
the volume guest edited by Robert Stone. I remember settling in with a cup of ginseng tea, then glancing up and seeing, with a shock of recognition, a woman who seemed like a younger version of me. She was Asian, I would guess even Chinese-American, and she was with a husband who looked quite similar to mine in height and build and coloring. But what was more striking than these superficial similarities was what she held in her hands: the same teal-blue volume of
The Best American Short Stories 1992.

Did she notice me as well? She gave no indication that she did. Meanwhile, I had an urge to run up to her and ask all kinds of questions: Was she a writer? What story was she reading? Why had she picked this book to bring on a long flight to Asia?