The Joy Luck Club

by Amy Tan

Fiction is a portal to a deeper understanding of myself, and when I went through it the first time, I knew I would write fiction the rest of my life.

This was not superstition or delusion. It was the permanent grief of an inconsolable girl who was left an orphan at age nine.

Like a Geiger counter, fiction veers relentlessly toward truth.

Storytelling was my mother’s purgative for her misery.

She would yank me on a tour of her past, meandering through rooms, describing who was there, what lies were said, who was genuine, or who was both greedy and sneaky. She could see through them all, and she taught me the signs.

When I finally started writing fiction at age thirty-three, I understood that the stories I was writing came from unshakable obsessions, deep emotions, and a desperate need to be understood. The past was ever present. And the way to a story and the truth within it was to feel the emotions.

But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.

I wonder what Auntie An-mei did to inspire a lifelong stream of criticism from my mother. Then again, it seemed my mother was always displeased with all her friends, with me, and even with my father. Something was always missing. Something always needed improving. Something was not in balance. This one or that had too much of one element, not enough of another.

The East is where things begin, my mother once told me, the direction from which the sun rises, where the wind comes from.

Auntie Ying has always been the weird auntie, someone lost in her own world. My mother used to say, “Auntie Ying is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening.”

That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.

I shrieked with delight at my shadow’s own cleverness. I ran to the shade under the tree, watching my shadow chase me. It disappeared. I loved my shadow, this dark side of me that had my same restless nature.

“My fate and my penance,” she began to lament, pulling her long fingers through her hair, “to live here on the moon, while my husband lives on the sun. So that each day and each night, we pass each other, never seeing one another, except this one evening, the night of the mid-autumn moon.”

My mother believed in God’s will for many years. It was as if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said “fate,” because she couldn’t pronounce that “th” sound in “faith.” And later, I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you’re in

I could not sleep for many nights. And later, I found I had an ability: to not listen to something meaningless calling to me.