Where the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination

by Amy Tan

I am a writer compelled by a subconscious neediness to know, which is different from a need to know. The latter can be satisfied with information. The former is a perpetual state of uncertainty and a tether to the past.

But in writing fiction, the

truth I seek is not a factual or scientific truth. It has to do with human nature, which is tied to my nature. It is about those things that are not apparent on the surface. When I set out to write a story, I am feeling my way through a question, often a moral one, and attempting to find a way to capture all its facets and conundrums. I don’t want an absolute answer. When writing fiction, I am trying to put down what feels true.

While writing I allow my brain to circumnavigate all the possibilities, but I am not confined to one conclusion. No truth is permanent. Irony is not an intractable fact.

Jane Eyre taught me that loneliness had more to do with being misunderstood than being alone.

The condolence flowers wilted within the week, but we kept them until the petals fell off and the stems rotted and smelled like dead flesh. Life is fleeting. You can’t hang on to it. That was the meaning of those flowers.

So much of my understanding of myself comes together through metaphoric imagery. One thing is like another. It is not the physical likeness. It is the emotional core of the situation, the feeling of what happens.

Whatever imagination is, I am grateful for its elasticity and willingness to accommodate whatever comes along, for giving me flotillas of imagery circumnavigating a brain that finds emotional

resonance in almost anything. I just have to let go of self-consciousness for it to spill out freely, as if all I am doing is listening to music.

If I ignore the need to silence myself, I eventually feel mentally claustrophobic, as if I’m on a crowded elevator that stops at no floor.

in heightened situations, the vagus nerve releases a hormone, norepinephrine, into the part of the brain known as the amygdala, where the strongest emotional memories and their original reactions are stored. The more fearful the experience the greater the surge of norepinephrine into the amygdala, and that increases the amygdala’s ability to store vivid, more strongly felt, lasting memories. They are called visceral reactions for a reason: the viscera react subconsciously when memory of the traumatic moment rises, often unexpectedly. For assault victims, the popped balloon instantly brings back the moment they were shot. This is not where you’ll find happy memories of birthday parties or trips to the zoo—unless the birthday cake exploded and the lion escaped the cage and ate your ear. In the amygdala reside the horror stories of our lives: the worst experiences we’ve had.

Everyone has them, big and little frights, emotional pain long buried. Invariably I am surprised when they rise up, often when writing fiction. One was shocking: my mother on the verge of killing me. How could I have forgotten that? It wasn’t my conscious choice to forget. My subconscious shoved those memories to the back of the vault, having decided on my behalf that it was best for the sake of my well-being.

The protective subconscious soothes: there, there, it’s over, no use dwelling on it. How does it decide what it should hide, what it should protect me from? Maybe it was necessary to forget when I was younger, but surely age and hindsight have removed the danger. Who wants to go back into the haunted house to see chopped-off heads and the ghosts who own them? I do. I want to find those moments that my subconscious has hidden. I am more than curious—and it’s not because I’m a fiction writer who seeks a good story to write about. What’s in there is what made me a fiction writer, someone who has an insatiable need to know the reasons why things happened. In the amygdala are vast stores of disappointments and devastations, pain and wreckage. There are those moments when I was lost in a store or on the streets, and the imagined reason was not simply that I had gone off in the wrong direction. I was unloved and had been abandoned. The bad stuff gave me the emotional reactions I have today—my quirks of personality, my volatility and secretiveness, my sense of shame and indignation, my fears and obsessions, and my expansiveness or constriction of hope. Those memories made my imagination an at-the-ready survival mechanism. I want to know what those experiences were.

Even if I never consciously recall the true event, I am already glad to have found the heart of it, what was necessary at some point in my life to survive by making sense of what is before me. Those are the genuine emotions. The fictional mind wandered and found them. The writer can put them into a story that never happened, and yet did in the deepest of ways.

She was always looking for answers to why things happened, and by looking for guilt, she found it.

But when I was grown, she was inextricably part of the way I thought and observed, and to wish she

were not my mother would be like wishing I were a different person.

And yet much of my writing, I realize, is about uncertainty—the heartbreaking moments when something is not clear, when the situation is changing, when a truth turns into a half-truth and then a lie. My childhood with its topsy-turvy emotions has, in fact, been a reason to write. I can lay it squarely on the page and see what it was. I can understand it and see the patterns.

I would have pointed out that the first time “In God We Trust” was used it was on a penny in 1864, not when the United States was established. It took a while for those words to be added to a nickel, and much longer before they were added to a dollar bill. Trusting in God when it came to money matters did not make it a historic American position, I would have said. And the reason it supplanted E Pluribus Unum was because of McCarthyism fears. It was a Commie Pinko litmus test. If a man coughed in trying to get out the words “In God We Trust,” he was un-American. It was adopted in 1956, only seven years before he gave his sermon, which was a rather brief amount of time to describe it as a “historic American position.” The words “under God,” were not added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954.

more-inclusive world: something about the Tower of Babel and discordant voices, something about our need for an interpreter of all the languages so that we could hear

what we had in common.

His need to find meaning and to provide compassion led to the ministry. My need for meaning and to show compassion led to my writing stories.

Voice has more to do with a character’s subconscious running over her conscious self, and her observations as that happens. The narrator unfolds the story naturally and seamlessly—however, to make that appear so, I have to use contrivance in an artful way, which is more difficult than the result would suggest. The voice also has to do with how much she recognizes herself as the story progresses.

So, by voice, I mean more the mind of the character and her identity, how she perceives herself in the world she inhabits,

it is essential to make a first-person narrator likeable, yet flawed.

The sense of the story is not chronological, but looping. It’s more the sensibility in Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths—infinite possibilities, coincidences that are recurrences, a realization that the sense and meaning of anything is not linear, does not follow prescribed order, but branches out of its own accord.

personal questions about identity: what we mean by identity, and what is set by circumstance, birth, what can be changed, how dramatic changes affect us, what we wind up believing as the way things happen in the world. How beliefs affect what we do, can beliefs be changed, what underlies them, what is impossible to undo, how does a dual identity imposed by society affect one’s perception of self.