>> Hello. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Wonderful to see you all here. My name is Marie Arana, and I am the literary director of this festival. Very happy to welcome you here. ^M00:00:12 [ Applause ] ^M00:00:17 Thank you so much for coming out. Now, sitting next to me, I want to announce, is not Secretary Madeleine Albright. [laughter] >> Amy Tan: I will be talking about fascism, however. >> And before we start, I just want to take a moment to say a very big thank you to our sponsors and donors. This festival would not happen without the funding from people like you, sponsors, donors. Go down to the expo floor, please tell them thank you very much for putting this festival on. No amount is too small, so if you're willing to contribute, we ask that you do. It is, it takes a lot of money to put this on to give it to you for free. So, thank you very much. Yes. [applause] We want to keep doing that. We want to keep giving it to you for free. Now this is, I'm sitting next to Amy Tan, who is the only author at this festival, we've got 115 authors here today, who was chosen by PBS' The Great American Read. ^M00:01:28 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:35 Chosen as a book by the public, by the American public, and there's going to be voting on all of the 100 books that were chosen, chosen for having written a book, it was the Joy Luck Club, that changed their lives. And yeah, wow. >> Amy Tan: I didn't--thank you whoever voted. ^M00:01:58 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:03 >> Joy Luck Club was followed of course by A Kitchen God's Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter's Daughter, all of her fiction, which has been extraordinary, and the nonfiction as well. Saving Fish from Drowning, The Valley of Amazement, and now the wonderful memoire that she's written, that she's given to us, and we're going to be talking about today. But I have to say, Amy, and I'll start with this, I am Hispanic. When I read your book, Joy Luck Club, I felt a real connection because you, it is families who come to this country bringing their own culture, bringing their own tradition, coming here with a completely different universe, and suddenly you are American, generations change, distances grow, tell us about you, how you feel about-- >> Amy Tan: I thought it, yeah, I thought it was so ironic because when I was writing that book, I thought no one is going to get this book. This is going to be so weird because are going to say nobody had a family like that, and a lot of the stories were based at least emotionally and situationally on my family, and so I was so surprised when Chinese American women or men said this book was, they identified with it. But then, as you said, I had people from all sorts of backgrounds tell me that. >> Well the interesting thing to me is that reading it and reading books like yours, Maxine Hong Kingston's Warrior Woman, these books, you realize that there's another way to think as a citizen of this country, as a part of this fantastic American experience, we all come with different heads and different histories. >> Amy Tan: I think that we also come with a similar heart, and that's where it comes from, this connection, and if you can get people to feel what you're feeling in the story, you have more of a chance to have them, this book, to be universal. I never intended it to be universal. I never intended for my emotions that were very private to, you know, link with that of other people, and it surprised me. I was grateful that they found that resonance. >> Well, I'm sure we have a lot of people in the audience who have been inspired, as I was, by your fiction and by what it says to us as a country. But now you've written this wonderful memoire. You don't call it a memoire, right? >> Amy Tan: No, no. It was a book about writing. That's originally what I thought it was, you know, people tell you what you've actually written after you've written it, including my editor, who said it's a memoire, it's, and I said no, it's a book about writing. But because it has so many examples of my writing from my real life, they ended up calling it a memoire. >> Your life has actually, and your family, and your background, and your roots, have really informed every single thing that you've written. >> Amy Tan: I try to get away from that. [laughter] But when you're writing about, you know, the way, what has shaped your writing, it's not simply the stories, the context of the stories. It has to do with the way you think, your whole cosmology of the world, and how things happen. It's what is important to you and morality and family and consciousness and also what you think about between the moment you were born and the moment you died but including the moment you died. So these go into the writing, and so I had to talk about what feeds the writing. >> Yeah, absolutely. But you said something once, or wrote something once that is coming to mind right now, which is, you said I didn't write this or write what I've written to be remembered in the minds of other people. Some writers do. You know, I want to become immortal. >> Amy Tan: I don't write for prosperity. >> I want to become immortal. >> Amy Tan: Yeah, yeah. >> You said I don't want to be, that's not why I'm writing. >> Amy Tan: Yeah, yeah. >> Why are you writing? >> Amy Tan: I want to write in the moment. I mean my whole purpose of writing is almost to capture, like a diary of myself and what I was thinking about at the time, and if I have in my mind that I'm writing for posterity, or, you know, to be in the library, somebody might look it up, you know, a hundred years from now, then I would get stuck. I would write for a different reason. And so in my mind I always have to tell myself this is for the moment, and if it ephemeral, if it's gone next year or ten years from now, that's fine. And my motives then, my intentions for writing are very clear to me. >> This book, and it really is to me, it seems a primmer for writers because it really goes into the way you think. Not only the way you think it goes into your brain. You're talking about the brain process, you're talking about amygdala, which where memory is supposedly held. And you're talking about your own sort of trepidations about the way that your brain works-- >> Amy Tan: Yeah. >> And, you know, where is it coming from and do I have it, and it's a very candid-- >> Amy Tan: You know, when people say it's candid, I think what did I say that's so candid? Or you're very brave, and I think, oh, maybe I shouldn't have said that. I wanted to know also because I was brain damaged for a while. I had Lyme disease that went into my brain, and it really made me foggy. It made it hard to remember anything, and then I became curious about how the brain--I hope you can see I recovered. I was [applause]--so one of the things that happened in thinking about the brain and how it works, I discovered in taking this sort of medication for seizures, which this is what Lyme left me with, that this medication made me too happy, which you think, well what's wrong with that. Well, if you're laughing at what people are saying, and it's not supposed to be funny, it can be rather distressing. So, I found also this had to do with neurologically something going on, and I tied it then to the idea that our brains have these emotions in them, they really are triggered also viscerally, and my stories have that too. So one of things I did was to take a visceral emotion that I had about a vague memory and then follow it. As I moved forward with it, then I would feel this, I would feel nervous, I would be aware that I was shaking or that I would have something going on in my stomach that felt uncomfortable, and I just kept following the story to see where it went, and I feel that I uncovered this very traumatic memory. Even if it did not happen exactly the way that I wrote it down, it is in essence part of my life during that time. So that is part of my writing, and you know, I say this, it's not a primmer for a lot of people. This doesn't happen to you where you go into a PTSD moment, that's okay. It is my, the thought process, the brain, and emotional, the emotional memory process that I go through in the writing. >> You say that you started this book by opening boxes and looking at letters, and as you were looking at the insides of these boxes and what they collected and the whole lifetime of and other people's lifetimes, that it was like, and I love the expression, you said it was like the force of glaciers [inaudible]. You have this image of, you know, oh my gosh, you know, whole force going on. >> Amy Tan: Things that have been frozen in time that suddenly were revealed to me. These were books of memorabilia from my family. I actually had 80 boxes, and I took it down to seven, and I had, you have to realize, I was desperate to finish this book, and I was writing a chapter a day, which is absolutely insane. It usually takes me years to write a book. I was going to finish it in about four months, and it was an experiment in part. So I would take things out of this, and it would be a letter from my mother to me, and it was a letter when she was really upset and hinting she was going to kill herself. And I took that, and I wrote something. And it might have been about her language and something about what she was saying underlying these words. Or I'd pick something up, and I'd suddenly realize my parents were illegal immigrants, oh my! You know. And that fed into some of the things they said to me that turned out to be lies. >> Right, right. >> Amy Tan: And one of them was taking an old report card out from an art teacher that said about my art, which I loved, I wanted to be an artist, she has no imagination, [laughter] which is essential for a deeper creative level. So I gave that dream up. Thank god he didn't say that about writing. >> I want to point out that she has one of her sketches in the book, at least one-- >> Amy Tan: Yeah. >> Of a, of a, of a, of a-- >> Amy Tan: A bird. >> Of a bird. With every little feather in it. It's a wonderful sketch. ^M00:12:13 >> Amy Tan: I draw every day now. I'm into nature journaling. But part of was something revealed to me in this book which was that so much of my life, my childhood was governed by expectations and the idea that something would become public. And I still am governed by that slightly, you know, the idea that maybe if I write something, some people are going to read it. But with the drawing, I do this for myself, and I don't have to show it to anybody, or I show it, and it could be really bad, and I don't care, you know, because they did it for pure pleasure. No one is paying for it, you know. So that was another thing I discovered in the book. There was one, it was almost a devastating discovery during the writing of the book, and it was about being told that I was going to be a doctor when I was six years old. Somebody had tested me, and then that was my parents, and my parents said to me, she said you're going to be a doctor. And then they say, and so you can be a concert pianist and a doctor. [laughter] And then she said, but she said you're not very good with words. Your English is not that good, but that's okay, you don't need a lot of words for being a doctor and, you know, playing the piano. Well, this prediction or mandate followed me for the rest of my life. I mean even to the moment that I was writing this book and I realized every time I felt inadequate or dumb or that I had never lived up to this expectation-- >> I hope you still don't feel a failure. >> Amy Tan: It's not that I'm a failure in comparison to what other people might perceive, but within my mind, there is always something there, and it has, there's no, the problem is there's no clear notion in my mind of what that is supposed to be that I am supposed to reach and say, yes, I fulfill this potential. So because it's so vague, you know, I'm always not there, and I did, I did sort of erase it partially when I came across this lie that I never was supposed to be a doctor. And it turned out the test, this is a great thing about the internet, you can find out this test I took in the first grade, and the woman came every year for two years, I mean twice a year for five years, and then she stopped, which made me think that I flunked and she wasn't going to come anymore. It was a different kind of test. I found it on the internet by googling 1958, first grade, Oakland, IQ longitudinal, and the first thing that came up, it was a landmark research on kids who read early, and guess what? Out of 5003 kids, there were 49 who could read early, and I was one of them. And my parents had lied-- >> And the school didn't like that? >> Amy Tan: Well, you weren't supposed to teach kids to read. There was a, you know, a prohibition. Parents are not supposed to teach because you were going to teach the wrong methods and your child would be a problem child from then on, you know, a chronic bed wetter or whatever. And people followed this to the hilt. I mean kids today, they read text messages. You know, they're, they're, is insane. At age two they're, you know, they're reading. >> So were your parents terrified that they had an early reader on their hands? >> Amy Tan: No, they would not say to the woman, and she kept asking them, how did she learn to read? And they said, oh, you know, her brother is brilliant. Her brother is so smart, and he didn't learn to read. He started first grade. He followed the rules, and he was doing great later. No, we don't--and finally it came out that I had been copying his textbook and I'd say to my brother, what does this mean, and my brother was teaching our cousins, who didn't speak English, and he had a little classroom. You have to imagine, here's a little six-year-old boy telling our older cousins, no, wrong, you know. [laughter] And I was sitting there in the classroom. So I have learned to read probably from that. >> It's an amazing story, and your parents were worried because, you know, they thought, because they were illegal immigrants. >> Amy Tan: Yeah. >> This was going to compromise them. >> Amy Tan: That's what I, that's what I realized. You know, I always thought my father was so honest because he was a minister. He was an electrical engineer by, you know, to make his money to support us, but he was by devotion a Baptist minister, and I thought, how could he have lied. And they lied about a number of things, and I realized then when I found the documentation that they were illegal and there were these letters with the word deportation that they were among many people before and today who have to lie in certain ways, not morality ways, but in ways, having to do with documents, so they don't imperil themselves and their families. So lying and saying we don't know how she learned to read, you know. We followed the rules. We knew we should, they said that like three times. We knew what the rules were. We didn't break them, you know. And it was her brother who taught her. [laughter] Send him back to China. [laughter] >> By the way, speaking of going back to China, I want to ask you this, as a, you know, I was born in Peru, and I came to this country when I was 10 years old. My mother was American. My father was Peruvian, and every time I went back to Peru after that it was, well you're not really Peruvian, you know, you're an American. You're not really, you know, you're not one of us anymore. >> Amy Tan: Yeah. >> Do you have this experience? >> Amy Tan: I grew up with that. I grew up with a sense of shame, both ways. Shame that I was Chinese in a school that was primarily white and then shame, you know, when I went among family friends who were Chinese or in a restaurant or any kind of situation around Chinese people that I couldn't speak Chinese, that I knew nothing about China, and I had trepidations about writing the Joy Luck Club because people would say you know nothing. You got it all wrong. Even my mother had said when we first went to China that, I was, this was how naïve I was. They said, you know, when we go, what if they think I'm one of them and they won't let me come back. She just said, you know, they just look at you and the way you talk and the way you walk and they know you don't belong. Later, she claimed, and a lot of people claimed that I was really so Chinese, you know. My Chinese did improve because I have half sisters who speak nothing but Chinese, and it came back, so I know that I spoke it when I was a child. It was in there, the roots of that language. And now when I speak Chinese people say, oh, you're so good. My Chinese is not that good, but, you know, everybody thinks that I'm just so talented at being Chinese. ^M00:19:38 [ Laughter ] ^M00:19:42 >> Coincidence there. This memoir, sorry--this book about writing-- >> Amy Tan: It's okay, it's shorter to say memoir. >> Is actually, was actually an unintended memoir if I can say that, because it's, tell us how it started. It started with a conversation through emails with your editor, Dan Halburn. >> Amy Tan: Yeah, yeah. >> I would, my editor and I are very good friends. He is a dream editor. He's one of those, if you're not yet published, you think you're going to have an editor like this person who loves everything that's going on in your life, loves your husband, loves, you know, wants to know what you had for dinner, and we would write these emails, and he so much enjoyed the emails, and he was often saying, how did you think of that? Or I loved what--and he decided we should do a book about our emails. He said it would be easy. You know, we'll just choose a bunch of them, put them in a book, and that's it. And I thought, great. Well, I started looking through them, and I said this is going to be a book about egotism. And it's going to be so boring, and I told him, I said, we can't do this. And because I had already signed this contract and something had gone out in the world that said this book is coming, I had to put a book together about, and think of the book, the emails were a lot about writing and our relationship as a writer and the kinds of things I would talk about as, you know, my insecurities as a writer. So, you know, this is going to be a book about writing. And in that book, there are some very, very rough pages where I just wrote them as I was, they were part of the book. I just wrote them down, and I just put them in. But there are some emails. I told Dan, I said, okay, you know, you suggested this book. I'm going to put them in, and we're going to include yours, and you tell me which ones. And then he freaked out, and he said, okay. I'm going to choose the email. So in the book there are a number of them about our early relationship as a writer and editor talking about the book, and I think it's good insight also into the kind of difficulties that a writer has. That it's not perfect, and if anything, people say, well can you just write this for me. They don't realize it is far more difficult to write a little piece as a writer than it is for any other person because you sweat over every word, and you think it's horrible, and you try doing it again and again. But the emails, they were just off the top of my head because they were just to Dan. And so I put them in there. You'll get to see how insecure I am as a writer. >> It's a very revealing book, and I think in the process of your talking about writing, you tell us about your life because you really didn't become a writer until you were in your 30s. >> Amy Tan: Yeah. >> You've been a linguist. You've been an educator. You've been a bartender. >> Amy Tan: Pizza slinger. Yeah. >> Pizza slinger, car hop. All of you out there who have jobs like that, you can also become Amy Tan, because these are the things that feed you in the process of being who you are. And the corporate, you were writing corporate materials and things like that, that sort of thing. >> Amy Tan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> So how, tell us a little bit about your decision to actually site down and write fiction and how that came to you and how the impetus for writing the Joy Luck Club actually happened. >> Amy Tan: There was no single moment that I said I'm going to write fiction. It's almost hard to think, you know, if there was a one day revelation, but one of the times when I was motivated was after reading Louise Erdrich's book, Love Medicine, which is about a community of people in there and different voices, and I realized that I had these stories, but they were all in different voices. Now, they were primarily my voice, but I had different ways that I wanted to see my life, through the voice of mother, daughter, and different situations. There was another moment when I started reading again, and I was writing the corporate business articles, and I was, I was good at it, and I have to admit, I was good at writing the corporate things about, or employing motivation materials, you know, why you should work harder for the same amount of money. Very, very good at that, and I had a lot of clients as a freelancer, but I was unhappy. I would go down in my office every day and I said, will I be doing this in in 10 years. And I was making good money, so it was hard to walk away, and I said, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Then I would sit down and I'd start working. And I knew that I liked to write, and so I thought, well maybe I'll do this other kind of writing, and I started, and I wrote things that were not very genuine. I made myself a German American girl, and, you know, rich parents and all that kind of stuff. And it wasn't good. It was not very authentic. And then I gave up on the idea that this would ever be published. I'd just do it for myself, and I started writing things that eventually would be part of the Joy Luck Club, and I went to writer's workshops. It wasn't a very good story. I had a lot of problems with it, but the questions that were asked of me that I had asked of myself and what I discovered about myself made me realize that week I was going to write fiction the rest of my life. I was not going to get published. I wasn't delusional. I said, I will keep at this, so it's really important, just the way that I'm drawing every day. This is important for me. I don't have to have it out there in the world, but it's important. And so I started to write with that notion. I would, and to give me a goal so that I wouldn't give up, because I have this dilatant tendency to start something and then drop it. I said, I will work to be published when I'm 70. I have a little bit to go still before I reach that goal. When I'm 70, if I get a short story published in a good literary magazine, I will be happy. That's my goal. >> You're a very adventurous soul. I know this because in this book you talk about going cave diving, spelunking. You go, you've had accidents on the Italian autostrada. You have had, you know, hotel break-ins. You've been mugged. A million things have happened to you. >> Amy Tan: That's not adventurous, that's bad luck. [laughter] Or good, because I'm alive. >> Yeah, it's live subjects to write about, but I think, you know, for all that bad luck and adventure that you've had, the greatest adventure I think is your family. The story, the treasure trove, if you were writing about a German girl with, you know, with rich parents, I mean the real treasure trove was in your family, the stories in your family, the extraordinary sort of revelations that came to you later in life about your grandmother, who was a concubine and committed suicide because she hated that life, about your mother, who was, it was an arranged marriage that she hated, and then left her children behind in China to come to the United States to be with your father-- >> Amy Tan: And kept this a secret. >> And kept it all a secret. >> Amy Tan: Yeah. >> And all of this was emerging, I assume, as you were in this process of doing your corporate newsletters and barhopping and pizza deliveries, all of this information was coming. Extraordinary stuff to write about. >> Amy Tan: Well, I always thought, you know, that my life contained nothing that would ever go into a book, that it was boring, because to me a writer, I'd read through one thing, as an English major, books only by male writers except for Virginia Woolf, that was the only one, and so I believed that you would have had to go through war, like Kurt Vonnegut, or you would have had to go through, you know, hunted animals like Earnest Hemingway, and I didn't have any of that history. Who would want to read about a Chinese girl and her crazy family and her mother who just, you know, has these horrible traumas in her life she's trying to get you to understand. And that's why it was so important for me to realize I have to write for my own reasons and not to impress anybody else, and once I got rid of that notion of ever getting it published, it enabled me to do it. But, you know, I, to this day, I keep thinking, I'm going to run out of family material, you know, I can move on to something else. And then I get another revelation, you know. It just, it just never ends. You know, one of the things that I thought that my grandmother was a very modest woman and that she was quiet and she was old fashioned, that was what was told to me. ^M00:30:05 She was raped and then became a concubine by force, and then I found these photos and a book that showed that the exact costume she was wearing was the one worn by courtesans. And I thought, oh my god. I mean the one thing you can say about that, not that she was necessarily a courtesan, she was not old fashioned. This would be like, you know, your grandmother dressed up as Britney Spears, and no, she was not old fashioned. And that was a thrill to me because, you know, I suddenly said, of course she wasn't. I mean look who came out, my mother. My mother, she's vain, she wears nice clothes, she's very consumed with, you know, being respected. And that also came from her mother, who demanded to be respected and wasn't and killed herself. I became my mother's daughter, and I have attributes that come from her, a certain obsessiveness where if I'm bothered by something I cannot stop talking about it. But I'm unlike here because I'm not suicidal. I'm, you know, I have my choices. So it, you know, those revelations where you find out facts, you find out about yourself as well. I find, you know I find myself in these revelations. Now there's one big revelation to me. In doing the research for this book, I found evidence that my father and mother knew each other in Chongqing in a certain year when they were sent to be in this place, when the Japanese were bombing their city. They had met years earlier, had fallen in love. My mother had a baby, and I was always told, she was told she was born in Shanghai. She was born in Chungking and Chongqing. My mother and father were there, and my sister did not know who her father was, and it was a possibility that her father, my half-sister, that her father was my father. We were in the midst of trying to find out how to get tests done, and the DNA tests, you cannot see the father's side, because as a female, you are XX, not XY, and trying to find a way to discover what this was and piecing together facts, and then she died. So she wanted to know. She knew that was a possibility, and she died, suddenly, in March on a trip to Egypt. I still have her DNA sample, and if I could ever, ever find a way to get some inkling of the paternal side, I will do that. >> More mysteries ahead, in other words. . >> Amy Tan: Yeah, more mysteries. >> Yeah, yeah. Your mother loved being in your books, I think, or having been mirrored in your books, did she not? She loved that aspect. And a lot of people say, whoa, you know, what did your mother think, thinking she would have been appalled, disinherited, not that she had any money, but, you know disown me or something. And in fact, she loved it. At the very end of reading, and my mother was not a big reader, she said it was so easy to read, and I knew that what she meant later is she saw that I understood things about her that she no longer had to explain, what upset her, what irritated her, what made her furious, that that was in the book and that I understand that about her. Oh, one of the funny things I discovered in looking through the memorabilia is that my mother was getting a graduate degree in American literature. That was on her student visa. And the only American literature she ever read was my book, many, many years later. [laughter] Yeah. >> She was precious. I mean she had some sort of-- >> Amy Tan: Yeah. She was going to make American literature. [laughter] >> You were a teenager when you lost your older brother, the brilliant, Peter, was his name. >> Amy Tan: Yeah, Peter, yeah. >> Who was a bit older than you, I think a few years older than you. >> Amy Tan: A year and a half, yeah. >> And then six months after that, your father died. >> Amy Tan: Yeah. >> Both died of brain tumors. >> Amy Tan: Brain tumors. >> And two quick losses in succession, which must have been an extraordinary force of, tragical force on your mother, but on you as a teenaged girl, how did that-- >> Amy Tan: The deaths of my father and my brother affected me, I would say, the most because of the way my mother reacted to that. >> Right. >> Amy Tan: She went a little insane, and she believed we were all going to die, and she became even more suicidal. And at one time there was a thought of all of us going to heaven together. But I was a daddy's girl. I adored my big brother, and I don't think I'm just remembering him in a way that comes from grief, transformed over time. He and I did things. He showed me things. Like he taught me how to read. He played with me. We read books together later in high school and talked about them. And so I was profoundly sad and isolated, but it was my mother's reaction. I'll tell you how insane she was during that time, and understandably so. You lose our husband, your connection to the adult world, because you don't speak English that well, and you lose your son, who it turns out I discovered in reading the memorabilia was her favorite, and also was my father's favorite. Now this was devastating when I thought I was the favorite. You know, this made her a little insane, and she ended up taking us to Europe, and on the basis of the fact that Holland was clean. She found a can of Dutch cleanser under the sink, and she decided that we'd go to Holland because maybe my father and brother died because of some kind of germ, and that's where we went. We ended up in Switzerland, you know, and every time I tell people I graduated from Switzerland, they think I was, you know, some rich girl, you know, went to a finishing school, but that wasn't the case. >> That was a phenomenal turn in events. Do you speak French, then? I mean were you in a French school? >> Amy Tan: Well, the sad thing is that most of the people there, the students, they could speak English fairly well, so my French is very bad. I speak better Spanish than French by the way. But I'm learning. I'm an autodidact, and I read Le Bon and I write letters to people in French who are friends who are French. >> Which leaves me to ask you, who were your models? Who were your, when you were thinking about actually sitting down and writing this for yourself, even if it took you to age 70 to get it done, who were your models? Who were the people who most inspired you? Who were your, those [inaudible]. >> Amy Tan: I would say they were the writers that I was reading at the time, and that's why I always tell people, if you really do want to be a writer to just keep reading and reading and reading. Not to copy other people, but to be inspired by the fact they have amazing, unique voices. So Louise Erdrich, definitely. She is one of our greatest, greatest writers today, and also Jamaica Kincaid. >> Oh, yeah. >> Amy Tan: Who is a writer you don't hear a lot about today, but her book, Annie John, was, I read that numerous times. It had, seemed so simple but it has this seething power underneath it, every sentence. And, you know, Isabel Allende, who has these stories, also these secrets, and a family from the past, ghosts from the past, and people call it magical realism, but you say, no, no, it's what really happened. And I love that part of it, that, you know, it didn't have to be fantastical. So there were many, and I do have to say they were mostly women. But there were writers, other writers that I, and Maxine Hong Kingston was another one. Richard Ford, who I love. And some of the writers that I read in college, but it had to do with the writers I was reading at the time and feeling more and more this urge that I was now older, and I had to make sense of the life I had lived thus far. ^M00:39:58 >> All of this is in this book, which is really a wonderful book. I couldn't recommend it more, but I want to take you back to a moment that you talk about in this book, and it's 2001, it's March. You had just Bonesetter's Daughter, and it was a book that was inspired really by your mother's gradual decline into Alzheimer's as I recall, and then complicated by your editor's bout with cancer. So there was this, trying to write this book about your mirror on your mother's experience, your editor, and then falls into this tragic state of affairs, and you race to finish the book for her sake, as I remember. You go to New York to finish it. >> Amy Tan: Yeah, yeah. >> And then you, Lyme disease comes into the picture somewhere in there, and you're in New York, strangely enough, as fate would happen, when the twin towers are struck, and you watch from the street. >> Amy Tan: I watched the first one fall from the CNN building on 37th. I was the trivia answer to which segment, who was the person being interviewed who was cancelled as a result of 9/11. They said one minute to live, then it was 30 seconds to live, and I was sitting on the stool, and suddenly the room just broke into chaos. And people were cursing at each other, and I thought, how strange, you know, that they would not temper themselves even if they were irritated. And then I saw on all of the monitors an image of a building on fire, and having done many interviews over the years, I knew whenever there was hard news, like O.J. Simpson, you know, a glove was found, that I would be cancelled. So I just knew that a building on fire, I was cancelled, and I was going to take this off. And then I see there's nothing behind a building, it's just sky. And then I heard somebody say it's a commercial jet. We have a witness, and I realized what it was and what was happening around me. We saw together in that newsroom with all those newscasters the second tower being hit, and somebody saying, it's war. And I watched the second tower fall as I was walking back to our house. We had a loft. My husband was there, and I just had to get home. I was walking on the street, and I saw it come down, and I said, I'm dreaming this. This can't be real. And I don't even remember hearing it. It was so surreal, I just watched this come down. And we live 10 blocks from the World Trade Center. All these people were running up our street covered with this cement dust, many of them looking shell shocked. And there was such an amazing camaraderie, a coming together of the whole city during that time. But of course, this was one of those moments you say, I'm going to die. What is my life about, what is important. >> Amazing sort of confluence of events. I'm going to ask one more question, but I want you to think about questions that you will ask because I will open it up to all of you. There are microphones in the aisles, and please ask a question of Amy Tan. My last question to you in interview is what can we expect from you next? What are you working on? >> Amy Tan: Oh, expectations. [laughter] It's the question, you know, my editor asks me. Actually, he's fine. We're having dinner, and he knows never to ask me that question. It's a novel, and the title of it is the Memory of Desire. >> The Memory of Desire? >> Of desire. Now it's going to be either one of two novels. It's once that I dreamt of about three years ago. The entirety of this book I dreamt on New Year's Day, like a gift, and I read over, I wrote down the notes about what I had dreamed, and a lot of times you dream these things and they turn out to be nonsense, but it made complete sense. It even had the subplots, all the characters and locations. The other was a book I started about ten years ago, and I found this draft in that pile of memorabilia, and I loved it. And I thought, why did I abandon this. And when I read that again, I thought maybe I'll do this. And I had sent it to Dan also a while ago, and he could not let go. He kept writing about a month back and forth about this but not wanting me to write about wanting me to write about this novel we had talked about. So, I don't know, it's going to be that or that, and I don't know if the title will be the Memory of Desire, but there you go. It'll be a surprise, just like everything in my life is a surprise. >> Well, I can't wait to read it. Do we have any questions, people who would like to come up and ask something of Amy? Come on up, don't be shy. This is a good chance to connect with an author. I have to tell you that there's not very much in this world that lasts forever, but when you come up and ask a question, it gets archived in the Library of Congress. ^M00:46:00 [ Laughter ] ^M00:46:04 >> Amy Tan: Your sound bite. >> So make it good. You can say you're an audio file forever. >> Amy Tan: Your great grandchildren will see it in the Library of Congress. >> Please, no pressure. >> Amy Tan: No pressure. >> So thank you so much for all of your books and for being here today. Sorry, I can see you up there. >> Amy Tan: Yeah. >> I was just struck by the beginning of your conversation when you said that one of the things that surprised you most when you wrote the Joy Luck Club was how universal it was in terms of people telling you it reminded them of their own experience. I'm just thinking of the moment we're in now. Crazy Rich Asians has broken all records in terms of box office receipts. Is that also part of what is important to you to see as sort of broadening of the popular culture acceptance of all things Asian or is the more humanistic approach more important for you? >> You know, in terms of film, I loved that film, and I loved it for two reasons. I thought it was a fun film, but the fact that it was so successful, breaking box office, number one at the box office, I felt this is going to give Asian Americans a chance to act in movies, and they don't have to be Asian American movies. They can be anything. The stories can be anything. I don't think that story is universal because it does not represent every Chinese person. We're not crazy rich all of us. Just as Pretty Woman does not represent all pretty women. But there is an expectation people have had in the past, and I hope that they'll get away from that looking at this movie. It's just a fun, romantic comedy, and a satire on rich people. >> Thank you. Next question. >> Yeah, I heard you say, I can't see you, I heard you say at one point that you're a linguist, and how do you approach dialect and creating voices in different, with accents, what have you thought about that, and you do really well. So I want to learn from you. >> Thank you. >> Amy Tan: I do love language. That's why I became a linguist. What I hear though mostly has, that's more important to me, has to do with imagery, and that does reflect in the way I look at my mother's speech, which includes a different way of expressing it in Chinese. It's a context that has historical, her history, personal history, and a lot of emotion over the years. I looked at the changes in my mother's language from the time she was a little girl speaking Shanghainese and Mandarin and English and then back to Chinese and Shanghainese when she had Alzheimer's. What I, I don't have to work at what her, these accents or the dialect is. It's simply what I heard. And so I, I'm sorry I can't help you and say this is how you do it, but if you were to have a character who had a different way of speaking from the mainstream, I think it would be to go and have conversations with that person. Not simply overhearing what they're saying, but really getting into an emotional conversation about some ongoing topic and how they express themselves. Not simply phonological features of that but how it comes out. >> Thank you, next. >> Amy Tan: Hi. >> My name is Meiyung. Thanks for your presentation. Yeah. My name is Meiyung. Thanks for your presentation. You had a good [inaudible] in Chinese to write a good book. But I'm thinking that if a person who writes another book, a different kind of book, and so far [inaudible] is always talk about fake news and some people, maybe their driver license will be denied if they would try to choose some work. If somebody is writing this type of book and will be restricted from publishing or get a copywrite, do you have any suggestion, that you can write another book or something [inaudible]. >> Amy Tan: Thank you, thank you. Whether or not you write a book and it's original or whether it's fake or whether you have copyright, if you write what is true to yourself and the way that you think, not just the story context itself, that's always going to be original. And if somebody, I've had people say, well your character is not depictions of real Chinese people. They're fake. That is there perspective, their reality, that they wanted to see characters in a certain way, just as they said, you know, Pretty Woman is not about every single pretty woman. We as writers, and I assume you would like to write a book or you have written a book, that it is authentic to you and to your emotion. >> Thank you. Over here, please. >> Hi. I'm delighted to be here to say this. I'm a high school teacher in a public school. I teach reading and English to students with disability, and we're about to start your book, The Joy Luck Club. I never taught it before, and I'm excited, but I just thought, is there anything I could take back to them that you might say to them? These are 10th graders mostly. >> Amy Tan: First of all, I don't think that everybody in the world, every student is going to like a book equally, and I think they have to know that that is fine, absolutely fine. There's a way you might look at a book differently, not for the story necessarily, not for the characters, but perhaps asking if there's one image in the book, one scene that really struck you as interesting, and just to go into what that scene is about and why it appealed to you. The other is that we often read books because they do resonate with our lives, and to ask a student if they would like to share, now these are very personal questions, but if they would like to share something about their own family that feels similar and the kind of pressures or expectations their parents have had that seems similar like this. And did they feel they were understood, because when I was reading as a kid, what I loved were those stories that made me feel that I had a friend, somebody who finally understood me. Yes. I understand that. >> Thank you. Next question. >> Yes, thank you very much for being here. You mentioned after 9/11 when you were going through the streets that it was the kind of experience that brings home to you what is meaningful in life and what is important. What was that for you? What were those revelations to you on that day afterwards? >> Amy Tan: It had to do with family, and I was very glad that I had lived a life that was focused in that direction. When I started writing, I asked myself that question again. What is the most important I should keep in my mind. And that, I reflected back on my life and said the things I wanted to do, meaning how I thought about things, how I treated people, I was content with, that I hadn't done anything I should be feeling shameful of. So what you should think about seems to come at the very moment you think you're going to die, and I was prepared. I said, it's okay. Now I'm going home. I just want to reach Lou and be together, and if it happens together, that's fine. Thank you. >> Thank you for the question. Another question please. We have time for two more. >> Okay. You mentioned that you have at times had trouble completing things that you started and that you had to let go, if I understand correctly, of the fact that you wanted it published in order to complete that. Is that what you were saying earlier, because I'm trying to figure out how you managed to go from starting to completion. Because I've started a million, and I can never complete. >> Amy Tan: Oh, that. No, what I meant was I would start different hobbies and then I would let them go, but that's true about books as well. I wanted to keep writing and not simply get disinterested and go on to jewelry making, for example. But I let go of books that ceased to intrigue me or ceased to be something that I feel and become more mechanical, where I'm interested only in how to get to the next chapter without feeling how the story is going. Now what happens is you put it aside enough times, you'll pick it up much later and you see the direction is clear now or the character is clear, and you're going to change it, but it makes sense. ^M00:56:02 So what I would say is put those things aside. Don't spend months and months agonizing. Move on. Or simply write as fast as you can. Don't think about the sentences or where it's going. Just do stream of consciousness and see if anything comes out after that that works. Now I say all this and I don't do it and I wish I, and that's why it takes me, and I know I should do that, and it's in the book, because I did it in the book, and it worked in the book. It just, I have to apply it now in this next novel. We'll see. You'll get yours done. I'll get mine done. >> Thank you. >> One last question please. >> First I want to say it's an honor and thank you so much. This has been very interesting, and I really appreciate it. I also appreciate the fact that you a linguist. I am an interpreter and translator, so it's awesome to see a colleague up there, or you were a colleague. My question is this. When you have a story to tell, and it's integral to your story, you speak about certain subjects that you feel like you can't leave out of your story, but you want to protect people. How would you deal with that or how have you dealt with it? Because the intention is you don't ever want to hurt people. You make your peace. You feel good now and everything else, but you feel like it's part of that story, and you want to tell it. >> Amy Tan: There have been very few stories where I've had that concern, and mostly, you know, it would have been about my mother, but she gave me full permission. She wanted me to write more about her as a matter of fact. She wanted me to devote whole book about her, which is the Kitchen God's Wife. In this last book, I did have some moments about family. You know, over time you have these moments where family have betrayed you or disappointed you in a certain way. And I learned something about betrayal and forgiveness. And it's not what you think. What I decided is that forgiveness has a lot to do whether you want to continue with the relationship. And so I had to decide because of the nature of the rest of the story that I had to include that. Well what I did was I just, I didn't include the name, and I just changed the relationship to a different one, and I put down the good things that person said as well. So it wasn't just this person was completely vile and vicious and mean as she really was. [laughter] And, you know, you just, you find a way to do it, never with hate or disgust. There was one story, one chapter I did leave out, and I really struggled over, and it was a story about being molested by a minister. And it was a life-changing experience, and it was a letter that I would have written to him and what it did to me, coming out of that room and how I was changed. And I decided not to include it because it changed the nature of the book so much. It was just like, oh my god, where is this going. And there was also a church to consider that it might damage, and I didn't think that this person, who is long gone from the church now should affect the church now, but I did write that letter to the church to say when you talk about your legacy and all the people you've helped and saved, you have to claim this as your legacy as well, and you have to make amends for it. So I say it now, and I'm glad I have the opportunity to say it, but I did not include it in the book, and those are the reasons I considered what damage would it do. >> Thank you so much. >> Pretty wonderful advice. Ladies and gentlemen, we've talked a lot about bad luck, but we've been very lucky to have Amy Tan with us today. [applause] >> Amy Tan: Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. [applause] >> Thank you. Thanks everybody. [applause] >> Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you. [applause] >> You got a standing O, oh my gosh. ^M01:00:25 [ Applause ]