Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. Amy Tan

thousands of songs I’ve heard at symphonies or on the radio. It could be a passage from a soundtrack. Or perhaps it was a fugitive melody from someone else’s dream.

      I have not given up on the idea that the music I hear in dreams can come alive in the waking world. I have had other things come to me in dreams. Cats that dip their tails in inkwells and write as instructed until one kitten has an accident. That became the children’s book Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat. I dreamed of a full moon party on a boat, during which a little girl falls into the water and becomes lost. When she is found, she is a different person. That became the children’s book The Moon Lady. I dreamed the idea for making the narrator of a novel the ghost of my mother, who had just died. She suggested in the dream that she could serve as the omniscient guide to tourists on holiday in Myanmar, and per her wish, she became the voice in the novel Saving Fish from Drowning. All sorts of solutions to small plot problems have come through somnolent delivery. The best dream arrived two years ago: it was an entire novel—the setting, the narrator, other characters, the situation that leads to the narrative, accidents and bad timing, the other characters and their roles, a backstory in China, a family tree, the complications, even small scenes. When I woke, I wondered if it was the gibberish that is understandable only in dream logic. While it was still in my head, I wrote it down, as much as I could remember. Ten pages. Then I read what I had written and it all made sense.

      The actual writing will still be daunting. It gets harder with each novel. I will have to relearn my craft, overcome the same doubts, untangle the narrative from long detours, or take whichever detour is the story I should tell. I will also find the right music to accompany the scenes as I write them. I am thinking it might even be some of the music that I have yet to dream. It doesn’t have to be a full orchestral piece—let us not be delusional. A simple motif would be enough, just four measures of it spun out into a melody that I could play on the piano in the clear voice of the right hand. It would require only a modest dream to deliver a motif barely hanging by a thread of intuition. I will hum it and capture it with a recorder, then transcribe the notes I hear onto a sheet of music. I will play freely with the motif, trying out variations, then transcribing five, the most emotionally resonant—onto sheet music. I will play that melodic motif a hundred times until it is engrained as emotional memory, as part of me. I will play that motif a thousand times for the novel that I have already dreamed I would write.

       [ QUIRK ]

       Souvenir from a Dream

      SAN FRANCISCO, JANUARY 8, 2002. In my dream about a former era, I was writing lyrics to a song, and when I woke, the lyrics were still in my mind. So I wrote them down. It was as if I had stepped out of a dream that took place in the 1920s and came back with a souvenir. Do these lyrics actually exist? Or did I truly dream them up? Maybe next: a flapper dress.

       Two can can-can

       —Toucan can’t.

       Two can can-can

       —Toucan can’t.

       If I can can-can

       You can can-can

       Then two can can-can.

       Shall we dance?

       Two lips will kiss.

       Tulips wilt

       Two lips will kiss.

       Tulips wilt.

       If I may kiss you?

       No, you can’t kiss me.

       Two lips will kiss.

       Two lips won’t.

       Let’s be a twosome.

       No, that’s too soon.

       Let’s be a twosome.

       No, that’s too soon.

       If I take one step

       You can take one step

       We two can two-step

       Right up the church steps.

       CHAPTER THREE

       HIDDEN GENIUS

      According to my parents, you could be a genius and not even know it if you were lazy. You had to work hard and push yourself to do what was difficult and that’s how you would know how strong your brain was. If you did only what was easy, you would be like everyone else. I had the impression as a child that my lazy brain was like a flabby muscle. If physical exercise could turn skinny weaklings into musclemen, mental exercise could do the same for my brain. And then, if I was indeed a genius, everyone would know this and I would be called a prodigy. “If Peter can do it,” they would say, “you can do it.”

      Peter was eighteen months older than I was and had been born a genius, destined to do great things in life. I heard my parents say that to me, our relatives, and to family friends. Whether he truly was a genius, I can’t say, since he died when he was sixteen, too young to fulfill the promise foretold. Nonetheless, I don’t remember a time in childhood when I didn’t believe that my parents’ boasts about him were based on fact. At the end of the first grade, he was promoted to the third, and, according to my parents, he was still more advanced than the other children. He learned everything quickly and had great powers of concentration. He devoted many days toward making a map of South America using different kinds of dried beans—Argentina was black-eyed peas, Brazil was lentils, Chile was yellow split peas—so many countries, so many beans. My parents displayed his South America on the mantels of our different homes, and only now do I wonder what became of that centerpiece of parental pride.

      Peter never bragged that he was smarter. When I could not do whatever he was doing, he helped me. He taught me how to catch a ball with a mitt, how to throw a newspaper, how to ride a bike hands free, how to climb over a fence or under barbed wire, how to breed guinea pigs, how to collect baseball bubble gum cards, and how to look up words in a thesaurus. He taught me Mad magazine jokes, the names of the most popular songs, and how to spy on our neighbors when they were having a fight. Whatever game he was playing, he let me play. He was Davy Crockett in his fake coonskin cap. I was the Indian maiden. When he received a Lionel train set for Christmas, he assembled the control box and connected the electrical wires. He let me help by connecting the tracks and setting up the plastic scenery. In high school, he ran for treasurer, so I ran for secretary. He let me read his books, the primers in grade school, and later, the novels in high school.

       Oakland, 1955. Playmates: Peter, five, and me, three.

      I always believed he was better in everything and always would be, and not simply because he was eighteen months older. It was because of what my parents said about Peter, openly commenting on his brilliance. Just the other day, I found my first grade report card and saw what my father had written to my teacher. His praise of me was offset by his higher praise of Peter, an opinion that has remained since childhood as indelible in my mind as the ink in his note.

       Amy used to have a sense of inferiority over her brother’s out-shining intelligence. This report gives her a big boost in her morale. She will need our constant encouragement as well as yours to keep her stride in such a high-spirited rhythm.