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

crusted feet eaten away by leprosy. Dr. Schweitzer’s work was not suitable for a child with precocious anxiety and a morbid imagination.

      The other model of success was musical. Mozart was the standard-bearer for many ambitious parents, ours included. My mother told me that Mozart started composing when he was five. No coincidence that I was five when she said that. That was also when a luminous black piano, a Wurlitzer spinet, arrived at our house and took its place along the entire length of a wall in our small living room. The Wurlitzer transformed our lives all at once. Our parents told us that the piano cost a lot of money, and this made me believe we had suddenly become rich. My mother had always complained that we were poor, in part because we gave away so much money. My father tithed 10 percent to the church and also sent money to his brothers and their families, who were refugees in Taiwan. We were shown photos of their sun-browned faces to make us proud to be good-hearted children. We also had to take care of my mother’s half brother and his family, who had left a life of wealth and privilege and arrived in the United States, unable to speak English, and unaccustomed to doing the kind of menial work that many Chinese immigrants had to do. They came during a time when my mother was attending nursing school and working part time in a hospital, a job that required her to empty bedpans, change soiled sheets, and wash people’s bottoms. One time, she had to listen to a newborn baby cry unceasingly. It had been born without an anus, she said. They could not feed it. She heard that baby cry throughout her night shift. It was agonizing. The next night, it was still crying. The following night, she heard no crying. She told us horror stories like that to show how much hardship she had to endure for our sake. She spoke of her life being so pitiful she almost “could not take it anymore.” When that expensive piano arrived, she was so happy I thought the pitiful days were over.

      My mother warned us not to damage its perfect surface—no dings, dents, scratches, stains, or sticky fingerprints. The bench was also very expensive, she said, and we were scolded for sliding across with bare legs to make squeaky farting sounds. She became the detective who matched fingerprints to culprits. She was the terrifying interrogator when the first scratches appeared. Who did this? Who? When no one confessed, we were all sent to bed without dinner. This instrument, so powerful and yet so fragile, was now our mother’s most prized possession, and she let us know often that she and my father had sacrificed a great deal in coming to America so that we children could have a better life, which included learning to enjoy music.

       1955: Me at age three, posing for my father’s Rollei.

      I did not understand until I was an adult what she meant by “sacrifices.” They were all that she had left behind in Shanghai, where she had had a life of privilege, starting from the age of nine, when her widowed mother married the richest man on an island outside of Shanghai. She went from being the honorable widow of a poor scholar to a wealthy man’s fourth wife—one of his concubines, which made her a woman at the lower end of society. According to one version of clan history, her family had expected her to remain a widow, and thus she disgraced them all by remarrying. But had she not married, she would have had to depend on the largesse—or rather, the miserliness—of her opium-addicted older brother. Another version cast her as the victim of a rape by the rich man, which resulted in pregnancy. In less than a year, after she gave birth to a son, my mother’s mother was dead. One side of the family said she swallowed raw opium to end her shame as a concubine. The other side related it as an accident. My mother believed a bit of both versions. She said that her mother found it unbearable that she had descended to being the lowly concubine in a household of other numerical wives. So she made the rich man promise that if she gave birth to a son, he would let her live in her own house in Shanghai. He agreed. My mother was the only one who heard the deal had been struck. She saw her mother’s mood change in talking about their return to Shanghai. Life on the island was boring, she complained. But when the son was born, the rich man’s promise evaporated. My mother witnessed her mother’s fury when she learned she had been fooled. To teach her husband a lesson, she swallowed opium. She had only meant to scare him, my mother explained. Her mother never would have intentionally left her, her nine-year-old daughter, alone, an orphan. “She loved me too much to do that. She died by accident.” But there were a few times when she acknowledged that her mother killed herself because “she could not take it anymore.” Sometimes she felt the same, she would say.

      My young mother remained in the mansion after her mother died. The rich man felt remorseful and posthumously revered his fourth wife as the mother of his son. In death, her position in the house was unassailable. The rich man promised to treat my mother as his own. He gave her a new name to reflect her official attachment to the family. He sent her to a private school for girls and paid for piano lessons. He bought her pretty clothes and a Bedlington terrier. My mother said that her stepfather was fond of her—he even let her eat with him, while everyone else had to sit at another table. Yet her feelings toward him remained conflicted. She blamed him for her mother’s death—first, for making her his concubine, and second, for breaking his promise. I imagine she called him “Father” out of respect, but whenever she spoke about him to me, she did not describe him as either her stepfather or her mother’s husband. She used his full name. She did not refer to the children of his other concubines as sisters or brothers. She referred to them by name and whichever number concubine was their mother. “The number two daughter of the number three wife.” Although she lived in the mansion while growing up, she told me she never felt she belonged. She was the daughter of a concubine who had killed herself, who had cast a shadow on the house. Relatives reminded her that she was lucky she was allowed to live in that house since she was not blood-related to the rich man. My mother said they reminded her so often she knew they were saying she did not really deserve to be there. “I was alone with no one to love and guide me, like I did for you,” she said. Without a mother to guide her, she did not recognize that the man who wanted to marry her was evil and would nearly destroy her mind.

      I am guessing she was eighteen or nineteen when she married. She described herself as naive and stupid. He was the eldest of the second richest family on the island, a family of scholars. His father was the rich man’s business partner. He had also trained to be a pilot, one of an elite team, which made him a celebrity hero with a status equal to a movie star. He was supposed to marry the rich man’s eldest daughter, my mother said. It was to be an arranged marriage, the prestigious union of two wealthy families of high society. But the pilot wanted my mother, the prettier one, the daughter of the concubine who had killed herself. Everyone told her it was a good opportunity and she was lucky the man wanted her. “Why do you want to be pretty?” my mother said when I cried one day because I feared I was ugly. “Being pretty ruined my life.”

      As soon as they married, her husband told her he had no intention of giving up his girlfriends, one of whom was a popular movie star. He brought women home almost every night. “That bad man said I should share the bed with them,” she said. “Can you imagine? I refused and that made him mad. He was mad? What about me?” “That bad man was also a gambler who spent my dowry. That bad man was no hero. He was a coward. During a big battle, many pilots died. But he turned his plane around and claimed he got lost.” Over the fourteen-year course of their marriage, she gave birth to a son, three daughters, and a ten-pound stillborn daughter whose skin was blue. (That stillborn half sister lives in my imagination as an angry-looking baby the color of the sea.) When my mother’s son died of dysentery at age three, my mother was in such despair over her life that she said as she cradled him, “Good for you, little one. You escaped.” Even after she attempted suicide, her husband refused to let her go. She was his property. He could torment her, slap her, or put a gun to her head whenever she refused to have sex with him.

      A few years ago, at a family dinner, a distant cousin I had never met said to me, “Your mother had many boyfriends in China.” Another woman, also a stranger to me, said, “Many.” They wore a look of bemusement. I was shocked by what they had just divulged, not just the information but also the humor they took in telling me this. Had my mother been alive, she would have been propelled into a suicidal rage. I wanted to defend her. Yet I was also guilty of wanting to know more. Was it true? Did she have lovers? If so, who were those men? Did they love her? Did she love any of them?