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

About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION

       WHERE THE PAST BEGINS

      In my office is a time capsule: seven large clear plastic bins safeguarding frozen moments in time, a past that began before my birth. During the writing of this book, I delved into the contents—memorabilia, letters, photos, and the like—and what I found had the force of glaciers calving. They reconfigured memories of my mother and father.

      Among the evidence were my parents’ student visas to the United States, letters from the U.S. Department of Justice regarding their deportation, as well as an application for citizenship. I found artifacts of life’s rites of passage: wedding announcements, followed soon by birth announcements, baby albums with tiny black handprints and downy locks of hair; yearly diaries; the annual Christmas letters with complaints and boasts about the children; floral-themed birthday and anniversary cards; a list of twenty-two people who had given floral contributions for my father’s funeral; and condolence cards bearing illustrations of crosses, olive trees, and dusk at the Garden of Gethsemane. There was also a draft of a surprising mature-sounding letter that I had written to serve as the template my mother could copy to thank people for their sympathy.

      Perhaps the most moving discoveries were the letters to me from my mother and the letters to my mother from me. She had saved mine and I had saved hers, even the angry ones, which is proof of love’s resilience. In another box, I found artifacts of our family’s hard work: my mother’s ESL essay on becoming an immigrant and her nursing school homework; my father’s thesis, sermons, and his homework for a graduate class in electrical engineering; my grade school essays and my brother Peter’s history compositions; the report cards of Peter, John, and me, from kindergarten through high school, as well as my father’s college records. In different files, I recovered my father’s and mother’s death certificates. I haven’t come across Peter’s yet, but I found a photo of him in a casket, his sixty-pound body covered by a high school letterman jacket, but with nothing to conceal the mutilation of his head by surgeries and an autopsy. So now I have to ask myself: What kind of sentimentality drove me to keep that?

      Actually, I never throw away photos, unless they are blurry. All of them, even the horrific ones, are an existential record of my life. Even the molecules of dust in the boxes are part and parcel of who I am—so goes the extreme rationale of a packrat, that and the certainty that treasure is buried in the debris. In my case, I don’t care for dust, but I did find much to treasure.

      To be honest, I have discarded photos of people I would never want to be reminded of again, a number that, alas, has grown over the years to eleven or twelve. The longer I live the more blurry photos I’ve accumulated, along with a few sucker punches from people I once trusted and who did the equivalent of knocking me down to be first in line at the ice-cream truck. Age confers this simple wisdom: Don’t expose yourself to malarial mosquitoes. Don’t expose yourself to assholes. As it turns out, throwing away photos of assholes does not remove them from consciousness. Memory, in fact, gives you no choice over which moments you can erase, and it is annoyingly persistent in retaining the most painful ones. It is extraordinarily faithful in recording the most hideous details, and it will recall them for you in the future with moments that are even only vaguely similar.

      With only those exceptions, I have kept all the photos. The problem is, I no longer recognize the faces of many—not the girl in the pool with me, or three out of the four women at a clothes-swap party. Nor those people having dinner at my house. Then again, I have met hundreds of thousands of people in my sixty-five years. Some of them may have even been important in my life. Yet, without conscious choice on my part, my brain has let a lot of moments slide over the cliff. While writing this memoir, I was conscious that much of what I think I remember is inaccurate, guessed at, or biased by experiences that came later. If I were to write this same book five years from now, I would likely describe some of the events differently, either because of a change of perspective or worsening memory—or even because new evidence has come to light. That is exactly what happened while writing this book. I had to revise often as more discoveries appeared.

      I used to think photographs were more accurate than bare memory because they capture moments as they were, making them indisputable. They are like hard facts, whereas aging memory is impressionistic and selective in details, much like fiction is. But now, having gone through the archives, I realize that photos also distort what is really being captured. To get the best shot, the messiness is shoved to the side, the weedy yard is out of the shot. The images are also missing context: the reason why some are missing, what happened before and after, who likes or dislikes whom, if anyone is unhappy to be there. When they heard “cheese,” they uniformly stared at the camera’s mechanical eye, and put on the happy mask, leaving a viewer fifty years later to assume everyone had a grand time. I keep in mind the caveat that I should question what I see and what is not seen. I use the photos to trigger a complement of emotional memories. I use a magnifying glass to look closely at details in the black-and-white images in sizes popular in the 1940s and 1950s—squares ranging from one and a half to three and a half inches. They document a progression of Easter Sundays after church and the annual mauling of Christmas presents, which were laid underneath scraggly trees or artificial ones, in old apartments or new tract homes. Some of these photos refuted what I had believed was true, for example, that our family owned no children’s books, except one, Chinese Fairy Tales, illustrated by an artist who made the characters look like George Chakiris and Natalie Wood from West Side Story. A photo of me at age three shows otherwise: I am mesmerized by the words and pictures in a book spread open in my lap. In other photos of that same day, there is evidence of presents of similar size waiting to be ripped open. I had not known this when I wrote the piece “How I Learned to Read.” But it all makes sense that I would have been given books by family friends, if not by my parents. As a writer, I’m glad to know that my grubby little paws were all over those pages.

      I came across many photos of me from the ages of one to five looking flirtatiously photogenic: perched in the crook of a tree, looking up from a wading pool, holding a cup with two hands, giving myself a hug, or grinning at the bottom of a playground slide. My father was an amateur photographer with a prized Rollei camera. He was no doubt giving me suggestions on how to arrange myself, praising me for remaining still, and telling me how pretty I looked, words I would have taken as a reward of love not given to my mother or brothers.

      The oldest and rarest photos are in large-format albums. After seventy years, the glue has flaked off the bindings and the rusty rivets have lost their heads. The paper corner brackets that held the photos in place have fallen off, and the photos lie loose between thick black pages. Some of the studio photos taken over a hundred years ago are the size of postage stamps, which was why I did not realize they were of my grandmother until six years ago, when I placed a magnifying loupe over the sepia images.

      One album holds photos my father took of my mother when they became secret lovers in Tianjin in 1945. He had arranged an artful collage: a large photo of my mother is in the center and smaller ones of himself surround her, as if to say that she is the center of his universe. My father also took many photos of Peter, the firstborn. I found multiple copies of the same photos, suggesting he sent them to friends or handed them out at church. My younger brother, John, received short shrift. Very few are of him alone.

      By the early 1960s, my father stopped taking artfully posed photos with his Rollei. He switched to a Brownie camera for snapshots at birthday parties or when relatives or family friends came a long distance to visit us. There are fewer photos of my brothers and me when we were no longer cute and huggable; our limbs had elongated and turned knobby and our faces were sweaty, pimply, and darkened by the sun. In one, I am wearing white cat’s-eye glasses. My hairstyle looks like an explosion of black snakes, the aftermath of a novice beautician’s first attempt at giving a perm. My nose is bulbous, my cheeks are balloons, and my legs are thick and shapeless. That was how I saw myself. I browse through more images, seeking clues of the start of illness in our family. In one of the last photos of my father, he appears to have aged a great deal in just