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

scientific concepts beyond my grasp, I often resort to metaphors. I asked: “So it’s sort of like pouring oil over a boat to keep Somali pirates from getting on board.” He was taken aback. “Yes,” he answered, “but how did you think of that?”

      I, in turn, was taken aback by his question and realized my example was indeed rather odd. I could only answer that I looked for ways to understand things through metaphor. “But why oil and pirates?” he asked. And I answered, “Why zinc finger? How did you come up with that?” His answer was logical: the structure resembled five fingers and had to do with the interaction of zinc ions.

      Later I thought more about our exchange. Why indeed had oily pirates surfaced out of a sea of metaphoric possibilities? Why had I not used, say, cowboys trying to capture greased pigs at a county fair? Something about the image felt familiar, but tracing its source was like doing detective work in disintegrating dreams. And then the connection snapped into place.

      A few months before, I had been at a friend’s ranch in Sonoma. It was a hot summer day, and about five or six of us were sitting in lounge chairs next to a small irregularly shaped pool. Proximity to water may have led us to recall a woman who spoke recently at a conference about her solo voyage halfway around the world. That naturally progressed to the recent rash of pirates hijacking boats. Then someone recalled a terrible story in which Somali pirates boarded a yacht and killed all four passengers. That led us to muse what we might have done to keep pirates from climbing onto a boat we might be on. Guns? Someone joked: We’re from Marin County. We wouldn’t have guns. We threw out more hypothetical solutions—in fact, they had to do with things you might have on board that could be thrown—kitchen knives, boiling water, fishing tackle. I then proposed my solution—barrels of engine oil poured over the surface of the boat, which would cause the villains to slip and fall back into the water. I pictured it clearly—a slick black coating, along with a bunch of now empty oil drums rolling toward the pirates to deliver the hilarious coup de grâce that cartoon characters use to elude the villains. Months after coming up with this antipirate solution, it emerged instantly as a match for my guessing how a raft of DNA proteins keeps the AIDS virus from interacting with other cells. Although a barrel of oil and a scaffolding of ions and proteins are far from similar in appearance, the patient and the passengers share something in common. They are terrified and helpless, facing imminent death and thus desperate for someone to bootstrap a solution, be it someone’s DNA mutation or a greasy ship hull.

      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. If you do a Venn diagram of the metaphoric imagery and the situation at hand, the overlap is emotional memory. It has its own story, a subconscious connection to my past. I know it is subconscious because it comes out without my thinking about it. Its revelation is often shocking to me, as if I were seeing the ghost of my mother, bringing me a sweater she had knit for me when I was five. “Look what I did,” she says. I recognize the feeling and what it means. This is why writing is so deeply satisfying to me. Even if the pages I’ve written prove to be unusable for the novel—and that often happens—I have still had the experience of using memory and intuition to write a story. I have found more intersections with the different points of my life. They create a map to meaning, taking me to origins and back again. I can see the pattern of early expectations and promise, and how death threw the patterns and religious beliefs askew, how a pronouncement that I had no imagination was both believed and ignored. Through writing, I dive into wonderment and come up with corpses, whale sharks, pirates, and the head of a rose.

      Despite my fluidity in conjuring up imagery, writing the actual narrative is a laborious and confounding experience tantamount to conducting an orchestra of ghosts or being the caterer for a wedding reception full of thieves and drunks. The narrative comes in halting steps, lurches in a new direction every hour or drifts away. The first chapter is written ten times and will eventually be entirely discarded. The story is hobbled by doubt and piecemeal revisions, and for a good long while, the story is so flimsy I fear it will collapse. The little room is the storeroom of memorabilia: boxes of old diaries, both mine and my father’s visas, fake certificates, letters pleading mercy, report cards, WHILE YOU WERE OUT messages, thousands of old photos of family and unknown people, aerograms written in Chinese, address books, birthday cards, baby announcements, wedding cards, sympathy cards, letters of recommendation, my homework, my brother’s homework, my father’s homework, my mother’s homework, angry letters, acceptance letters, and the memories of things I lost, as well as those childhood souvenirs I’m sure I kept but cannot find—the great assortment of my life. As I struggle to capture what I mean, the right word I know so well is on the tip of my tongue, and so is the right idea, but as soon as I remember that word, phrase, or idea, another elusive set takes its place. I must do this repeatedly until I find enough of them to fill a novel. The process of writing is the painful recovery of things that are lost.

      The characters arrive with stiff personalities or histrionic ones. They will remain caricatures until I can truly feel them. At several points in the writing, I will realize I have embarked on an impossible task. I will have fewer than a hundred pages, always fewer than a hundred, and they are all bad. I will be seized with paralyzing existential dread that I will never finish this book. Who I was an hour ago no longer exists. This is not writer’s block. This is chaos with no way out. The metaphoric connections have been cut. The wonders are gone. The worst has happened. I am no longer a writer. And then, after another five minutes of self-flagellation, I start writing again.

      When I took my first writers workshop, I heard someone talk about the continuous dream. The essence was this: once you set up your story, you should step into it and write as if you are living in that fictional dream. The result would be a story that would make readers feel that they, too, were in a seamless story, a dream. I believed that the continuous dream was a normal state that most writers went into, a state of higher awareness. It happened to me from time to time, but in spurts, and not as often as it should. I was new to writing fiction, and I believed that in time, my continuous dreams would become more continuous. While trying to minimize the noise of construction work in an adjacent building, I discovered that listening to music could keep me immersed in the mood of a scene for longer periods of time. But I still had to create the scene, characters, and basis for the story. Music could not fix flaws. Nor was music successful in keeping external distractions from reaching me—the phone, faxes, and what would happen to my privacy after I was published. I was naive—unaware that heaps of self-consciousness awaited me. After my first book was published I found my groove far less often than I did ruts. Each book since then has been increasingly difficult to write. The more I know about writing, the more difficult it is to write. I am too often in a self-conscious state that excludes the intuitive subconscious one. I need to stop rereading each sentence I write before I continue to the next. You can’t write a novel one sentence at a time.

      Distractions vie with self-consciousness as the reason novels-in-waiting languish from neglect. I have learned to say no to events, to parties, to seeing friends from out of town, to providing comments on books about to be published. But none of the strictures I put on my time are able to hold tight when there is a family emergency, or when a friend has just received a bad diagnosis. None of it works when I hear the piteous screams of my little dog, which was what he emitted the other night. I came out of the land of continuous dreams and ran to him. After loving his teddy bear, my little dog was unable to retract his penis into its protective sheath. The sight of that problem was much bigger for such a little dog than I would have ever imagined possible—had I even imagined it. Imagine my four-pound Yorkie as a miniature stallion. It was appalling to me, his noncanine mother. I quickly looked up information via the Internet and found the prognosis and the treatment: if the situation was not immediately handled—literally handled—my little dog would risk infection, even amputation. I got out the olive oil. I put on the examining gloves. An hour later, he was fine. I was not. That’s the kind of distraction I’m talking about, ones I must handle immediately, no matter how well or poorly my writing is going.

      To get away from distractions, I once tried an artists’ colony. While I can work perfectly well on an airplane, I discovered that in this haven for industrious artists, I could not begin. The room was oddly arranged, with two twin beds and three metal