Book Review: Where the Past Begins by Amy Tan

 

Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

 

This was not quite the book I expected when I started reading, but it was fascinating, nevertheless.

The opening is more about Tan’s writing. I had to laugh out loud when her introduction included some very humorous asides from her editor, Daniel Halpern.

In talking about her work on the book, she says – Even so, I did not miss a deadline, except one. The last.

But Halpern adds – [ed. Note: Technically, she was always a day late, using the excuse of PST, to protest her PTSD.]

I had thought this was a memoir about Tan’s writing, but it’s more about where she came from, both the circumstances of her growing up years, the way her parents interacted with her, and going back farther, to the stories of her ancestors that sparked her imagination.

There are excerpts from journals and even from novels that never made it to culmination.

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 . . . This is not writer’s block. This is chaos with no way out.

But the book is weighted heavily in the story of her family, something that fascinates many of us. Where her mother came from, where her father came from to a lesser degree – who they were as people- how she felt about events that happened in her childhood then how her understanding of them progressed as she looked deeper into the letters and journals and other artifacts her family left behind.

She always looked for signs that her mother was going to explode, so she could get ready for it, but this time she forgot.

There is a great deal about the experiences of her grandmother, her mother’s mother, in China and how that affected her mother and thus Tan. Tan shares the view of this history from multiple points in her life, and thus multiple perspectives, especially when new information makes things more clear. These stories factor heavily in Tan’s novels.

The sad or difficult things she experienced in life, the fearful ones too, are included here. I won’t go into detail but Tan has lived through some very sad and scary experiences in her life, like the time she was in a car crash in Europe that could have turned out far worse than it did.

At first, I did not love the section of letters back and forth with her editor. Because there are dates in between, I felt like I was missing information, but even more, I felt like the third wheel – listening to two other people have an inside conversation without being able to participate. However, I began to appreciate the insight to her writing method and mental state before, during, and after creating a novel.

This was a very deep and thoughtful book that offered the opportunity for reflection. It was not something I could rush through reading, and even now, I am sure if I went back and read it again, I would learn many new things. It makes me think about keeping a journal of my own and exploring my own family history more. I would definitely recommend.