My childhood with its topsy-turvy emotions has, in fact, been a reason to write. I can lay it squarely on the page and see what it was. I can understand it and see the patterns. My characters are witness to what I went through. In each story, we are untangling a knot in a huge matted mess. The work of undoing them one at a time is the most gratifying part of writing, but the mess will always be there.So, apparently Amy Tan was contractually obligated to provide her new editor, Daniel Halpern at Ecco, with two books – one fiction, one non – and while he was hoping for a memoir, Tan resisted: it would seem that the older she gets, the more tortuous her writing process has become (perhaps due to the brain lesions resulting from Lyme disease or the lingering effects of a massive concussion that affected her brain's language center), and the idea of a memoir – with the constant writing and rewriting and hedging and second-guessing – wasn't enticing to her. They struck a deal: Tan would send fifteen uncorrected pages on whatever she felt like writing to Halpern per week, and he would turn it into a book; this book. As a result, Where the Past Begins is very free-form, with essays on drawing and music appreciation, old journal entries and letters, an overlong email exchange between Tan and Halpern from when she was writing The Valley of Amazement, and chapters about her childhood and what she has been able to unearth about her family back in China. As a result, this is an inconsistent reading experience – some parts were fascinating, others less so – but as someone who has adored Tan's fiction throughout the years, I appreciated learning the inspiration behind some of her most gut-punching scenes. For the most part this worked for me, but individual experience may vary.
Tonight I go to a spot in my mind where the foot of the mountain and a river connect, sneggin, a meeting place. I wait until I feel the sound pulsing in my veins. And it comes – Pes-pas! Pes-pas! – the sound of horses galloping softly over grass. The second vowel tightens. Pes-pis! Pes-pis! The hooves are hitting the hard-baked earth of the steppes. Soon we will arrive at that place where the past begins.I didn't realise that Tan received a Masters in Linguistics before she started her writing career, and her lasting fascination with languages seems a key to understanding her point-of-view and the family dynamics that feature so heavily in her fiction. Tan didn't find out until after her mother died that what she thought was her mother's fluid Mandarin was actually heavily accented, and that her native Shanghaiese was spoken with a posh and educated dialect: not only was Daisy handicapped in America with her “rusty” pidgin English, but even when speaking “Chinese”, most people missed the subtleties of what she was saying – this must have affected how she was treated; must have contributed (along with what Tan assumes to be some degree of mental illness) to Daisy's stated loneliness and suicidal (not to mention homicidal) threats. If it wasn't true, it would seem an authorial overreach to have the Linguist lose elements of her own speech due to both illness and injury, and then watch her aging trilingual mother lose each of her own languages to dementia until she's reduced to speaking in the baby-talk of her mother tongue.
The story of my grandmother is like a torn map glued together with so many bits and pieces that there is now more glue than map. The pieces haven't led to verifiable truth. I have imagined what the truth might have been, based on my own emotional and moral character. Others have done the same. We see what we want to believe. We are all unreliable narrators when it comes to speaking for the dead.In particular, Tan is fascinated by dead languages and makes the point that once a language loses its native speakers – once no one is making puns or exchanging gossip in that tongue – it becomes impossible to actually know what those people's lives were like; cuneiform accounting tablets tell us nothing intimate of Sumerian domestic life. In the same way, Tan makes the point that we can never really know anyone by the words they leave behind – she can read old letters and study yellowing photos, but she will never know the grandmother who overdosed on opium when Daisy was only nine. And this leads to another interesting point:
I have never read an analysis of my work or me that reads as accurate. It's because they start off on the wrong path, have created the map and thereby see only those points and conclusions. There is no symbolic immortality to be had in giving one's archives to a library. It's perpetual misinterpretation. Who I was will have been missing since before I stepped off Earth's floor.Apparently Tan intends to have all of her personal papers destroyed upon her death – all of the letters, journals, and partial novels that, as an admitted packrat, she now possesses – and this seems to be in line with what she's saying here: words on the page are dead things, not a conversation with their author, and open to misinterpretation; she wants to be remembered for what she has produced, not for what others assume those products mean. And that's very interesting coming from a Linguist-novelist; someone who uses language to discuss language; someone who uses language to untangle the knotted mess that is her inner self.
Where the Past Begins does have all the elements of a traditional memoir – we learn about Tan's childhood and her complicated relationship with her mother; the tragedies that befell the family when Tan was a teenager; the family stories behind some of her fictional scenes – but this “fugue state” free form style also includes material that didn't interest me very much. Still happy to have read it and am rounding up to four stars.
