Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir by Amy Tan (review)

Amy Tan’s Where the Past Begins, unique among her writings, offers a rare insight into the process of her writing as well as her becoming a writer. In the book, Tan explains how her past affects her writings and reveals the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fictions. Through spontaneous storytelling, Tan shows how her fluid fictional state of mind triggers her near-forgotten memories and at the same time becomes the emotional source of her novels.

The memoir is originally suggested by her editor (Daniel Halpern) that she writes a book based on the e-mails exchanges between both of them. To fulfill this, Tan “plow[s] into the e-mails that might be usable” (7). Instead of writing one totally based on their e-mails, Tan has plunged into the history of her family and has successfully reconstructed “the past even before [her] birth” (1). Consequently, we, the readers, together with Tan, the author, are given the opportunity to explore the unpleasant stories of her family back in China and those of the Tans’ in the United States. These include the short and tragic (even doubtful) life of a grandmother. Tan, judging from a family photo, believes that her grandmother was once a prostitute. In addition, there is the tormented life of her mother who was unable to suffer her abusive husband and who, against the then societal practice, fell in love with Tan’s father and later immigrated to America. The story of struggle-for-survival of her parents in the States intervened by the heartbreaking losses in the same year of her father and brother, and the troubled yet love-filled stories between Tan, the daughter, and her suicide-haunted mother.

Obviously, Where the Past Begins conveys to the audience that Tan’s family plays an essential role in the making of the writer. Among all the factors leading to the rise of the writer, three should not be neglected: the source of her imagination; her personality; and most importantly, her traumatic childhood indissolubly tied to her mother, a difficult, moody woman who had an indelible influence on her daughter Amy Tan, the author.

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Tan firstly explores how her imagination—of the greatest importance for a writer—was cultivated unconsciously when she practiced drawing and playing the piano from an early age. In some ways, drawing is very much like fiction writing, both of them requires one to be “curious, observant and inquisitive” (20). Tan has the habit of wonderment, which prompts her to wonder over what she is seeing and helps in removing usual assumptions. Tan regard writing as a process to discover truths that lie submerged under the factual surface and writing as a process of revealing human nature. She contends: “in writing fiction, the truth I seek is not a factual or scientific truth. It has to do with human nature, which is tied to nature. It is about those things that are not apparent on the surface” (21).

Naturally, in writing a story, she attempts “to find a way to capture all its facets and conundrums” and tries “to put down what feels true” (21). Her drawing proclivities in childhood actually increase her aptitude for the visual and emotional imagery in her writing. The way she draws shares similarities with writing. Both require the presentation of what is seen on paper. “When I see a visual image in my mind as a scene, I try to capture it in words . . . and I do constant revisions as l try to capture it more clearly.” She wants to “bring forth what [she] cannot see, what is not there” and in writing she allows “[her] brain to circumnavigate all the possibilities” (21).

Music has become Tan’s best companion when she writes, as music can help her concentrate on writing. When she listens to a piece of music, she will see a story in the...