Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate

Amy Tan’s book The Opposite of Fate brings a unique perspective to the writing life. Her bi-culturalism and bilingualism allow her to assess her experiences as a writer in an insightful and sometimes humorous way. She terms the work a “book of musings.” The book comprises a collection of pieces of varied lengths that she wrote over time. Many of the short pieces describe family and life events that have informed her work.

She begins with “A Note to the Reader” in which she mentions that as she compiled and assembled various pieces written for different purposes over the years, she realized that she had always been obsessed with “questions of fate and its alternatives” and that “Hope has always been there.”

In the first section, Fate and Faith, Tan discusses “The CliffNotes Version of My Life,” noting that on one occasion she was surprised by an admirer asking if she was “a contemporary author.” Tan came face to face with the idea that if she was not contemporary, she was dead! Thus, her days of authorhood were “time-limited.”  One of the problems of being a “contemporary” author she notes, is that you come face to face with others’ views of you and your work. Her discussion of finding herself on the shelf of the Cliff Notes Section of the bookstore is amusing. Tan goes on to clarify and correct many of the wrong assumptions in the publication creating her own “Cliff Notes” of her life.

The second section, Changing the Past, presents her thoughts on her mother’s complex life as a young woman in China and her life and death in the United States. The title The Opposite of Fate comes from her mother’s confusion of “faith” and “fate” because she didn’t pronounce the “th” of “faith.”  In this section, Tan also writes about her grandmother and her own realization that writing about the past was one way to change the present and potentially the future. In “Thinly Disguised Memoir,” Tan chuckles about her readers assuming that everything she writes is about her, even though the books contain many things she has never done. She is also amused by individuals offering to share their own personal stories with her so that she can write about them. She ends by emphasizing, “When I write my stories, I do not use childhood memories. I use a child’s memory.” “Persona Errata” is an interesting discussion about the amount of misinformation written about Tan on the internet which gets repeated and requoted broadly. One of the most amusing and stupid errors individuals make is misquoting ages and dates. She ends this section with a short piece called “Scent” in which she recalls the perfume of gardenias and its different meanings throughout her life.

In the third major section of the book, American Circumstances and Chinese Character, Tan’s wry humor is evident as she talks about the experience of growing up in a Chinese family in the United States. “Fish Cheeks” is about her embarrassment when a white family comes to partake in a Chinese dinner. “Dangerous Advice” details some of the warnings her mother offered as she grew up. In “Midlife Confidential,” Tan discusses her life as a successful writer spending time on the road giving talks on book tours. In “Arrival Banquet,” she summarizes a trip taken to visit family in China with her mother and her realization of her Americanness. In “Joy Luck and Hollywood,” she relates her experiences with turning a book into a movie. She ties her visual imagination to her habit of placing herself in her “character’s shoes.” She would look down at the shoes and start walking: “When I looked up, I would see the scenery in front of me, say China in the 1920s.” She thinks this visual imagination helped her work with the movie crew. In In the fourth section of the book, Strong Winds, Strong Influences, Tan reminisces about experiences and individuals who influenced her writing. In “What She Meant,” Tan realizes how differently her mother views her past when she asks her about the war and her mother answers, “I wasn’t affected.” Tan then realizes that she needs to examine how hope affects one’s responses to circumstances. In the short piece “Confessions,” Tan discusses a time when her mother flew into a fury and threatened to kill her. Years later when she asked her mother about it, her mother answered, “You always good girl…” This statement allowed the daughter to hear “what was never true yet now would be forever so.”  Tan compares her own looks to her mother’s beauty in the chapter “Pretty Beyond Belief” and realizes as she ages that she still wants to look like her mother. “The Most Hateful Words” addresses the difficulty of mother/daughter relationships. When her mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s, she called Amy to apologize for hurting her and asked her to forget the bad things that had happened. As a fiction writer who “uses memory and imagination,” Tan chose to know “in our hearts what we should remember, what we can forget.” In the chapter on “My Love Affair with Vladimir Nabokov,” Tan details various literary influences on her work. She had the rare experience of living near Nabokov when the Tan family lived in Switzerland. She never met him but loved his writing style. She also states that she learned not to read reviews of her own work.

The section on Luck, Chance, and a Charmed Life is a collection of personal ghostly experiences that have had an impact on Tan’s adult writing life. “Inferior Decorating” discusses her approach to decorating her home with objects related to her Chinese culture. In “Room with a View, New Kitchen, and Ghosts,” she discusses her home in San Francisco from which she had to have a Chinese man expel the ghost of a former inhabitant. In “Retreat to Reality,” Tan focuses on acquiring a cabin inhabited by invasive squirrels. In “My Hair, My Face, My Nails,” she discusses having to be rescued from a flood that destroyed the bridges to their property. And, in “The Ghosts of My Imagination,” she delves into the incredible coincidences that occur to her when she is working on a writing project. It is as if forces from beyond are aware of and supportive of the story she is writing.

The section on A Choice of Words includes several essays. The first, “What the Library Means to Me,” Tan wrote when she was a child. In “Mother Tongue,” Tan discusses the types of English she grew up with, the difficulties her mother had communicating with white Americans, and the benefit she derived from her own personal linguistic history when she became a writer. In her discussion of the differences between Chinese and English in “The Language of Discretion,” Tan explains how difficult translation is and how each language represents an entirely different social world. Being bi-cultural, she learned to understand and navigate two languages and two cultures. “Five Writing Tips” is the text of a speech Tan gave at a graduation ceremony. She suggests that aspiring writers avoid clichés and generalizations, find their own voice, show compassion, and ask important questions. In a poignant discussion “Required Reading and Other Dangerous Subjects,” Tan reveals her reactions to academic examinations of her work, usually in a multicultural context. She says that she experiences “shock and embarrassment” at what individuals write about her and her work and feels distanced from their appraisals. In “Angst and the Second Book,” she talks about the anguish she felt when told that authors’ second books tend to be worse than their first ones. Subsequently, she wrote several unpublished stories and finally published her second book which was a success. In “The Best Stories,” Tan discusses her own writing of short stories and her judgment of short stories. She summarizes that she likes stories that have a strong narrative thread that leads to a feeling of change in both the characters and the reader.

In the last section of the book, Hope, Tan reflects on “What I Would Remember,” a short piece on her relationship with her mother. In “To Complain Is American,” she talks about cultural differences and accepted or unaccepted behaviors in Chinese and American culture. Finally, “The Opposite of Fate” is a long detailed discussion of her extended, ignored, long non-diagnosed bout with Lime’s disease, and her discovery of an online Lime’s disease group that led her to a doctor who accurately diagnosed her condition so she could write once again.

My Writing Goals for 2023

Publish my second book of poetry:

This book is off to the publisher. I also received some royalties from my first book, Moon Chimes, which is available on Amazon.

Finish, request feedback, and send my first novel out for review:

This month, my critique group workshopped around 2000 pages of this novel.

Continue to work on my other novels:

This month I investigated potential agents and presses for these books.

Continue to develop a network of kindred spirits in the world of writing and publishing:

Boulder Writers Alliance: 

This month I attended the BWA Happy Hour and enjoyed meeting new members. I participated in the Writers Who Read group and the following social evening. I also presented on writing Ekphrastic Poetry for the BWA Poetry Circle. Additionally, the editor of our newsletter and I worked on our November BWA Newsletter.

Denver Women’s Press Club: I read the newsletter but had no time to attend any meetings.

Women Writing the West:  The national conference was online. I particularly enjoyed the panel with agents and publishers.

Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers:  I read the newsletter.

Document my writing progress through my blog and post it on the seventh day of each month, one blog per month in 2023:

Today is November 7, 2023, and I am posting my eleventh blog of 2023. This year seems to have passed by so quickly. Fortunately, fall is always an invigorating time for me. I love sitting by the fireplace and writing in the evening.

Today in History:

Ruth Pitter, a British poet, was born on November 7, 1897, and died in 1992. The winner of the Hawthornden Prize in 1937 for A Trophy of Arms and of the William E. Heinemann Award in 1954 for The Ermine, Pitter authored eighteen volumes of poetry over her long career.