Tan discusses writing, Ouija board labors

When Amy Tan was four and didn’t want to go to bed one night, she lied and told her mother… When Amy Tan was four and didn’t want to go to bed one night, she lied and told her mother she couldn’t brush her teeth because there were ghosts in the bathroom.

Instead of yelling at her, her mother rushed into the bathroom.

“Where, where are they? Show me where,” her mother said with excitement. After that night, her mother believed that Tan could communicate with ghosts.

Tan, the author of “The Joy Luck Club,” “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” and several other books inspired by her Chinese-American family, appeared at Heinz Hall Wednesday night as the third speaker in this year’s Pittsburgh Speakers Series, presented by Robert Morris University.

She began speaking about her experiences with fame in the manner of a stand-up comedian, but she kept the audience laughing as she tackled stories about her family and her writing.

When both her father and brother died of brain tumors within a year, Tan was asked by her mother to help her communicate with their spirits. Armed with a Ouija board and a teenager’s cynicism, Tan gave her mother the answers she wanted to hear in response to questions like, “Do you still love me?”

When her mother moved on to questions about the stock market and the family’s business life, Tan usually replied with the briefest answers she could think of.

“Why she believed that people on the other side would care about the Dow Jones, I don’t know,” Tan said, adding that, by the time her mother died, she had increased her scarce funds as a widow into a “nice portfolio.”

Tan’s mother fled from China in 1949, shortly before the Communists took control of Shanghai, and was forced to leave behind three daughters from a previous marriage. Tan said she later learned that her mother had been married to “a very bad man” and had often contemplated suicide, both for honor and vengeance. As a child, however, Tan knew only her mother’s odd warnings and strong beliefs in the supernatural.

“She said to me, ‘Don’t ever kiss a boy, because if you kiss a boy, you’ll have a baby, and then you’ll put it in the garbage can, and the police will come and lock you away forever, so you might as well kill yourself now,'” Tan said.

After nearly 35 years of marriage to Lou DeMattei, she still hasn’t kissed her husband, Tan joked.

Tan was a young girl when her playmate down the street died. Tan said she didn’t really understand death at the time, but attended the funeral with her mother.

When Tan and her mother approached the coffin and Tan looked at her friend’s body, her mother leaned in and whispered, “This is what happens when you don’t listen to your mother.”

Tan’s mother influenced her writing a great deal, but Tan said she also felt influenced by her father, a passionate Baptist minister. Though her characters are not directly modeled after specific people – she pointed out that her husband and half-sisters are frequently asked if they did some of the unusual things described in her books – Tan said her books are the result of a structure she forces over the chaos of her family’s past.

Even with her ancestors prompting her, however, Tan admitted that she sometimes has trouble writing.

“The page isn’t really blank, because it’s filled with all these possibilities of things I might write about,” she said, elaborating upon her description of the “blank screen” she said she faces when her writing doesn’t come easily.

“I consider myself one of the luckiest people in the world, that I am able to sit at my desk, in my pajamas, if need be, and meditate,” she said.

When not writing and meditating, Tan spends time performing in a “vintage garage” rock ‘n’ roll band, The Rock Bottom Remainders, with fellow writers Stephen King, Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Mitch Albom, James McBride, Scott Turow, Matt Groening and others.

“This is a band of people who revert to being adolescents about once a year,” she said, adding that most of the band members – including Tan – are “not that musically talented.”

They nevertheless performed at the opening of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

One audience member asked how some Americans, whose cultural roots are more distant, could connect with their histories as deeply as Tan does.

“I think that we have to look at our histories as being continuous,” Tan responded, explaining that a person is not influenced only by her parents, but the parents who shaped them, going back many generations.

When asked if she experienced much prejudice, she responded that she thinks any racist names or slurs she encountered were delivered just like any other hurtful names, such as “fatty,” that children throw at each another.

“Like a lot of kids, I wanted to be like other kids, and I think a lot of the prejudice came from within myself,” she said, recalling that she did not completely accept herself as a Chinese person.

Tan brushed off acclamation saying that her writing has opened the door for Asian-American writers, or revealed a history of immigration and assimilation.

“I feel that my intentions as a writer are far simpler,” she said. “They have much more to do with emotions than anything socioeconomic.”

“I’ve written about one particular set of Chinese characters, namely, my family, who are very weird,” she said, explaining that her stories can’t be applied to every Chinese-American family.

“I believe that writing fiction is a wonderful way to find the truth,” Tan said.