Amy Tan on the Writing Life, New Paperback Release

 In Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate: a book of musings (OoF 2003), she talks about her motives for writing.  “I write for myself.  I write because I enjoy stories and make believe.  I write because if I didn’t I’d probably go crazy (OoF 304).”  

Tan shares Masha Hamilton’s use of writing to understand life and probe experience.  “I write about questions that disturb me, images that mystify me, or memories that cause me anguish and pain.  I write about secrets, lies, and contradictions, because within them are many kinds of truth. …  I write about life as I have misunderstood it.  To be sure it’s a Chinese-American life, but it’s the only one I’ve had so far (OoF 304-5).”

In all previous novels she has mined the Chinese-American experience by creating parallel stories – one set in America and one set in China, but Saving Fish from Drowning( SFD) maintains only a vestige of doubleness.  The narration begins in America but quickly shifts to China and Burma for most of the novel, returning only to contemporary American moments in a collage of characters’ lives after they returned.  Our novel has a unique doubleness.  The ghost of Bibi Chen presides over the world as we know it, filling us in on all the angles and possible pitfalls to come.

The inside track lets us see all the characters so we have a sense of simultaneous events unknown to the people caught up in them.  Saving Fish from Drowning achieves the sense of syncopation and tension between the known and unknown through Bibi’s supernatural sight (and insight).  This can lead to hilarity with an undertone of menace