Amy Tan is best known for her 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. Published when she was 37 years old, Tan covered the complex subject of Chinese women whose daughters were ABC (American Born Chinese). Many people probably remember reading about Tan in their high school literature course, but unlike old English writers from the Western Canon; Tan is not white, male, or dead. She is actually quite the opposite.
Through the pages of her most recently published book The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musing, Tan has created a compilation of her different non-fiction writings about gaining popularity from The Joy Luck Club’s success, along with very personal musings.
Tan writes in a note to the reader, “I call this a book of musings because the writings are mostly casual pieces rather than formal essays.” Despite any apparent discontinuity, Tan is able to draw the reader into her world, with different entries that range from a contest essay from when she was eight years old, to her mother’s obituary, to a random person she and her husband lived with during her doctoral program years.
The Opposite of Fate is an enormous book for a pleasure reader like myself. This nonfiction autobiography did have several dry areas, especially when she started getting into her own writing and her obsession with ghosts. There tended to be a lot of repetition of different events and ideas. Unlike a normal storybook, The Opposite of Fate feels much more like a book of short stories with different feelings generated from various entries.
The autobiography’s 398 pages are partitioned into different themes such as Fate and Faith, Changing the Past, and American Circumstances and Chinese Character. In this book, you see Tan in many different lights. These include simultaneous deaths of her older brother and father from brain tumors, and touches on how her personality has been shaped by the morbid behaviorisms of her mother, which stem from her mother’s own hard past (which is reflected in many of the stories within The Joy Luck Club).
Tan openly speaks about different subjects such as making The Joy Luck Club movie, writing the “second book,” and speaking about her current lifeand history. Tan was actually in a musical band called The Rock Bottom Remainders during the early ’90s with other renowned authors like Dave Barry, Stephen King, and Barbara Kingsolver, which was interesting to discover, to say the least. However, Tan does ends up going a bit overboard in the description of her experience in this endeavor of singing.
Three entries really stood out of the handfuls found in The Opposite of Fate. The first of these noteworthy submissions is “the personal errata,” in this musing, where she pokes fun at people getting her biography completely wrong because of unofficial websites one might find when googling Amy Tan. She expresses her annoyance with incorrect information because of the implied laziness factor in not going further to look for the truth. Tan puts this at the end to help correct these wrongs that have been spread through various websites.
The second notable musing is called “pretty beyond belief;” Tan describes conversations she had about beauty with her mother, who was glamorous and ended up marrying an attractive “bad man” who openly slept with other women in front of her. In addition, Tan’s widowed grandmother had been forced to become the concubine of a rich Chinese man because of her beauty. It is so fascinating to read about examples of how these lives have been ruined by their beauty. This idea deviates from our culture’s positive view of beautiful females.
The third prominent selection in The Opposite of Fate is “required reading and other dangerous subjects.” While the other two selections I picked out were sarcastic, humorous, and sad, here Tan reveals her criticism of how novels are produced today. She speaks on how people have analyzed her in the wrong way and analysts have tried to create different reasons on why she writes. As the essay progressed, her anger increased to protest against how literature is viewed in the United States. She protests against the idea that people must write within the boundaries of who they are such as Chinese writing about being Chinese and Native Americans about being Native American. Also, she complains about being coupled and compared to other Chinese writers, who are not even writing about the same themes. Tan is disturbed by how people are labeled and measured by an imaginary ruler for that particular genre or group of people.
Overall, The Opposite of Fate is readable, and you can still pick it up even if you put it down a few months ago. Amy Tan has a pretty interesting past, her style of writing is enjoyable, and while there is some redundancy throughout the collection, I recommend this book to those who like autobiographies. Otherwise, you will just put it on the bookshelf and ever look at it again.
