As a child Amy Tan believed her life was duller than most. She read to escape. Her parents wanted her to be a doctor and a concert pianist. She secretly dreamed of becoming an artist. She began writing fiction when she was 33.
The Holy Ghost of my father and the Chinese ghosts of my mother.
The American Dream and the Chinese family's interpretation of that.
Free books from the library every week and reading books that appeared on the banned book lists.
Writing secret letters to my friends about running away to Haight-Ashbury and writing thank you letters as my mother dictated them to me in bad English.
The early deaths of my older brother and father and my mother's belief that I would die next.
An SAT score in the 400s for English and SAT score in the 700s in Spanish
Listening to my mother and her friends gossip in Chinese. Understanding Chinese but not being able to speak it.
The Other Way Around: While going through 100 boxes of junk, I found a file of documents concerning my mother and father's expired student visas. There were handtyped notices threatening deportation. I never knew how close I came to growing up in a rice field during the Cultural Revolution. That was the fate of my half-sisters. My parents wept when they became US ...
Have Twitter and Facebook with their word limits dumbed us down to symbolic subtlety? Do icons like smiley faces shorthand our deeper emotions into cliche? I am a novelist and have problems with word limits. If someone tells me I am limited to 4000 words, I feel caged in. If I am told I have 350 words, I feel censored. 140 characters, that's a press release headline. But ...
I've been reading a book on writing that includes stories of rejection from writers who later saw success. Stephen King, Andrew Sean Greer, myself. Reading them together, you'd think there was a contest on who was more brutally rejected. Fun reading. (Write That Book Already! by Sam Barry and Kathi Kamen Goldmark)
