Finally Friday - Amy Tan

 Finally Friday. Let's fill it with Amy Tan.  There is currently a documentary on Netflix about her - very well done and it prompted me to buy this memoir Where the Past Begins - Memory and Imagination. 

Ever since she burst on to the literary scene with Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan has been a favorite author of mine. Her writing, characters, and stories are rich. She blends the past with the present to create memorable books. And she's taken me to places I've never been. 

With this memoir, you learn more about her life and upbringing. It was not easy. Her mother's story is quite shocking - abusive marriage, fleeing China, Amy's father's (2nd husband) death from a brain tumor and her eldest son's death from a brain tumor, leaving America briefly to travel and mourn, and mental illness through the years. 

Meanwhile, Amy has her issues from her father and brother's deaths. That's a lot to deal with and she uses writing as an escape, a tool, and a career - she was meant to be a writer!

p.186  Darkness is no longer the word I would use for despair, not since going into that cave. I now think the metaphor of pitch-blackness is a good one for starting afresh, for thinking before writing. In darkness, the old forms and assumptions vanish.  Time is suspended. Noise is blocked. In darkness, I have only imagination. 

Food for thought from this memoir (that I did buy):  p. 327  Books are no longer being bought. People are scrimping on their minds. They are starving. 

Happy Friday. Don't scrimp.  Feed your face (mmm...ice cream!), feed your brain - anything by Amy Tan. 

Book Review: Valley of Amazement

Ever since The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan has not let us down.  Her rich writing, her complicated characters, and her insight into the Chinese/American conundrum have given us a lot of good reading. Add The Valley of Amazement to her pile.  This stunning book covers forty years and two continents. We see the collapse of China’s last imperial dynasty and we learn about old Shanghai. It’s Shanghai 1812 and Violet Minturn is a “privileged daughter of the American madam running the most exclusive courtesan house. But the Ching dynasty is overturned and Violet is separated from her mother in a cruel act of chicanery.”  (cover blurb)  It takes forty years for her to find her mother again and also reunite with a daughter she lost.  

Violet and her mother Lucia choose disasterous courses in life, but then manage to pull it together. There are some good loves, sad deaths, wealth and poverty, and journeys of discovery. The key is the connection between mothers and daughters. At times convoluted, humor, desire, drama , and deception pull together the huge narrative. There were times when I wished Lucia’s story was more intermixed between Violet’s tale. I think that would have given us more insight into both women’s saga. But it all ties up in the end satisfactorily, and the writing is stupendous.  

p. 588 “On sleepless nights, when I could not bear my life, I thought of that ship and imagined I was aboard. I had been saved…….. But the ship never left, and I would have to disembark, and begin my life again each morning.” 

The Valley of Amazement is a book, a painting, and a life journey.