Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from her arm and drops it into the soup she has made for her dying mother. She spills another bowl of soup over her young daughter, seriously scalding the child’s neck. When that scarred little girl grows up and emigrates to America, she tells herself that to find her true identity, ‘You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.’
Almost 30 years later, the author has finally found the courage to take her character’s advice. Coaxed into peeling back the layers of her own traumatic heritage by her long-term editor Daniel Halpern, Tan has produced a memoir that teases and circles a series of painful truths before pinning each to the page with steely precision.
Born in California in 1952, Tan was the child of Chinese immigrants with a secret. Her mother had fled an abusive marriage to marry her father, leaving three children behind in China. An evangelical minister, her father never forgave himself for the sin of adultery and retreated from real engagement with both his children and his congregation by quoting scripture at them.
But he was easy company compared with Tan’s volatile mother, Daisy, whose own mother had died of an opium overdose when she was nine. As a consequence, Daisy learned to threaten suicide at the drop of a hat. Tan recalls the howling horror of a scene in which her mother tried to fling herself from the family car as they hurtled down the freeway, the car door stuck open ‘like the broken wing of a stupid bird’.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in