And she said, 'It's not too late; tell the world, tell the world what happened to her.' And I take her mandate to be the one that is in my heart, the one that I should follow.
And so she was very proud, because she measured success in terms of money, which is what I started to do as well. My goal then, became to increase the amount of money that I made each month.
And we have a Constitution, a tradition, a culture that supports that. I hope it continues to support that. I hope it especially continues to support the arts in that direction.
At the time I was doing business writing, I also had a friend who introduced me to a fiction writer. My friend said that I could meet this woman and tell her how to make some real money.
Certainly all of us have gone through fights with partners in our life, but that's not drawn from my relationships per se. But I know that I'm going to be subject to that assumption.
For myself, it's very personal. So I have a hard time accepting what is said about my work when it's taken apart.
Getting this story out, I realized, was a gift that she was giving me. And there was a gift I could give back to her, and it didn't matter what happened to that book afterwards.
God, life changes faster than you think.
I also grew up, thankfully, with a love of language. That may have happened because I was bilingual at an early age. I stopped speaking Chinese when I was five, but I loved words.
I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
I could already see how people were treating me differently. That's the scary thing.
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
I did see all of those things, and even more. I discovered how American I was. I also discovered how Chinese I was by the kind of family habits and routines that were so familiar.
I did some writing in class when I was young just as everybody did. I had to write little essays and things like that.
I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.
I didn't want to become a suspicious person. Those were the things that helped me decide what I was going to write.
I discovered a sense of finally belonging to a period of history which I never felt with American history.
I don't see myself, for example, writing about cultural dichotomies, but about human connections.
I find it happening less here partly because people are more aware now of the flaws of political correctness - that literature has to do something to educate people.
I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.
I remember all of my teachers. I think of them all as being very kind and dedicated. I remember one teacher in particular.
I remember once one of my playmates from around the corner died, probably of leukemia. My mother took me to this funeral and took me up to see Rachel.
I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.
I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.
I still did a lot of things out of anger for a while. I was lucky that I met a very kind person, a very good person and that person is now my husband. He is a very sweet man.
I still have to think about that over and over again, with everything I do in life. It's so easy to get derailed by success.
I think any mother worries about her daughter losing herself to some boy and ruining her life. So there was a mix of things.
I think I was a gloomy kid. I was trying to behave, trying to be good. I really loved my father. He was my mentor in a way, so I wanted to please him a lot.
I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.
I thought it would ruin things, because at that moment in my life I was fairly happy. I was getting along with my mother.
I thought my life was over then, that all chances of ever going to college - of having a decent life, of being respected - were gone.
I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.
I wanted to bury it so that what I thought was the stronger, more independent, American side could come out.
I wanted to see where she had lived, I wanted to see the family members that had raised her, the daughters she had left behind. The daughters could have been me, or I could have been them.
I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.
I was in a school in the third grade and they were thinking of skipping me, putting me in a higher grade. But then somebody said that would be bad psychologically.
I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.
I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.
I'm a fairly skeptical person. I'm educated, I'm reasonably sane, and I know that this subject is fodder for ridicule.
If you get this kind of review then you worry about what's going to happen with the next. So there's never any comfort point.
In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
In no other country do you have that opportunity. It's not to say that everything will happen fairly and the way that you want.
It didn't matter to my mother that I was writing fiction, because I still had the job. I made it a goal however, to cut back and work only 50 billable hours a week.
It is that self-determination of your identity, to define what it means to be an American, and that nobody defines that for you.
It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
It's hard to believe, but this feeling changes over time. So many people feel this way. It's normal to feel conflicted.
It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself.
It's not just some philosophical babble of how things repeat themselves. You see the undercurrents of change and culture and that is history. It's those behaviors that are important.
It's not simply material ones or environmental ones. I worry about ethical ones, moral ones, the kinds of compromises that are constantly being made for pragmatic reasons.
It's very gothic to have a little boy killing a giant, somebody's head being served on a platter, dead people being raised out of the grave.
Just be open to it and never let yourself despair that this is it.
Like in Las Vegas when the bells go off, telling you you've hit the jackpot. Yin people ring the bells, saying, 'Pay attention.' And you say, 'Oh, I see now.'
My books and my stories are about families, so why wouldn't I tell them the things that I thought were important to our family, that are in my books?
My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.
My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.
My mother, meanwhile, all the time kept saying, 'Write my true story. That's all you have to do. Write my true story.' I kept saying, 'No, that's not fiction. I'm not writing biography.'
My mother, though, got equally angry at the relative and said, 'For so many years, I carried this shame on my back, and my mother suffered, because she couldn't say anything to anybody.'
My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was in kindergarten.
My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.
Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
She hounded me until I wrote a couple more stories and then she sold that as a collection called The Joy Luck Club.
She said 'I'm by commission. You don't have to pay anything until you sell anything.' I said, 'Well fine. You want to be my agent and not make anything.' I thought, 'Boy, is she dumb.'
Some people are going to lose out, but there also might be some compromises made in the world.
That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.
That was what achievement was: the plateaus you always had to maintain, the highest standards, the 'A's.' People would give you the feedback and tell you if you had done the achievement.
That's what I think life is like, too. I have the luxury to do exactly what it is we all need time to do, and that is just think about the mystery of life.
The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.
The hurdles and conflicts are really momentary. You get over them and you see what happens afterwards.
There are a lot of people who think that's what's needed to be successful is always being right, always being careful, always picking the right path.
They didn't know who I really was. They didn't know how much the smallest amount of recognition would have meant to me and how the smallest amount of criticism could undo me.
They published my little essay and they gave me a transistor radio and, at that moment, there was a little gleam in mind that maybe writing could be lucrative.
They were daughters, also wanting their mother's approval, and didn't understand why their mother was so critical.
This was a moment when I thought for sure my life was over. I think I understand kids who have made a few mistakes. They're relying on everybody else's opinion of who they are.
To write the book, I had to put that aside. As with any book. I go through the anxiety, 'What will people think of me for writing something like this?'
Ultimately, I have to write what I have to write about, including the question of life continuing beyond our ordinary senses.
What you'll find ultimately is that this whole question of who you are is a very, very interesting question and having two cultures to add to the mix of it makes it even more interesting.
When people measure their lives in those terms, the passion is there, the self-guidance is there, and the rewards are there. The success is always there.
When you read about the Civil War, a lot of people, like my husband, can say my great-great-grandfather fought in that war. We have the gun and all that kind of stuff.
Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.
With that sendoff into the world, I was determined to make it as a writer. I worked day and night trying to build my business, writing a business plan and thinking of how I could do this.
Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.
Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.
You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.'
You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.
Amy has written two children's books: The Moon Lady and Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat.
Amy, along with Stephen King and Dave Barry, Matt Groening and others, is a member of a literary garage band called the Rock Bottom Remainders. The band helps to raise money for literacy programs.
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