Q&A: Amy Tan

Amy Tan’s new novel “The Valley of Amazement” is a long and luxurious read, offering riches on almost every page.

As in “The Joy Luck Club,” “The Kitchen God’s Wife” and other works, Tan concocts a tale that lets her delve into knotty themes such as women as victims of a male-dominated society; the great divide between social classes; the cultural clash of East with West; and, most poignantly, the complicated bond between mother and daughter.

Largely set between 1895 and 1926, this fat novel sweeps readers from Shanghai’s first-class courtesan houses (the city once had some 1,500 of them) to a remote Chinese village “where hermits go to die” to the bustle of early San Francisco. Tan laces her story with colorful characters (names such as Magic Gourd and Loyalty Fang), a little comedy, enough tragedy, and plenty of passion and historic detail.

In a phone interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week, Tan recalled the research, family background and coincidence that sent her down the path that became “The Valley of Amazement.” Several years ago, she said, she was studying photographs taken in 1910 of her grandmother — her mother’s mother — and noticed similarities to a century-old photo of “The 10 Beauties of Shanghai,” all of whom were known courtesans.

In one image, her grandmother poses with hand on hip, coming across as one tough cookie. Her outfit is nearly identical to those worn by several of the 10 courtesan “beauties.” After further poking and prying, Tan said, she came to believe “that my grandmother might have worked as a courtesan at one point.” She abandoned another novel in progress because “that’s what I had to write about.”

She considers “Valley” a story “mostly about identity.”

The first leg of Tan’s 30-city book tour brings her to Atlanta next week. Here are some highlights of the AJC’s conversation with her …

Q: Before you imagined her working as a courtesan, what did you already know about your grandmother's life?

A: At some point after my grandfather died of Spanish influenza in 1919, my grandmother became the fourth wife, or concubine, of a very brutal man. She was miserable and killed herself with an opium overdose when my mother was 9. My mother even witnessed this. She watched her mother die.

Q: And once you decided that she also may have been a Shanghai courtesan, you were compelled to learn more and write about that?

A: Yes. I became obsessed with learning everything I could about women falling into those circumstances. I wanted to enter that mysterious world and see who was there. Maybe I was looking for my grandmother. I can't say I found her or found out everything I could, but I found a lot of clues.

Q: You write about mother issues a lot, and this book has a mother's abandonment at its core.

A: My mother was often overwrought, unstable. She constantly wailed that she was supposed to be a doctor "so that if I ever wanted to leave my husband I wouldn't have to think twice." That was a huge theme in my life.

My mother escaped a marriage to someone we only knew as “that bad man.” He raped little girls and made her watch. He put a gun to her head. My mother’s first son died in her arms. Also, my mother abandoned three daughters in China in 1949, when she immigrated to the U.S. and married my father. I didn’t find out until I was a teenager and I couldn’t believe it. My father was a Baptist minister and this was a very shameful thing. Over the years my mother refused to feel guilty, but I don’t think I’ll ever know her true feelings.

Q: You haven't previously written what we would call "sex" scenes, but you do in this book. Was that difficult?

A: I didn't want to push it that much, but this was the business of the courtesans, so I could not really avoid it. The goal was to be as truthful and tasteful as I could.

Q: Does writing fiction help you figure out the world and your place in it?

A: Absolutely. Writing is a luxury that, for me, involves remembering and meditating. You give yourself the chance to think and feel as deeply as you can. I used to think my life was too weird or too boring, but looking back, there was a lot that was improbable, too much trauma and drama. Well, at least it's source material.