Amy and Me (reposted)

I wrote this on January 5, 2013. An update to it is that Ms. Tan has a new novel titled The Valley of Amazement, published last month. Didn't have time to write today, so I chose this one to give you. Hope you enjoy it, and the video!
 

OK—confession time. I have—sort of—a Twitter account.

“Nonsense,” you say. “You do or you don’t. How can you ‘sort of’ have a Twitter account?”

Well, I was willing—actually compelled—to write a book. I also vowed to start a blog to promote it. And I spend an hour or two trying to promote my work—asking people to write reviews, calling people who may be interested in the book.

What did I refuse to do?

The social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus.

I’m not stupid. I could do it if I wanted to. But that’s the crux—I have no interest that you ate a six-pound hamburger accompanied by a quart of diet Coke AND you have photographed the monstrosity and put it on your wall. Perhaps it was one too many dead sheep that dulled the senses to it all….

So I gave the thing over to doña Taí, who is capable and also interested. And, periodically, I get messages from people who are “following” me. These I happily ignore—the messages, not the people. OK—both.

Until yesterday, when I got an email notification from Twitter that Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club is now following me.

Yeah? 

A fake, I decided. So I checked it out, going first to her official website, which is quite beautifully done, by the way. From there I clicked on her Twitter page, which looked identical to the page I had received in the email Twitter had sent to me. There was a tweet about her new phone number, with the lucky “88” that’s spurring bill collectors to call daily. (Hmmm, and that’s lucky?) There’s the tweet about Joyce Carol Oates being over at her house.

Well, it’s real or it’s not. At any rate, it seemed a thing to do—find out the real, or at least the presented, dope on Amy Tan.

Born in America, of Chinese immigrants. Her father was an electrical engineer as well as a Baptist minister. But as anyone who has read The Joy Luck Club can tell you, it’s the mother that counts. So much so that the first line in her Wikipedia article runs something like “Amy Tan is an American writer of Chinese descent whose work explores mother / daughter relationships.”  When her brother and father die of brain tumors six months apart, her mother decides logically that there’s a curse—the fifteen-year old Amy is next. So they pack her off to Switzerland, to see the world before Amy leaves it.

In Switzerland, Amy hangs out with the counter-culture—remember that?—and gets arrested for drugs. But then she pulls it together and gets a scholarship to go to Linfield College in Oregon. She does graduate work in linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later at Berkeley.

She worked as a freelance business writer for a bunch of telecommunication companies, until she wearied of it, and began to write in her spare time. The Joy Luck Club was her first novel—or rather, in her words, a collection of stories.

She’s written five or six other novels, a memoir, a couple of children’s books, and the libretto for an opera based on her novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

An impressive body of work, for which she has received numerous awards. She’s also been translated into 35 languages.

Wow—the lady is major!

Well, well—it was all a hoax, I decided. The world is not always a nice place—sorry you had to read it here, but somebody should tell you—and things are not always what they seem. A hacker, or maybe spoofster, has decided his day would be better off by playing tricks on an aged, unknown writer. It was a mistweet, or maybe a faux tweet.

But it now seems it’s real. Doña Taí writes that she too has gotten a notification from Twitter of a follow from Ms. Tan, and that she had Twitter-messaged Amy some time ago to say how much she—sorry, that’s Taí—had liked her—and that would be Amy’s—work. Especially her love of her dog Bombo. Taí had come across Amy’s blog looking for something, and read through it and saw the videos of Bombo and read Amy’s bio, stories and bloggies, as she calls them. Perhaps Ms. Tan stumbled across my blog through Taí’s tweets reposting links to its posts....

“Compare and contrast” started every essay question on every test I took in high school. (Right, not the math classes, but just about everything else…..) And some forty years later, I’m still doing it. The contrasts are easy—fame, fortune, sex, culture. But the comparisons are interesting—two writers with distinctive mothers, both of whom had Alzheimer’s. A strong love of classical music—she played the piano, I the cello. A total love of animals.

Most, I suppose, the fact that we sit down each day in our varying worlds before a screen of primordial whiteness, and conjure how we are going to cook up other worlds. The cat wags its tail and moves its head when I proclaim him “ridiculous.” Bombo thumps his tail. Somewhere, perhaps, Amy Tan is reading my blog.

I’m totally honored.