Delve into the stories from Amy Tan's life that inspired bestselling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement
Amy Tan has touched millions of readers with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists. Whether recalling arguments with her mother in suburban California or introducing us to the ghosts that inhabit her computer, The Opposite of Fate offers vivid portraits of choices, attitudes, charms, and luck in actiona refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we all face today.
From the Publisher
Sharp and invigorating . . . fertile reading. (The New York Times Book Review)Wickedly funny and honest. (O Magazine)
A melodramatic, tragic and comedic tale . . . Tan is refreshingly candid. (The Baltimore Sun)
Novelist Amy Tan began her musings by asking how hope changes according to life's circumstances. "And what," she continues, "of the circumstances themselves: Do we believe they are simply a matter of fate? Or do we view them as the Chinese concept of luck, the Christian concept of God's will, the American concept of choice? And depending on what we believe, how can we then find balance in our lives? What do we accept? What do we feel we can still change? In these ruminations, the author of Joy Luck Club finds answers and lessons in everyday actions and attitudes.
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The Barnes & Noble Review
In her bestselling novels of the Chinese-American experience, Amy Tan has examined the vagaries of luck, a two-sided coin that spins from superstition to serendipity and from choice to destiny in the blink of an eye. Now, in The Opposite of Fate, a dazzling kaleidoscope of short nonfiction pieces, she ponders the role of luck in her own charmed life.
Presented thematically, these entertaining meditations delve into a wealth of experience, with Tan's beautiful, diminutive mother holding center stage in several pieces. Here we come to meet a tragicomic figure who elevated pessimism to an art form, communed with ancestral spirits through a Oujia board (and occasionally the computer!), and wholeheartedly believed her unhappy life was cursed. (In many ways, it was.) In other pieces, Tan recalls a murdered friend who appeared to her in puzzling dreams that provided uncanny clues to the future; describes the deliciously liberating experience of jamming with Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, and other publishing titans in a band called the Rock Bottom Remainders; recounts her adventures in Hollywood filming The Joy Luck Club; and corrects several Internet bios that have erroneously endowed her with a doctorate, multiple husbands, nonexistent children, and a Pulitzer Prize!
As witty as Tan herself, this delightful "book of musings" explores the yin and yang of a literary life blessed with happy accidents and destined (perhaps?) for even greater success. Anne Markowski
The New York Times
The cunning willfulness of memory is a powerful refrain in this book. Tan considers how she, like her mother, became frozen in one frame of time, a slave to her own punishing recollections. In ''Scent,'' she relates how one whiff of a gardenia would plunge her into the ''unbearable grief'' of the year in her midteens when the living room was twice filled with funeral sprays after both her father and brother died of brain tumors. Now, she says, she is submerging those black memories into others of ''an earlier time, of happy expectations,'' when the scent of a gardenia meant ''prom nights and first kisses.''
Deborah Mason
The Washington Post
In this volume, for the first time, I felt uneasy about my reactions to this woman, as if I were laughing at my Chinese waitress for the way she speaks or at the eccentricities of someone who was extremely depressed. That kind of ambivalence is at the heart of Tan's work, which is comic and heart-wrenching at the same time. And depression runs through the female side of this family, seems to afflict Chinese women disproportionately. Tan reports the astonishing statistic that one-third of deaths among rural women in China are suicides.
David Guy
New York Times
Tan's novels swim with memories transfigured by the pulse of her imagination.
Washington Post Book World
The Opposite of Fate is a collection of occasional pieces, but...it's as entertaining as a memoir.
Seattle Times
...her fans should consider themselves fortunate to receive such a funny, insightful and frequently strange literary self-portrait.
Publishers Weekly
In her first collection of essays, Tan explains that she writes stories to understand "how things happen." These musings, as wide-ranging as a graduation speech at Simmons College and a childhood contest entry, offer insight into how her family history has shaped the questions she chooses to ask. Tan herself reads the essays, which suits the intimate, self-congratulatory tone of the collection. Several of the pieces focus on Tan's tragedies-her father and brother died from brain tumors, her mother suffered violent bouts of depression and her best friend was murdered-but her successes also receive a fair amount of space. One can almost hear the pride in Tan's voice as she talks of her associations with other famous writers, how her name has been used as a question on Jeopardy and how The Joy Luck Club appears alongside "Bill" (Shakespeare) and "Jim" (Conrad) in Cliff's Notes, a fact that Tan uses to launch into a tirade about current perceptions of multicultural and Asian-American literature. The essays work best when Tan is telling a story, as when she relays her battle with Lyme disease or describes her mother's final days. Still, there's no denying that Tan has every right to be proud, having led a peripatetic and extraordinary life. Simultaneous release with the Putnam hardcover (Forecasts, Sept. 15). (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
The subtitle of this collection captures the flavor of Tan's writing here: musings on topics as varied as rock'n'roll, the film adaptation of The Joy Luck Club, her reactions to the Cliff Notes' analysis of her work and life, her recent health problems, and other autobiographical observations. The selections are culled from essays, speeches, interviews, and a commencement address and include a piece she wrote as an eight-year-old on the value of libraries. As such there is some redundancy, but this is an invaluable personal resource from a contemporary writer that is filled with wit, bemusement, and honesty; Tan even addresses errors about her life that are perpetuated across the web. Her reading captures the veracity and vulnerability of her public appearances and is flawed only by quick leaps from the end of one piece into the next. Highly recommended.-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Novelist Tan (The Bonesetter's Daughter, 2001, etc.) offers a wry but bracing take on life and writing in this collection of her nonfiction, some previously published. Although the author recalls some painful subjects-a friend's murder, her mother's dementia, her own battle with long-undiagnosed Lyme disease-her prose is thoughtful, never maudlin or self-pitying. Tan writes as easily and unpretentiously about herself as about others. She is equally balanced in her treatment of such contentious subjects as multiculturalism-she believes in an inclusive, truly American literature-and human rights in China, which are more complicated, she argues, than it seems from a US perspective. (She cites as an example her own banning from the country after a misunderstanding about fundraising for orphans in need of surgery.) The author also offers pertinent advice, originally delivered at a commencement address, on how to write; on the perils of translation, particularly in conveying social context; and on the challenge of writing a second novel after a bestselling first. But the heart of this collection concerns Tan's mother, who left the children of her first marriage in China and immigrated to the US to marry Amy's father, whom she had met and fallen in love with in China. Tu Ching Tan taught her daughter about the permutations of fate, but equally defended the strength of hope. The author suspects that her mother's many threats to kill herself reflected underlying depression: at nine Tu Ching had seen her own mother commit suicide; she endured an abusive first marriage and then saw her second husband and elder son die, within months, of brain tumors, deaths that led her to flee with Amy and heryounger son to Europe. Tan writes lovingly and perceptively of this woman who could exasperate with constant advice and criticism, but who was also her daughter's strongest defender, bragging that she always knew Amy would be a writer, though she had as adamantly believed Tan would be a doctor. An examined life recalled with wisdom and grace. Agent: Sandra Dijkstra
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