Her mother told her she didn’t have to get married if she didn’t want to, but she had to get a good job, and be successful, so that if she got married and wasn’t happy, she could easily leave. Amy Tan grew up hating her mother. Like most Chinese mothers, they put pressure on their children to be successful. Amy’s parents were adament to raise her and her brothers as American though, and the pressures put on them were not a typical American thing. But it was different for Amy and her brothers. She said her mother wasn’t a Tiger Mom, she was a Suicidal Mom. If you wont do what I say, I might as well kill myself. It wasn’t until the fear that her mother might be dying, much later into Amy’s adulthood, that their relationship changed. Amy finally took the time to get to really know her mother, and through that, she became a writer.
Like other writers I’ve posted about, writing was almost a way for Amy to make sense of things. Her first book, The Joy Luck Club, while fiction, was inspired by her mother’s life in China, as well as her own life in America, and the bridging of the gap between. She faced a lot of criticism about the book, for things like the broken English, and suicidal concubines, by Americans who probably had never seen Chinese people as more than just stereotypes. What Amy Tan did with The Joy Luck Club was bring to light the China that her mother and grandmother before her lived through. It also brought to light the modern day Chinese-American experience. Things, admittedly, and shamefully, invisible to most Americans. When Amy was in elementary school, on her birthday, she was terribly afraid her mother would bring Chinese food to the school. She was immensely relieved when her mother brought cupcakes.
Amy struggled with a lot of loss, and anger growing up. She grappled with fighting the expectations of her Chinese mother, and of being a successful writer and suddenly having literary expectations thrust on her. All through her books, I think, she was able to make sense of and process a lot of her own life. At the end of the documentary, you see her on her back deck, bird feeders everywhere. She has taken up art again and has beautiful and detailed renditions of various birds. Birds, I think, perhaps almost symbolic for her, for their absolute, weightless sense of freedom.