Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. Amy Tan
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recall feeling inferior to Peter, at least not in a painful way. I simply accepted that he was smarter. I suffered no sense of inadequacy around other children my age. My parents and theirs would compare us in various ways. I weighed nine pounds and eleven ounces at birth, destined from the start to be the reigning champion for years in the categories of height, weight, and the speed in which we outgrew shoes. And I remained the heavyweight among the skinny children of family friends all the way until my first year in college, when I was diagnosed with a thyroid disorder and rapidly lost thirty pounds once I was treated. Last year, I winced when my parents’ friends told me with good humor about the many boasts they endured hearing whenever our families gathered together for dinner: “Peter is a genius,” or “Amy’s teacher said she reads with great expression.”
From a child’s point of view, I thought that how I was judged each day determined how much love I would receive. A smarter child would be better loved, but so would a sicker one. I remember that I competed for expressions of love—for special attention that came in the way of smiles, or being invited to watch my mother get ready for a party, or standing balanced on the soles of my father’s feet, or being given an early taste of whatever special dish my mother was cooking. I was deemed lovable for quietness, neatness, good manners, and a happy face. I was more lovable when I was feverish but not when I threw up, more lovable if I did not cry when a needle went in my arm, but not so lovable when I had scraped my knee doing something forbidden. One time I won the cooing praise of my mother for simply going to bed early without being told to do so. To remain praiseworthy I pretended to be asleep. I pretended so well, my mother turned off the light and closed the door, and then I sat up in tears, listening to other children laughing and shouting in the other rooms. I would draw pictures to win praise from teachers, especially when starting at a new school. I recall my shock and disappointment that the drawing of another kindergartner had been selected to hang in the principal’s hallway display window. Her drawing was terrible. It looked like she had scrawled on the paper with crayons stuck up her nose. My drawings were realistic, meaning: the people had feet and the houses had doors.
During childhood, I believed there were times when my mother disliked me, even hated me. Love was not constant. It varied in amount. It was removable. My insecurity about love was no doubt amplified by my mother’s threats or attempts to kill herself whenever she was unhappy with my father, her children, or her lot in life.
The good parent today may think it’s terrible for a child to live with uncertainty. But how can any parent prevent impressionable children from wondering where they stand in comparison to others? There are a hundred ways children are judged every day, from the moment the household awakens—how noisy the child is, how quickly or slowly the child eats breakfast or ties his or her shoes. And, as a parent, you cannot ensure popularity on the playground or how a teacher grades your child. You can’t change birth order and the fact that your brother was the firstborn son and the sole object of affection of newly besotted parents, and that he would later be regarded as your leader and protector. When my younger brother came along, like many middle children, I was jostled about in an evolving and changeable position in the new family order. The day John was born, I sat on the stoop in new Chinese pajamas embroidered with a hundred children, waiting anxiously for my mother to return to me. A family friend tried to soothe me and coax me into playing with her daughter. I would not budge from my spot on the stoop, the place where my mother had left me.
My little brother, John, who was nicknamed “Didi,” received love whenever he cried. He cried when his photo was taken, or when he was seated apart from our mother. He would cry when Peter and I would not let him play with our toys. He was not required to follow in Peter’s and my fast-paced footsteps. No overt demands or comparisons were made that might cause him to have a sense of inferiority. He was not told he should aim to become a doctor. Where were the impossible goals, the anxiety-inducing predictions? “Whatever will be will be” was my parents’ plan for him. They were never lackadaisical about anything to do with Peter or my education—or about anything, for that matter. But Didi could do no wrong. When my parents caught him eating gum he had peeled off the sidewalk, Peter and I were to blame for not watching him more carefully. When he broke our toys or stole our Halloween candy, our parents said that we should have shared instead of being selfish. Our parents unintentionally seeded Peter’s and my resentment toward our younger brother. Didi always got us in trouble, and we avoided him as much as possible.
My mother told me when I was an adult that she and my father treated John differently because they felt guilty that they spent relatively little time with him. They neglected him, she said. With Peter and me, they had been fully devoted from the start of our lives. They took us to parks, pointed out errors, helped us with our homework, monitored our progress, accompanied us to the library, and gave us piano lessons. As the years went by, my father became increasingly busy. He was simultaneously a full-time electrical engineer, a graduate student, a substitute Baptist minister, and an entrepreneur who had the same aspirations of many Silicon Valley engineers in the 1960s who were starting their niche companies in a garage. My mother had a full-time job as an allergy technician and ran a home business selling wigs. They were too tired to goad yet another child to improve his grades and practice the piano. My father did not spend hours helping Didi learn all twelve multiplication tables in one night, as he did with me. He was not forced to learn calligraphy in the second grade, as I was, as a method for improving penmanship. They allowed him to watch cartoons for hours as he lay splayed across the sofa, wrapped in his ratty blanket. My parents simply wanted John to feel loved and happy in a more expedient way.
My resentment toward my little brother changed during the year both of us stood on the sidelines, largely invisible, during the twelve months when both Peter and my father were dying of brain tumors. Family, friends, ministers, and church members surrounded our parents, prayed for miracles, spoke to our comatose brother, listened to my father recite the latest doctor’s report, sat with them in the hospital during each surgery, and laughed and cried as they recounted anecdotes of happier days. My mother saw every involuntary twitch of my comatose brother as meaningful. That year, they paid little attention to anything John and I did. He and I were equally neglected, equally criticized for not being helpful during crisis, equally buffeted by our mother’s depression, equally uncertain about her sanity when she brought in teams of faith healers and karma adjusters. We were equally scared when our mother wondered if there was a curse that would kill all of us. Who was next? When we complained of headaches or stomachaches, we were hauled down to the hospital for tests. We did not know how to grieve. We could not be crazy like our mother.
John and I survived that year of failed miracles. With my father gone, we stopped saying prayers at the dinner table. Our mother’s will to live collapsed and surged, from day to day. She would weep and ask aloud, “Why did this happen?” and then count out the imagined reasons. At other times, she was seized with a manic outpouring of ideas for our future—a restaurant, a souvenir shop, going to Taiwan so John and I could learn manners and to speak Chinese, or moving to Holland, simply because it was clean. Only we understood all the ways our family had fractured and why our mother would never heal. It was both natural and necessary that John and I became compatriots who could depend on each other for the rest of our lives.
Easter 1959: In the park after church.
My parents loved their children so much they wanted us to have the best opportunities an immigrant family could find. That required having the best models for success. One was Albert Einstein, who had also been an immigrant. I can’t imagine my parents truly believed we could be as smart as Einstein. But why not aim high and then fail just a little? That was their thinking. The only glimmer of Einstein they saw in me was his well-known trait of daydreaming and ignoring those around him. They had read a story that when Einstein was off in his own little world, his mind was actually exploding with ideas. My mind was not. I was not paying attention.
There was another Albert—Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who had the best morals. He won a Nobel Prize for having gone into the jungles of Africa, where he risked life and limb to cure gaunt-faced children of terrible wasting diseases. My father, a minister, also cited him as one of the highest examples of a good Christian. Goodness would not have motivated