Summary

In her first book of nonfiction, bestselling novelist Amy Tan shares her personal philosophy of fate. Amy Tan was born into a family that believed in fate. In The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, she explores this legacy, as well as American circumstances, and finds ways to honor the past while creating her own brand of destiny. She discovers answers in everyday actions and attitudes-from writing stories, decorating her house with charms, learning to ski, and living with squirrels, to dealing with three members of her family afflicted with brain disease, surviving natural disasters, and shaking off both family curses and the expectations that she should become a doctor and a concert pianist. With the same spirit, humor, and magic that characterize her beloved novels, Amy Tan presents a refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we face today, contemplating how things happen-in her own life and beyond-but always returning to the question of fate and its opposites: the choices, charms, influences, attitudes, and lucky accidents that shape us all.

Author Biography

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and two children's books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which is now a PBS production called Sagwa, for which Tan is a creative consultant and writer. Tan was also a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club, and her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

A Note to the Reader	p. 1
Fate and Faith
The CliffsNotes Version of My Life	p. 7
How We Knew	p. 39
A Question of Fate	p. 41
Faith	p. 61
Changing the Past
Last Week	p. 69
My Grandmother's Choice	p. 99
Thinly Disguised Memoir	p. 105
Persona Errata	p. 113
Scent	p. 121
American Circumstances and Chinese Character
Fish Cheeks	p. 125
Dangerous Advice	p. 128
Midlife Confidential	p. 135
Arrival Banquet	p. 154
Joy Luck and Hollywood	p. 176
Strong Winds, Strong Influences
What She Meant	p. 207
Confessions	p. 212
Pretty Beyond Belief	p. 215
The Most Hateful Words	p. 218
My Love Affair with Vladimir Nabokov	p. 221
Luck, Chance, and a Charmed Life
Inferior Decorating	p. 231
Room with a View, New Kitchen, and Ghosts	p. 235
Retreat to Reality	p. 239
My Hair, My Face, My Nails	p. 245
The Ghosts of My Imagination	p. 250
A Choice of Words
What the Library Means to Me	p. 269
Mother Tongue	p. 271
The Language of Discretion	p. 280
Five Writing Tips	p. 291
Required Reading and Other Dangerous Subjects	p. 299
Angst and the Second Book	p. 324
The Best Stories	p. 334
Hope
What I Would Remember	p. 357
To Complain Is American	p. 360
The Opposite of Fate	p. 367
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

FATE AND FAITHMy mother believed in God's will for many years. It was as if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said "fate," because she couldn't pronounce that "th" sound in "faith." And later, I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control. I found out the most I could have was hope, and with that I was not denying any possibility, good or bad. I was just saying, If there is a choice, dear God or whatever you are, here's where the odds should be placed. ?The Joy Luck Club ?the cliffsnotes version of my life?Soon after my first book was published, I found myself often confronted with the subject of my mortality. I remember being asked by a young woman what I did for a living. "I'm an author," I said with proud new authority. "A contemporary author?" she wanted to know. And being newly published at the time, I had to think for a moment before I realized that if I were not contemporary I would be the alternative, which is, of course, dead. Since then I have preferred to call myself a writer. A writer writes-she writes in the present progressive tense. Whereas an author, unless she is clearly said to be "contemporary," is in the past tense, someone who once wrote, someone who no longer has to sharpen her pencil, so to speak. To me, the word author is as chilling as rigor mortis, and I shudder when I hear myself introduced as such when I lecture at universities. This is probably due to the fact that when I was an English major at a university, all the authors I read were, sad to say, not contemporary. What compels ardent readers of my work to ask me questions concerning my time-limited authorhood? In lecture halls and on live radio shows, I have been stunned by questions as deadly as these: "What would you like written on your tombstone?" "Which book would you like people to remember you by?" "Does it make you feel honored that your books probably will be in circulation at the library long after you're gone?" I don't find those questions nearly as appalling as this one: "Are you loaded?" which is what a nine-year-old girl in Nashville once asked me at a book signing. I wondered whether the child might have just come from a school program on crime prevention or substance abuse and was now worried that all adults carried loaded weapons or were loaded on drugs. I said to her gently, "What kind of loaded are you worried about?" "You know," the girl snapped, "loaded like filthy rich." I glanced over to her mother, expecting that she would reprimand her daughter. And the mother looked right at me and said, "Well, are you?"I've grown accustomed to public scrutiny. Yet nothing prepared me for what I consider the ultimate reminder of an author's mortality. It happened when I was at yet another bookstore, about to give yet another reading. I was waiting in the wings, as the store manager delivered a long introduction on my credentials as an author. Glancing to my side, I saw a wire book rack crammed with cheap and familiar booklets. They were CliffsNotes, self-proclaimed as "your key to the classics." As we all know, CliffsNotes have served as the midnight salvation of many a literature student, and if the sad truth be known, this former honors English major used them to write incisive papers on-dare I say it?-Ulysses, Lord Jim, and Hamlet.Imagine: There I was, in a bookstore, recalling these past sins, about to read from my own published work. I gave a silent apology to my fellow authors Jim Joyce, Joe Conrad, and Bill Shakespeare, may they rest in peace. And then my eyes landed on another familiar title: The Joy Luck Club.I stared at those CliffsNotes, thinking to myself, B