Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir - Amy Tan

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imagination. My high school art teacher, an artist himself, wrote that conclusion on my final semester report card: “Has admirable drawing abilities but lacks imagination or drive, which are necessary to a deeper creative level.” The comment was sharply wounding at the time. He did not say I needed to use more of my imagination. He simply said I lacked it—that and depth.

      After my last year in high school, I did nothing further with my artistic inclinations, save the occasional sketch and doodle. I do know that had I continued, I would not have gone in the direction of abstract art. Even today, I am often puzzled by abstract art—those ten-foot-high paintings with a minimal dot of color or squiggles. At museums, my husband and I turn to each other and jokingly utter the words of cultural philistines: “And they call that art!” I now remember there were several afternoons in class when my art teacher instructed us to create a drawing using only colored shapes. Whatever I did, that was likely what sealed his opinion that I had no imagination or depth, at least not for the complexities of abstract art, which I now recall was the kind of art he made.

      I recently took up drawing again when I joined a monthly nature journaling class, which has as much of an emphasis on journaling as plein air sketching. I began by drawing birds. Once again, I heard the same compliments from friends and family: that I have a good eye. I can draw a bird that looks like a bird. This time, however, I recognized that my abilities stop there. I can draw a likeness, but I can’t easily create backgrounds more complicated than a branch with a few leaves. I can’t add a new context—falling buildings or a melting ice cap—or anything else that would enable the figurative drawing to represent an idea, say, global warming through the iris of a raven. As it turned out, everyone in the class had a good eye and a number of them were especially skilled and also imaginative. Our teacher, a naturalist artist and author, told us anyone can learn to draw, a view I’ve heard expressed by numerous artists since then. You can acquire techniques—like how to block out the shape of your subject, to use the negative space around a figure to see its shape, to use shading to represent the anatomical structure of birds, amphibians, and large mammals. You can play with a mix of watercolors, gouache, and graphite. You can get by perfectly well with just a pencil and journal book, or you can feed your artistic needs by draining your savings account buying mechanical pencils, blending tools, gel pens, a set of twelve soft and hard graphite pencils, a good brand of watercolor pencils, then an even better brand of watercolor pencils, an embossing tool, watercolor brushes, watercolor brushes with built-in reservoirs, sketchbooks and then really good sketchbooks, zoom and macro binoculars, a spotting scope, a field research bag for carrying your sketch kit, plus a portable stool for sitting in the field for hours. You have to practice daily to make certain skills intuitive—for instance, foreshortening and shadows related to the direction of the light. You need the right shape of the whole creature before you draw an eye. I can’t help it, though—I like to draw the eye early on and correct it later. I like that the bird is eyeing me suspiciously as I draw it.

      Now that I’ve been drawing every day, I have come to realize the larger reason I was not destined to be an artist. It has to do with what does not happen when I draw. I’ve never experienced a sudden shivery spine-to-brain revelation that what I have drawn is a record of who I am. I don’t mix watercolor paints and think about my changing amalgam of beliefs, confusion, and fears. I don’t do shading with thoughts about death and its growing shadow as the predicted number of actuarial years left to me grows smaller. When I view a bird from an angle instead of in profile, I don’t think of the mistaken views I have held. With practice, I will become better at drawing the eye of a bird or its feet, but I can’t practice having an unexpected reckoning of my soul. All that I have mentioned—what does not happen when I draw—does occur when I write. They occurred in the earliest short stories I wrote when I was thirty-three. Then, as now, they are revelations—ones that are painful, exhilarating, transformative, and lasting in their effects. In my writing, I recognize myself.

      Drawing will continue to grow as a pleasurable activity. I enjoy the practice and patience it requires. I love the sensuous feel of graphite sliding across paper. I was excited by my discovery two days ago that watercolors are not flat swashes of pigment; they create mottling, shading, and other interesting effects that suggest texture and depth. I am delighted by the final outcome. Is it a good likeness? Does it show signs of life? I was humored by my childish pride when someone on Facebook made a comment on my first watercolor of a coot, a bird with a white bill and black body: “You did a good job of capturing its essence.” She knew it was a coot.

      I have also found ways in which nature journaling is very much like fiction writing. It requires me to be curious, observant, and inquisitive. I have to continuously wonder over what I am seeing and remove the usual assumptions. Wonderment has always been my habit, even before I knew I was a writer. It still is today. When I was on Robben Island in South Africa, for example, I noticed four orange-eyed oystercatchers on the shore, evenly spaced and perfectly aligned. They simultaneously dipped their beaks into the sand, looked at us, then dipped again—all with the precision of an avian troupe of Radio City Rockettes. What was going on? I mused over the possibilities, some of them rather far-fetched—that this was similar to the instinct that “birds of a feather flock together,” and by acting as a regiment with identical movements, they can be attentive to important incongruities in their environment, say, an osprey, or a bunch of gawking tourists with cameras clicking. Or perhaps it was a parasite or virus that caused some sort of zombie bird syndrome, similar to the zombie ants I saw in Papua whose brains sprouted a foaming parasitic fungus, which directed the ants to attach themselves to an ideally located leaf on the forest floor until the brain bursts forth with spores that would create a new generation of zombie ant masters. The next time I see this synchronized behavior, I will wonder again and come up with more guesses. When I do nature sketching, I am trying to represent what I see, what is true to a particular species of bird and its behavior. My observations and questions have to do with what might be factually true, which I could discover only by asking an ornithologist. But in writing fiction, the truth I seek is not a factual or scientific truth. It has to do with human nature, which is tied to my nature. It is about those things that are not apparent on the surface. When I set out to write a story, I am feeling my way through a question, often a moral one, and attempting to find a way to capture all its facets and conundrums. I don’t want an absolute answer. When writing fiction, I am trying to put down what feels true. Even though the story may not ostensibly be mine, it contains knowledge based on my personal history. It is my experiences that have coalesced into a situation that holds sad irony or horrific clarity. I want to bring forth what I cannot see, what is not there, or is there but nearly indiscernible because the million pieces that make up its whole are scattered all over the place, and extend from past into present. While writing I allow my brain to circumnavigate all the possibilities, but I am not confined to one conclusion. No truth is permanent. Irony is not an intractable fact. Imagination is fluid in flowing to any alluvial ditch of emotions, personal idiosyncrasies, or memories that appear when the flood subsides.

      If my curiosity is innate, it has been greatly enhanced by involuntary apprenticeship to my mother and her school of wonderment. She questioned everything, from fishy odors to fishy explanations, both of which pointed to a faulty character. She saw significance in coincidences, and coincidences in just about any juxtaposition of events. On one occasion, it was my saying a word—so ordinary I can’t recall what it was—at the same time that the head of a rose in a vase fell off its stem. My mother stared at me and said, “Are you my mother?” My grandmother had killed herself in 1925, and the idea that I was her reincarnation made me queasy. I insisted I wasn’t her mother, yet I wondered if I might be. How would a person know who she had been in a past life? You don’t journey from one lifetime to the next with luggage tags. “You don’t have to hide,” my mother said. She continued to give me odd looks throughout the day. “Why you say you bored?” she asked at one point. “My mother said that, too.” She wondered aloud if I was her karmic punishment for not showing her mother enough concern. My mother’s brand of wonderment combined curiosity, nosiness, hypothesis, loose opinion, suspicion, seeing what you believe, and seeking what you hope, including miracles, and the reincarnation of your mother into the form of your bad American daughter.

      Coincidences abound in my life as well. Just an hour ago, as I was writing the above paragraph, my keyboard

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