What does Unintended Memoir mean? I never intended my last book [2017’s Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir] to be a memoir; I thought it was about writing. But it just kept coming back to all the things that influenced my writing—my style, imagery and obsessions. I wrote a book on writing, and everyone called it a memoir. When your mother had a health scare with angina, was that pivotal in beginning your career? I had that moment where I thought, There’s so much that I don’t know about her. I spent so many years not talking about things, not being close to her. I knew that if she lived, I would do that. I started writing these stories that became The Joy Luck Club. Is there another book coming? I’m working on a book, and I have other ideas. During the 2016 election, I was so overcome by what had happened that I had to switch what I was writing because suddenly the story I had been writing seemed to be trivial. There was a lot of racism suddenly going on in the world. There was this huge divide, and my story no longer seemed relevant. Who do you read? Stories by Lydia Davis. I have her collected works. I read a lot of books about nature, a lot of books about birds, a new obsession of mine—Bernd Heinrich, who is a naturalist, for example. When you wrote The Joy Luck Club and it was a success, did you consider that you were inspirational to another whole generation? You have Kevin Kwan in the documentary, who wrote Crazy Rich Asians. I have to say I cannot take credit for trying to inspire people. I make a real clear distinction. I never had the intention, so I can’t say good for me for doing that, but I’m glad it happened. I was writing for myself. It’s too confusing to try and write for yourself, write for your mother and then also write to inspire people or write to correct wrongs in the world. I don’t write with those other intentions. People have told me over the years that that was also a result of the success of the books. You have to have something in the marketplace that’s successful to encourage people to move ahead. But at the same time, I have had especially young Asian males denounce me as saying, “She’s not writing anything authentic.” And I get it. It doesn’t speak to them. Because there were, especially in the past, so few Asian American writers, they would see this as being representative of all Asians and they objected to that stuff. The more we have stories by Asian Americans, we will not have these people so angry that I am in this position to get a lot of attention. How special was it when The Joy Luck Club went from book to movie? I was not eager to do the film because I was a little concerned that whoever made it would perpetuate some kind of stereotype, or do long Dragon Lady fingernails. I had recently seen a movie with long Dragon Lady fingernails. But when [director] Wayne Wang stepped into the picture literally, I felt that at least he understands Chinese culture and he would not be doing anything that was completely off base. And then [writer] Ron Bass came, and I got pulled into working on the screenplay—“Try this one scene just for the fun,” and I did, and then I was trapped into continuing with it. It was great. It was the most collaborative experience I’d had, but it was also so moving that everyone on the film set were just so in love with this book, because they felt it was their life. And that’s what they put into the film, whether actor or director. What was it like the first time you saw The Joy Luck Club on the screen? Seeing it on the screen was a cross between knowing the story was made up, knowing the story was in part based on family, and then also just looking at it and saying, “Yeah, when I was a kid and watched Disney movies, this would have been impossible to even hope for something like this. And here it is.” I think the most wonderful part about watching this film was being with my mother at the premiere, sitting next to her, and glancing over at her from time to time to see if she was OK, and thinking, “She’s going to fall apart, especially in the scene where the mother has taken an overdose and is dying,” because that is exactly what happened to my grandmother with my mother actually watching her in those last moments as she was dying. You know what she said? She was clear-eyed; everybody else was crying. I said, “How is it?” She says, “It’s fine. In China, everything is so much worse. This is already better.” I think she was the only one who didn’t cry watching the film. One of the things you discuss in the show was your “needing to know” as opposed to a need to know. Are you still searching your past or has your needing to know been satisfied? I think it’s a state of being that I will always have. I also think it’s a quality of a writer. I don’t think I’m the only one who has this neediness. It’s something that will never be satisfied. And the neediness to know is an answer that is impossible to get about all the questions of your past. If I had done this, would this have happened? What is fate? What is destiny? What is randomness? How much of our lives are determined by our own choices or by accident? Those questions are always going to be there and are a filter for how I look at my life. They are the ways that I find stories. Within these questions I create stories about what it is I’ve been wanting to understand. Was it disconcerting when people thought they knew who you were from your fiction, so the memoir was to set them straight? That’s a very complex question. It’s almost like trying to analyze why I did certain things that seemed contradictory. I have given up on trying to tell people who I really am or what my intentions are. It seems it doesn’t matter how much I clarify; they will always have their impressions based on what they’ve read. But I think of myself as very private. I was going to go into more of a retreat from public life when Jamie [director James Redford] asked me about this film. Doing a documentary completely went against my plans to become more private. For many different reasons, I ended up saying yes. I have a broken sensor, a broken filter, in my brain that does not recognize when I’m saying something that others would think is very personal and private—things that you don’t talk about. The reason I think that is, is because I had a mother who talked about everything. And as you can see in the documentary, she talked about her sex life. She was completely unbuffered. I think I inherited some of her unbuffered consciousness, where I will end up talking about all kinds of things people think are very private. That goes back to your question as well, Unintended Memoir. As far as the documentary is concerned, as I said, I really did not want to do anything that was going to be more public. And then here I go a few years ago, I’m working with Jamie and then I do this master class and I’m thinking to myself, What am I doing to myself? The more I say I’m not going to do something, something else happens that intervenes. I don’t go seeking these things. They come to me and, somehow, I get talked into doing it for various reasons. You are a survivor. You lost your older brother, your father, and you had Lyme disease. What kept you going? It doesn’t occur to me as life is going on that I’m ever going to stop, except the one time when I had Lyme disease and thought my brain was going to stop. That was scary. It was not going to be a volitional cessation of my life. I didn’t have a sense that my life was completely over, and I might as well kill myself, which would have been my mother’s response to something like that. I just had to keep persisting to find an answer as to why something was happening to me. With my brother and my father, I was told by my mother we were going to die too. I eventually had a realization at a very early age that I didn’t have to believe what anyone told me, especially the church. So it was a collection of beliefs. I didn’t have to believe my mother, I didn’t have to believe the church, I didn’t have to believe what boys thought about me, whether I was ugly or whether I was exotic or cute. I got rid of all of that at the age of 17 and started over again. I think that that helped. As you get to be older, you forget where all these beliefs come from, what they were based on, and you have to unravel them. I unraveled them from a very early age and very consciously picked things I wanted to believe in. I think if you’re going to say, “What is it that enabled you to survive?” It was my beliefs, and not saying things like, “I didn’t deserve this; it’s not fair.” That never was going to be part of my mantra. We don’t get to decide what’s fair in the universe of randomness. There’s no malevolence involved in that kind of situation. We just have to deal with it. The fact that you were able to unpack old ideas and come up with your own ideas at 17 is incredible. You have to look at what I was dealing with. My brother died; my father died right after that. My mother had gone crazy and was trying to kill herself. The youth minister sexually assaulted me. I go from being the ugly girl in school to being exotic and almost ran off with a German Army deserter who’s going to kill himself if I don’t go off with him. There was a lot going on that one year or two years where I had to just figure it out for myself. Next, All the Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in May
