Amy Tan's life with a shadow

Tumult has tracked Amy Tan's life. She tells GILBERT WONG how trauma has brought troubles and revelations.

Amy Tan is talking about stalkers, those bogeymen that have become so emblematic of our celebrity-troubled times.

"I've had my room entered into by strangers while on book tours. The police have had to be called. A man who molested me in childhood showed up at a book signing. It isn't the best thing for me," she lapses into a nervous laugh at her ironic understatement.

In a flat Californian accent she recounts a traumatic litany of events: attacked by a knife-wielding assailant in a bar; having to identify the corpse of a murdered close friend. Mind you, there is reason to be thankful. She could be Stephen King. Tan plays in a rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, with a bunch of other writers, including the horror maestro. His stalkers are of another order entirely.

"He has to have security on hand and a limo if he's walking down the sidewalk so he can jump in at any time. He's a different sort of writer and he is known for attracting people who might be a little bit off."

If there is a common thread to these stalkers it is that many are or want to be writers.

"But if they are writers, they also have some mental illness and they are a little unbalanced. You try to understand that it isn't personal," she says. I can imagine her gritting her teeth.

Tan is at her Soho apartment in New York's central Manhattan. She has another residence in the plush Presidio district of San Francisco, a grand house with windows that frame views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Later this evening she's off to a panel with the writer Allan Gurganus chaired by the fiction editor of the New Yorker. She has fundraisers to attend. At 48, she has travelled a long way from the working-class migrant family living in Oakland, across the harbour from San Francisco.

She is wealthy, undeniably a literary celebrity. But it is a life with a shadow that would be impossible without her dogs Bubba and Lilli, a pair of Yorkshire terriers, registered and trained as medical alert dogs.

Bubba and Lilli provide reassurance to Tan, who suffers severe agoraphobia. Without the reassuring company of her dogs, who travel in her shoulder bag, she would be unable to leave her room in a strange city. Even in her hometown of San Francisco, Tan says she would barely be able to venture more than a few blocks.

Tan: "Yeah, if you were to look at the criteria for when people talk about life trauma, either repeated trauma or one major trauma, because I've had so many things, especially violence, it kind of took its toll on me." In the background either Bubba or Lilli lets off a shrill bark.

When she arrives in New Zealand as the major literary guest at the Auckland Writers' Festival next week, Bubba and Lilli are staying at home. Quarantine restrictions, she sighs. Instead, her husband of 31 years, tax lawyer Lou DeMattei, ("he's such a sport") will accompany her, allowing her to spend time in yet another strange city.

The remarkable thing about Tan is that she functions at all, considering the tumult that has tracked her life. At 15 her father John and brother Peter died of brain tumours. Her mother, temporarily unbalanced, according to Time magazine, held a knife to Tan's throat, threatening to kill her and then herself.

In later life her mother, Daisy, suffered dementia. Tan took time off to care for Daisy before her death in 1999. This partly explains the five-year gap between her latest novel The Bonesetter's Daughter and the previous The Hundred Secret Senses.

The Bonesetter's Daughter had its genesis in her mother's death. Tan was writing her mother's obituary and put her mother's Chinese name as Li Cheng. Tan's half-sister, who had arrived for the funeral from Shanghai, told her that Daisy Tan's real name was Li Bingzi and that her grandmother's real name was Gu Jingmei. The Bonesetter's Daughter is dedicated to these two women who had always, according to Chinese tradition, been referred to solely by their familial roles.

Tan: "My mother never thought it was important to let me know her real name, she left out so many things, including that she had three daughters in China, that she had been married before. She didn't tell me this until I was 16.

"My grandmother was never referred to her by name. She had a name in the Shanghai dialect that meant grandmother and that's how she was referred to by us.

"It was quite a revelation. It sounds like trivia, because it wasn't that important in one sense, but it was also hugely important to me, because names carry a lot of power to them. That's why I made the beginning of the book the story of a woman searching for her family name."

Tan reveals that she has a Chinese name Enmai, literally Beautiful Country.

The author has a dry sense of irony."Blessing from America would be their thought. I'm kidding here, but I'm sure my mother must have sometimes thought it meant curse from America."

The generational clash between mothers and daughters raised in a new country has been a constant in her novels, as has the tension that a hybrid identity brings. Tan might be a product of southern California and Shanghai but she is far more, she contends.

"I do think that in the United States, we're so preoccupied with self. In China, the preoccupation is family.

"There has been that struggle for me. I realise that one has an identity as an individual and as part of a larger community, whatever that community is. You are always asking questions of identity and self. At no point in my life has there ever been an absolute answer to that. It is a question I will have all my life and I am glad to have the interesting mix with respect, to being an American, a Chinese, a writer, a person, a wife, daughter, a sister. There are so many roles we play in life, race is not the only question we can ask of identity."

Tan rejects any pigeon-holing that might consign her to a subset of novelists.

"I don't think my books are about dual identity. That's kind of the background detail. It's more about the emotions, the meetings of legacies across generations, of losing your voice and finding your voice. Translating what people want to say and mistranslating that. I find that these things can get overshadowed by the identity question."

If her writing is about legacies, did Tan ever consider having that fundamental legacy, a child?

"I haven't decided to not have children, I just haven't decided to have children. If I wanted to become a parent I could adopt, the door isn't closed."

Rather appropriately for a writer, she imagines her children.

"Lou and I often talk about our children as if they have been there all along growing up. Usually they are doing terrible things, so we can be glad they are imaginary. You know, they're taking Ecstasy and we are beside ourselves or they're refusing to wear a helmet when out riding bikes."

She confesses that her inevitable anxiety has made the prospect of children unlikely. "I would have been so afraid and worried for them. I would have passed on so many fears and been one of the most overprotective mothers that the world has ever seen."

Her books since the first, The Joy Luck Club, which won the American National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award, have been eagerly anticipated and critically acclaimed. Success can be as paralysing as failure.

"I once asked Don deLilo if it ever gets any easier and he said it gets harder and harder with each book. Every serious writer wants to improve his or her craft. It's part of finding an emotional idea or theme, for a year or two years or longer. There is a constant demand to do better.

"With a certain success there is self-consciousness, I battle that by never reading my reviews or interviews that I have done. I call it the head-in-the-sand ostrich approach. Some people may not find it admirable. But I find it much better to write with a sense of naivety over what people have said. I don't want to direct my work towards things that people have admired or away from blows. I need to know what's important intrinsically as a writer and not be motivated by external reasons."

While many might view her agoraphobia as debilitating, Tan has learned to cope. "I guess it's not a bad condition to have if you want to be a writer. I can spend 16 hours a day writing and never worry about having to leave the house."

Auckland prompts two memories. Her friend, the writer Armistead Maupin, once had a holiday home in New Zealand. Quite where she cannot remember, but he was, she says, always extolling the sparkling beaches and rolling green hills.

Perhaps not that attractive for an agoraphobe, I venture. She giggles and tells me her other New Zealand story.

"This might be apocryphal, but there was a guy at LA airport wanting to go home to Oakland. He heard this boarding announcement and got on a plane. Sixteen hours later he arrived at Auckland airport."

I tell her this really happened. She laughs with a novelist's delight that what she had always considered fiction was truth.

* Amy Tan is a guest of the Auckland Writers' Festival.