By Beth Kephart
In the early pages of Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club , we meet Jing-Mei Woo shortly after her mother’s death. In taking her mother’s place at a mah-jong table, Jing-Mei learns that her mother’s friends have raised $1200 so that Jing-Mei might go to China and meet the half sisters her mother was forced, by war, to leave behind as infant twins so many years ago. “You must tell them about her life,” these friends insist, but Jing-Mei asserts that she doesn’t know a thing. “She was my mother,” Jing-Mei says. As if that one word—mother—is all this grieving daughter knows.
“‘Tell them stories of your family here. How she became success,’ offers Auntie Lin.”
“‘Tell them stories she told you, lessons she taught, what you know about her mind that has become your mind,’ says Auntie Ying.”
In re-reading The Joy Luck Club in preparation for my late-April conversation with Tan on the Free Library of Philadelphia stage, I pressed a bookmark right there, against this page, closed the novel, and wondered. What if we began our own character development work with this mandate in mind: Tell the stories they told, the lessons they taught, and the mind that has become our own.
We could spreadsheet this if we were really stuck—one column for stories told, one column for lessons taught, one column for the ways in which the Other in our lives has become part and parcel of the way we love, fear, or yield to the world.
I could, for example, choose my father, who might not have been the world’s most prodigious storyteller, but the few stories he did tell organized themselves into reliable categories—adventures with a few childhood and college friends; the long wait for my mother to say yes to his (two) proposals; late-night combustions at an oil refinery and mid-winter turmoil in an executive suite; later-in-life travels with new friends. My father had a way of telling—few adjectives, few adverbs, as few words, indeed, as possible—and I can only remember a handful of times when he was the star of his own story.
What, then, were the lessons that he taught? Humility, I’d log into my spreadsheet. The long reach of his arch-enemy, anxiety. The importance of hard work. The necessity and satisfaction of putting family first. The power of quiet over shout. (There’s more.)
And finally (and of course this is the hardest part of this assignment): How has my father’s mind become my own? Well: His legacy of anxiety is certainly right here, everywhere, so terribly constant. His sense that our greatest value comes from what we can do for others has hovered over my own heart, dictated the choices I have made (for better, for worse). His abject disinterest in stealing any show. (I see myself on too many literary panels, speaking last or not at all.)
How about you? Who is your Other? (Who are your Others?) How would you fill the columns on your character spreadsheet? And couldn’t it be true that it would be so much easier now, this assembled information in hand, to write toward that person, with truthful and intriguing depth?
But would you be you done? Would your character development be complete? In her new book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, Tan’s characters are avian. They’re the hummingbird that feeds from her hand. The Pine Siskins that toss more seeds than they swallow. The baby Scrub Jay learning to master the feeder. These birds have arrived in Tan’s world without a known history, without a reliable list of stories told. And yet, Tan uses her great powers of observation to develop the birds’ characters. She beckons them with a whistle, with suet, seeds, and mealworms. She draws the curves of their beaks, the length of their feathers, the tuck of their tails. She watches them watching her, and it is in this way—the Other observing the Writer, the Writer observing the Other—that Tan begins to differentiate these birds, to make them not part of a broad feathery flock, but a there-is-no-other-bird-quite-precisely-like-this-one-bird singularity. Are there lessons in this for us, as writers? Might we wait, as Tan so patiently waits, until a greater understanding comes to us? (As opposed, say, to simply writing down what we already know, what has become almost the caricature cliche.) Might we draw our Others, collage them, return to old photographs to see them newly? (As opposed, say, to simply applying the well-known descriptors—brown hair, green eyes, hooked nose.) Might we see ourselves through the eyes of our Others—or do our best to imagine such a thing?
Tan has produced, among many other things, novels, memoir, now this illustrated bird journal. Genre does not matter here. Whether we are writing fiction, memoir, poetry, opera, or a screenplay, whether the characters are people or crayons or bugs, there are lessons in Tan’s work for all of us. There are Others to whom and which we owe our very finest work.
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Beth Kephart is the author of some 40 books in multiple genres. Her new books are My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press) and You Are Not Vanished Here (coming in early June from Juncture Workshops). More at bethkephartbooks.com
Learn to tell a story of yourself that in some way contains the stories of others. Join Beth Kephart for her CRAFT TALKS Masterclass, Character Development: Writing the Other, part of a new series of longer writing workshops for in-depth learning and moments of creation within the class. June 1, 11AM-3:30PM Eastern ($175 Early Bird). More Info/Register Now.
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