Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir
Earlier in the summer, my parents recommended the documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir (currently on Netflix). It is excellent.
I love Amy Tan. I have fond high school memories of curling up on our teal leather couch munching on bowls and bowls of Costco animal crackers while plowing through The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. (Goodbye to the dated teal couch as well as my ability to eat approximately 100 animal crackers without consequence.) She’s just a classic, you know? Sometimes I find myself on Twitter (yuck) and come across different tweets and threads by writers that are so self-righteous and snarky and annoyingly provocative — and don’t you think Amy Tan is just one of those authors above it all? No simplistic “hot takes”…just a combo of information/press, matter-of-fact calling out (i.e. her condemnation of anti-Asian sentiment) and, well, her watercolors. (OK, that’s on Instagram.) The documentary, directed by the late James Redford (yes, Robert’s son), shows this: A woman with strong views, who had an often-difficult upbringing with her Chinese immigrant parents in California, and whose mother — it is revealed — had a tragic upbringing and background in China before migrating to the US with Amy’s father. I don’t want to sound like one of those people who brushes off trauma in a “well, let’s use this for good!” kind of way, but…I sort of feel like Amy Tan does. She meets a wide swath of readers where they are — the onus should not necessarily be on her to do that — and, as a result, educates and opens minds while slyly entertaining them. The film discusses how she became a writer, her life with her husband, her relationship with her mother, and how she places herself in a world that has — and continues to — boxed people of Asian descent into tight categories. Here’s what she wrote on Twitter on the occasion of the documentary’s release: “It’s so lovingly made. I’m afraid I’ll cry.” Indeed, I really could get the sense that it was “lovingly made.”
Amy Tan is such a class act (hello, do you pay attention to her fab wardrobe?!); do yourself a favor and spend some time watching this portrait of an interesting woman. It’s edifying.
originally published on instagram