In “Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir,” Amy Tan recalls the time a relative told her mother that she shouldn’t fill her daughter’s head with “all these useless stories.” Why should Amy know so much, visit her mother’s painful memories, when it was beyond her power to change the past? Her mother replied: “I tell her so she can tell everyone, tell the whole world . . . That’s how it can be changed.” As she writes in her memoir, “My mother gave me permission to tell the truth.”

Many of Tan’s novels, beginning with “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” were partly inspired by the stories of her own family. But “Where the Past Begins” is Amy Tan as we’ve not previously seen her in fiction. The book reveals her as a daughter, a seeker, and also as a writer — explicitly mining unexplained truths and unknown family secrets from her past and spinning a memoir that is generous and often breathtaking in its vulnerability.

“[O]nce the fiction-writing mind is freed, there are no censors, no prohibitions. It is curious and open to anything,” she writes. “But its most important trait is this: it seeks a story, a narrative that reveals what happened and why it happened.” What happened to her family, why it happened, and how it all contributed to her life as a writer are the questions “Where the Past Begins” seeks to answer. Many of the stories told in this memoir were only discovered in the process of writing it, while others grew from memories that returned to her as she worked on her other books. In September, I was fortunate enough to speak with Amy about her family, her life since the 2016 presidential election, her parents’ sacrifices and precarious status as immigrants, and how she wrote her new memoir.

Nicole Chung: "Where the Past Begins" is a work of recovered history, and you say that a lot of these memories began to emerge when you started writing fiction. Do you think that’s a common experience among fiction writers?

Amy Tan: I do think it’s common. We often think that the memories we recover are those that immediately come to mind, but some memories really wend their way back into consciousness through many different means. For example, if you’ve been somewhere and associate a particular smell with that place, the smell is going to evoke that memory.

And it’s the same with writing fiction: I may be writing something fictional, but something will click, some element that is part of a memory, and then more of the memory comes back. This book went many, many levels beyond that. I was able to corroborate memories with these artifacts in my office, these boxes I had from my childhood. It was more than Connect-the-Dots—it was my brain suddenly coming into sync with the brain I had in the past. It was startling to me.

NC: It must have been extraordinary to go through all those boxes of journals and letters and photographs. What was your favorite thing you discovered?

AT: My mother’s letters to me, and my letters to her. In part, they contradicted the selective memory that recalled mostly the bad things that went on between us, and little of the expressions of love. I knew she loved me, and the way she worried about me. “You’re like me,” she’d say, “and that’s why we understand each other.”

Reading her letters, I thought, That’s where that comes from. Also that idea of feeling deeply, or feeling that people didn’t understand her—that’s exactly how I feel. I want to feel deeply, and I also feel no one understands me. And there it was in her letters—it was like having her back.

If I kept a book until I thought it was perfect, it would never be published.

NC: Was this memoir of your family a book you’d always planned or hoped to write?

AT: No, I’ve written about my family, but — for example — I couldn’t have imagined writing the piece about my father. It came up spontaneously because of the election. Many of those pieces suggested themselves to me at the moment, and then I wrote them in the moment. There were discoveries that took place: I’m in the middle of writing about how I learned to read, and suddenly I discover the reason behind the reading test; then I discover my parents’ lie; then the illegal status they had . . . that is all happening in real time, during the writing. It was like nothing I’ve ever done before.

NC: I loved that piece about your father. You say you had this “idealized” memory of him — but after the election, as you considered his faith and his values, you were inspired to do the hard work of interrogating that memory. Why were you so focused on trying to determine how he would have voted?

AT: Whether it is in reaction to or in harmony with the beliefs we grew up with, we are in part a reflection of those beliefs. My strong need to find a purpose in life probably comes from my father. So it was not just a question of who he was, but who am I? What are the qualities that he had, that he provided for me, and what didn’t he provide? What am I still looking for? What am I still rebelling against?

When your father dies when you are fifteen, the “you” who you were at that age is still there. I wanted to think about how I saw my father from those rebel teen years until now, as someone who is well beyond the years he lived. My father was, to me, a model of great values: an honest person, a kind person. But everything about the election called into question everything for me. I was so disillusioned that it was essential to look at everything and say, How could this have been? Who were the kind of people who would’ve voted for [Donald Trump]? What if my father were alive — is this the man he would have voted for, and why? It was not to demonize voters so much as I simply couldn’t understand how this attitude could have become the defining one for our country for the next four years — one I considered before the election, and which has borne out post-election, to be a very racist, white supremacist agenda.

Who we become has so much to do with the experiences we had, and how we survived.

NC: What else has changed for you, personally, in the aftermath of the election?

AT: It’s that sense of looking at community differently, and wanting to find that commonality with people. I’m more grateful when I find [those] people — I don’t even have to ask them what their politics are, you can just tell by the kind of things they care about. If they are concerned for poor people, and immigrants, and people with uncertain status, you know where they stand.

“Liberal” is not a nasty word. I wish “liberal” could be changed to “compassionate,” meaning we share responsibility; we share pain; we share in our flaws; we share in the ways we’re destroying the environment but want to make amends. It has more to do with recognition of a lot of the good things in people, and appreciating that those qualities are there — in more people than not.

NC: In another chapter, you write about finding out your parents were undocumented when you were young — their visas had expired, and they were in danger of deportation.

AT: We grew up not knowing that my parents had this status. I just remember them getting their citizenship and crying in jubilation. It was a moment of great relief: the danger of them losing their life here was over.

“You don’t know how lucky you are to be here, what we had to do so you could be here” — that was always the message, and I didn’t know what it was based on. Much of the context was missing. There were illusions to great sacrifices made on our behalf. I didn’t know what kind of life they’d had in China or why they left; I certainly didn’t know they had an affair, or that my mother had other children.

In a way, I think it’s good they didn’t tell us kids that our life here was in jeopardy. We were born here, so we were American citizens, but if our parents were forced to leave, we of course would have had to go with them. I see this today in people I know who are undocumented—I asked a good friend of ours the other day, “What does your six-year-old child know?” She said, “He doesn’t know. He’ll say, ‘Why can Uncle So-and-so go to Mexico and we can’t?’” And she says, “We can’t for now, but maybe later.” Meanwhile, they’re hoping they don’t get deported. If they were, what a shock that would be to that child.

NC: I appreciated how you wrote, in the Introduction, “I am not the subject matter of mothers and daughters or Chinese culture or immigrant experience that most people cite as my domain.” For many people, your books are some of the first they read by an Asian American woman; you were writing these stories that were very specific to your family and your own imagination, yet there were those who wanted to claim they were—or should be—the be-all of Asian American literature, the Asian American experience. Was it hard to be “the first” for many readers?

AT: There were others in the past; Maxine Hong Kingston, definitely. But when ["The Joy Luck Club"] came out, it did feel like there were many expectations from all areas — not just in the Asian American community, but in Asian culture itself, and in any ethnic studies community. There were people who said “At last!” and there were people who said “How dare she?” And many of those comments were from Asian men, who said, “She’s representing us incorrectly.” I wanted to say: I’m not writing sociology, it just so happens this is what happened in my own family. I’m sorry my mother’s first husband was a rapist. I wish he’d been a very fine man. In my stories, often, you’ll see the good father dies early, like mine.

Who we become has so much to do with the experiences we had, and how we survived. The book is not about happy situations — it’s about trauma, and the times when characters have to question who they are. It’s about my questions, and who I am.

(I always feel I have to explain to people, I’ve only been married once, and my husband is actually a very nice man.)

When your father dies when you are fifteen, the “you” who you were at that age is still there.

NC: This book is dedicated to your editor, Daniel Halpern. Why is this relationship so important to your writing, and why did you want to include your email correspondence in the book?

AT: I’ve known Dan since 2011, when we began working together. I had an editor who died in 1999, and I hadn’t been able to take on a new editor — I didn’t think I’d ever find one like her, who could see me as a writer and also as a person; who could see that what happened in my daily life was the writing. Who would look for me in the writing and not say, “This is a crappy sentence,” but instead say, “You’re not in the sentence, I don’t hear you.” Dan is that kind of editor.

The original concept for the book was to make it a book of our emails—that was a bad idea, but I was lured into doing this book because of it. Then I wasn’t going to include the emails, but when I talked to friends about what I was writing, and told them the idea grew out of the 15,000 emails Dan and I had exchanged, many said, “I’d love to read that book!” So I thought, hmm, maybe I’d include the emails and let people know what went on between a writer and their editor, since this is a book about writing in a way. I thought it might be helpful for people to see how truly difficult it is for me to write. How much I struggle. How much perspective I don’t have with my own writing, and why it’s so good to have someone who can provide that — always with the sense that they believe in you.

I am never happy with any manuscript I have ever turned in. What counts for me is if I’m not mortified by what gets published. Even in the final book, there will be errors, and it just kills me that they’ll be there until the reprint; hopefully I’m alive when that happens. On the other hand, if I kept a book until I thought it was perfect, it would never be published.

NC: This book is so much about looking to the past, connecting that to how you write. What about the future? What are you working on now?

AT: I have a novel on my plate that I have sketched out; a novel that I dreamt, actually. It’s called The Memory of Desire. I can’t really do writing on it, because I’m in the midst of talking about this memoir, and when I’m doing publicity for a book, talking about writing and how I go about [it], I find [that] it’s poisonous to writing a new book. I can only do outer parts of it, like the research.

Right now I’m enjoying doing something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid, and that’s drawing. I draw every single day. I go out and fill my birdfeeders every morning, and I greet the birds and take photos and draw pictures of them. I do very detailed drawings, little stroke by little stroke. It’s meditative. Some of the early drawings I did are not good at all—they’re out of proportion, and I didn’t know how to use the watercolors. Almost as therapy, I share these imperfect things, saying, “You can do stuff, even though it’s not perfect! That is not the goal. You can just enjoy it and put it out there and share it.” Nature is something you share with people.

Just before I got on the phone with you, I was outside, where I had brought a hand feeder. I stood there and waited, and within thirty seconds this one hummingbird came up to me and began to feed out of my hand! No other birds challenged him, because everybody knew I was his, and he made a little chip! chip! chip! And then I had to come in to do this interview. Now I’ve just stepped outside again, and another one came right up to me. It’s a real thrill. I never noticed birds before, and now I find they’ve been there. They’ve been there all along.

Nicole Chung is a writer and editor in the DC area. She's working on a book about adoption. Find her on Twitter: @nicole_soojung. This interview has been condensed and edited.