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 ZZ: You were born in 1952, right in the middle of the baby boom. How has that influenced your work?
AT: Well, I’m not conscious of it, but I’m sure it has. I was not only born in the middle of the baby boom years, but to the month, I’m the median age of baby boomers. And I think that it makes my consciousness about culture, my preoccupations, my obsessions, to be very much those of many other people.
ZZ: I was doing a little reading and I came across something I didn’t know about you: that your father was a Baptist minister. Has religion shaped your personal values and your writing?
AT: Religion was such a big part of my life that it’s shaped how I question the world, because not only was my father a Baptist minister, my mother had religious beliefs that were quite different from his. Her beliefs encompassed all things: it was more of a pragmatism that allowed for any possibility that explained what normal logic couldn’t explain. It could be ancestral worship, beliefs in ghosts, Christianity, all kinds of things that often ran counter to what my father believed. It caused me to question the world and not depend on any particular set of religious beliefs as my own. I think of myself as a spiritual person in that I ask questions about the existence of a higher power, my purpose in life every day. I think of writing also as a very focused kind of meditation.
ZZ: It sounds like all of those traditions have come to influence your work.
AT: Yes, I put them in there. After all, writing is a version of your personality and the way you see the world. And I think I’m very lucky to have such a confused or questioning way that I see the world -- a desire to discover the right questions to ask myself. I think that’s what is also encompassed in different religions, that people pose a set of questions to examine their life. I just happen not to subscribe to any organized set of beliefs.
ZZ: I know that you were exposed to death at an early age, both your father’s and brother’s deaths, at about the same time, when you were fourteen? How did that influence your view of life?
AT: I became a cynical person at a very early age. I lost my faith in many things, not only God, but people in general. I was so bitterly angry about what happened, and didn’t feel that anybody really understood the pain that I had. But at the same time, that cynicism and fear and confusion and pain have transformed over time. And that’s also gone into a lot of my writing, into who I am as a person, and the things that are important to me, which has a lot to do with hope and with love.
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"I think of myself as a spiritual person...I think of writing also as a very focused kind of meditation."
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Amy Tan
;)
