Amy Tan speaks to City Weekend editor Lydia Holden about feeling inadequate, learning Mandarin as an adult and the up-coming Shanghai International Literary Festival.

"Here the vendors sell steamed baskets of xiao long bao, the dumplings Shanghai is famous for .... Aiyi motions for me to stay off to the side, encouraging me to disappear the best I can with a roomful of people staring at me from my red lipstick to my cowboy-style boots,” wrote Amy Tan in her memoir, “The Opposite of Fate,” about her 1990 trip to China.

At that time, Tan says by phone from her San Francisco apartment, they thought she was a prostitute, “but today’s China is so different from the China I stood out in in the 1980s and 90s. China has changed so quickly—now I am like an old fashion lady when I visit.”

Tan comes to China a few times a year to visit family in Shanghai and Beijing, research her books and articles and find inspiration. This March, Tan will attend the Man Hong Kong Literary Festival and the Shanghai International Literary Festival to talk about her novels and writing process.

“Our biggest weekends at the festival are always the ones that include authors who write about China,” says Tina M. Kanagaratnam, CEO of AsiaMedia Ltd. and one of the Shanghai festival's directors, who predicts that Tan’s two sessions at the festival will sell out quickly. “Expats want to learn about China, to make sense of where they are and the people around them; much of Amy Tan’s work is about her characters making sense of where they are, making sense of a Chinese identity.”

Tan’s novels include “The Joy Luck Club,” “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” “The Hundred Secret Senses,” “The Bonesetter's Daughter” and “Saving Fish from Drowning,” all New York Times bestsellers and the recipients of various awards.

While Tan has enjoyed a successful career, her life away from her desk has been a series of misadventures, further colored by her family background. Tan's mother once threatened to kill her with a kitchen knife held to her neck, her father and older brother both died of brain tumors within months of each other, she has been robbed at gunpoint, nearly raped, almost drowned, survived two car crashes, was threatened with death by stalkers and almost swept away in a mudslide. She’s also battled Lyme Disease, an illness started by the bite of a deer tick, which causes neurological damage. For months she was unable to write, but is now back to work on a new novel. Tan has also managed to squeeze some fun into her life as one of the singers for the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band whose 10 members include Stephen King, Scott Turow, James McBride and Matt Groening.

But when Tan speaks about her experiences, it isn’t just her history that is revealed. Tan’s grandmother was forced into concubinage and, after giving birth to a son, committed suicide by swallowing raw opium buried in rice cakes. Tan’s mother, a young girl at the time, watched her mother die. This cast a shadow over Tan’s mother's life who often threatened suicide when she was unhappy or her children did not obey. Tan herself once attempted suicide when she was 6 years old. To understand the tragedies that plagued her family, Tan felt she needed to give her grandmother and mother a voice in her writing, specifically in “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Kitchen God's Wife,” because they were forced to suffer silently.

“When I’m writing, I feel I am conversing with my grandmother,” says Tan. “By looking at why she did this and her despair in not having a voice, I’m saying to her: We have a voice now.”

Tan discovered as a teenager that her mother had been married before, to an abusive husband with whom she had five children. Blaming her husband for the death of two of her children, Tan’s mother ran away and was subsequently banned by her husband from seeing her three remaining daughters. Just days before the revolution, Tan’s mother left for California where she married a handsome Baptist minister named John Tan, originally from Beijing. The couple had three children, including Tan, who found out about her older half-sisters during an argument with her mother. Since then, Tan and her mother, until her death, often spent time in the Middle Kingdom reconnecting with their Chinese family.

“I now see the lines over the course of my family’s history—abrupt severing of the past and present with huge upheavals so the past has been put to sleep,” says Tan. “In the U.S. we had no interest in what happened in China and my parents didn’t talk about it because it was the McCarthy years and it was better to leave Red China alone. Personal histories [in China] have tragedies of an enormous magnitude that people in the U.S. cannot imagine. In my family there were enormous tragedies, but that was normal.”

On Tan’s upcoming trip, she will stay with one of her Shanghai sisters and have “plenty of family dinners.” Also on Tan’s agenda is a quick one night stay in Beijing, possibly at the Capital Club, and then on to a little village two hours from Liping in Guizhou province where Tan will research an article for National Geographic magazine.

Tan enthusiastically says she would like to live in China, “especially Beijing because there the history is more apparent and because the Shanghai I imagined and heard about in stories, it's hard to find that Shanghai when I go there." But with her two dogs and China's strict quarantine and registration laws it would be difficult, says Tan. Her voice strains a bit as she talks about her Yorkshire terriers, Lilli, 11, and Bubba, who is 13, on multiple medications and has been doing poorly of late. Tan and her husband, Lou DeMattei, a tax accountant whom she married in 1974, do not have children, so Lilli and Bubba are near and dear to her heart, and may prevent Tan from settling down in Beijing any time soon.

If Tan did make the move, it would not be permanent, just until her Putonghua was up to snuff. “I hate that I run into friends who speak Chinese so much better than I do,” laments Tan. “But I can understand more now. I went from ‘ni hao ma’ when I first came, to gossiping with my sisters. I can’t talk about literature and politics though.” With all of her China experience, it is a bit shocking that Tan doesn’t know how she is perceived here as a writer. “I continue to be surprised that people in China know my books. I must suffer from inadequate Chinese woman syndrome,” Tan says. “I grew up not speaking Chinese, so having one of my books in Chinese is astounding.”

“The Bonesetter’s Daughter,” “The Joy Luck Club” and Tan’s latest offering, “Saving Fish from Drowning,” have all been translated into Chinese. “Amy is pretty much the only overseas Chinese writer to have a significant following in China,” says Jo Lusby, the general manager of Penguin China. “The Chinese reads quite beautifully—not a clunky translation, but a lyrical rendition. In the process, though, certain passages drifted away from the original, and people weren't sure if it was taking too many liberties. Personally, I think it's a natural approach to translation, where the feeling and spirit rather than the precise words are retained.”

While Tan isn’t concerned about the Chinese translation of her own novels, she is interested in books written by Chinese authors. She admires Ha Jin and thinks Geling Yan's “The Lost Daughters of Happiness” is “incredibly powerful.” Tan juggles the telephone while sifting through the stacks of books by the side of her bed and on her desk, reciting the titles she is currently reading: “‘Driven Out: Chinese People in the States,’ ‘The Lady and The Monk,’ some Jonathan Spence books, ‘My Revolutionary Years,’ something called ‘Chinese Characteristics’ that was published in 1899. It talks about disregard of accuracy and absence of public spirit. I also have ‘The Chinese are Like That,’” she says laughing. “I like old books that give you a window of how people look at the Chinese through an outside window, which I am.”