Amy Tan is currently on tour to promote her new book, Saving Fish From Drowning. The novel relates the story of Bibi Chen, a wealthy socialite and art dealer dies in a violent way just before she was was supposed to lead a group of tourists on an art trip along Burma Road in Asia. Bibi's ghost decides to tag along on the ill-fated trip, and gives a running commentary on the group's individual foibles and their experiences in Burma. In an interview with the Arkansas Gazette, Tan talks about her mentor and longtime editor, Molly Giles, and how she shaped Tan's writing.
A trip to the Southeast Asian country of Burma (also known as Myanmar) inspired her new novel.
With it, she created a story involving 12 Americans who are like herself in various ways and whose lives intersect. The story ultimately explores human-rights atrocities in Burma — a subject many readers might not want to confront.
"I decided I should write a story that would seduce people," Tan said recently from Portland, Ore. "Suddenly, you can find yourself very quickly submersed in the unfamiliar." "My hope is that they enjoy the story and that they remember Burma," she says, when readers hear of the country that was renamed Myanmar after a military regime took control.
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At the workshop 20 years ago at Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Tan had a dozen or so pages about a Chinese girl and her mother. Giles told her that there wasn’t a consistent voice in the story, and Giles went through it and noted about a dozen places that could be the beginning of a short story. Giles told Tan to pick one and write that story, then repeat the process for each. Tan simply said "OK."
"Hardly anybody says, 'OK,'" Giles says.
"Instead of being horrified, I was so excited," Tan recalls.
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"Even if I was violently opposed to what she’d suggest, she was often right," Tan says of Giles. "She’s tough. She just cuts to the chase."
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Tan says she likes that Giles bluntly delivers criticism and that she knows how Tan works. Tan writes profusely and then starts shaping and directing her story. "I’m more like a sculptor than I am watercolorist," Tan says.
Tan also likes that Giles comes to her writing with unselfish motives.
"She’s not concerned with the marketing issues or the commercial side of publishing. She’s concerned with the work," Tan says.
That approach seems to have paid off for both Tan and Giles: Ms. Tan's new book has excellent buzz, although she appears to have shocked some fans by introducing more of her own, wry and somewhat cynical voice into the voice of the narrator.
