by Amy Tan, 1989
Born in 1952 in Oakland, California, Amy Tan is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. In 1987 she was a successful freelance business writer, with no fiction to her name. That same year she returned with her mother to China, where she met two half-sisters and a new world was revealed to her. This journey of both discovery and self-discovery inspired her first novel, The Joy Luck Club. In a multiple narrative it presents the frictions of immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. In the vignette printed below, Waverly Jong takes her American boyfriend, Rich, and her daughter, Shoshana, to visit her very traditional parents.
When I offered Rich a fork, he insisted on using the slippery ivory chopsticks. He held them splayed like the knock-kneed legs of an ostrich while picking up a large chunk of sauce-coated eggplant. Halfway between his plate and his open mouth, the chunk fell on his crisp white shirt and then slid into his crotch. It took several minutes to get Shoshana to stop shrieking with laughter.
And then he had helped himself to big portions of the shrimp and snow peas, not realizing he should have taken only a polite spoonful, until everybody had had a morsel.
He had declined the sautéed new greens, the tender and expensive leaves of bean plants plucked before the sprouts turn into beans. And Shoshana refused to eat them also, pointing to Rich: "He didn't eat them! He didn't eat them!"
He thought he was being polite by refusing seconds, when he should have followed my father's example, who made a big show of taking small portions of seconds, thirds, and even fourths, always saying he could not resist another bite of something or other, and then groaning that he was so full he thought he would burst.
But the worst was when Rich criticized my mother's cooking, and he didn't even know what he had done. As is the Chinese cook's custom, my mother always made disparaging remarks about her own cooking. That night she chose to direct it toward her famous steamed pork and preserved vegetable dish, which she always served with special pride.
"Ai! This dish not salty enough, no flavor," she complained, after tasting a small bite. "It is too bad to eat."
This was our family's cue to eat some and proclaim it the best she had ever made. But before we could do so, Rich said, "You know, all it needs is a little soy sauce." And he proceeded to pour a riverful of the salty black stuff on the platter, right before my mother's horrified eyes.
And even though I was hoping throughout the dinner that my mother would somehow see Rich's kindness, his sense of humor and boyish charm, I knew he had failed miserably in her eyes.
Rich obviously had had a different opinion on how the evening had gone. When we got home that night, after we put Shoshana to bed, he said modestly, "Well, I think we hit it off A-o-kay." He had the look of a dalmatian, panting, loyal, waiting to be petted.
SourceSource: The Joy Luck Club, New York, 1989.
