Why Amy Tan will never forget her first visit to Hong Kong
The American author, a guest at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, talks about her introduction to Kowloon, discovering Facebook and why she chose to mine her family’s tragic past for her stories, and now a memoir
Amy Tan first set foot in Hong Kong in 1987, but that trip is seared into her memory. This was before the Oakland, California-born author had published – or even written – The Joy Luck Club. Tan’s mother, Daisy, who would become the muse for many of her novels, had arranged for her to stay with Auntie Elsie, a childhood friend from Shanghai, in a flat near the Ambassador Hotel, in Kowloon.
“It was my first introduction to sleeping on a bed that was woven rattan and you would lie on it, instead of a regular mattress, because it was so hot,” Tan says, from her craftsman-style home just north of San Francisco. “And you are living in somebody’s apartment and it is so hot.”
It was not the luxury accommodation she has since become accustomed to.
“It was very old fashioned,” Tan says, pausing a beat. “There were paintings of Hawaii on the walls.”
Auntie Elsie’s mother could not walk on her own, so she had to balance on the back of an unfortunate amah, or domestic helper.
“Auntie Elsie would point, ‘Go here,’ or ‘Put her there,’ and the poor amah would have to run around all over the apartment with this old lady on her back, as if she were a donkey.” Auntie Elsie’s parsimonious mother also refused to draw a fresh bath for herself, insisting instead on bathing in her daughter’s used water. For a Chinese-American who had never before experienced Asia, this was all part of a grand awakening, a cultural rebirth of sorts, if an awkward one.
