Amy Tan’s mother and maternal grandmother were concubines in communist China. Her maternal grandmother may also have been a courtesan. Tan’s familial back story is filled with trauma; there are stories of dead babies, rape and women’s servitude to cruel husbands and other men.

Where the Past Begins reveals long-held secrets and their modern day repercussions, such as her father’s ambition to make it in his adopted country, America, and to amend, perhaps, for marrying an already married woman who’d left behind three living daughters to make a life in the new world. He studied for a higher degree at night and worked as a Baptist minister and engineer by day. The family business, meant to bring in more money for a growing family by making and testing transformers on the kitchen table, appears to have led to three of Tan’s immediate family developing brain tumours. Her eldest brother and father died in the same year, but her mother’s tumour was benign, so she survived.

Like the feared curse on her family, Amy Tan has had her share of brain knocks as well: from serious car accidents to Lyme-disease-induced epilepsy.

Amy Tan’s ‘li hai’ strength of character is explored in her memoir, a new style of communicating a writer’s story. She achieves this through relating the struggle to get a story down in emails between her editor and herself, journal entries from different times in her life, what it’s like when the ‘voice’ works, and the real story behind the title of her hugely successful novel The Joy Luck Club.

Tan is generous in revealing herself, though keeps her husband’s life private, which is appropriate for a book about her writing praxis. I loved how Tan peels her writing process back to let us glimpse the machinations involved in creating her bestselling books.

Reviewed by Josepha Dietrich