By Jana Monji, Arts & Culture Writer
Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir was intended as a look at Tan’s journey as a writer and the impact her blockbuster novel The Joy Luck Club made on her life.
But it also became a final conversation between Tan and her late friend, filmmaker James Redford. Redford, the son of historian Lola Van Wagenen and actor, director and Sundance Film Festival founder Robert Redford, died of cancer in October 2020, while his documentary was in post-production. He left sufficient notes for his vision to be realized.
“I perceived very early on that this was a film about us,” Tan said in a conversation after the documentary’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. “It wasn’t a film about me.”
Redford’s Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir will be shown virtually this Saturday, May 1 during CAAMFest 2021. It also premieres on Monday, May 3 on PBS for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. AsAmNews is a proud media partner of CAAMFest.
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“I wouldn’t have done this with anybody else,” Tan said about the documentary. “Jamie was a very special person and I had absolute trust in him. He feared that he would do something that would offend me or be embarrassing to me and I just said, ‘I have complete trust in you, and you don’t even have to ask. You don’t have to show me anything.'”
In a wide-ranging conversation with the media at the Sundance Film Festival, Tan also shared her thoughts on the writing process, life after The Joy Luck Club and the movie Crazy Rich Asians:
On the success of Crazy Rich Asians:
“I was so glad to see that movie. In fact, I saw it about five times. Kevin Kwan (author of Crazy Rich Asians) and I have talked about this, that it is a long time coming. And I think that it had to achieve commercial success before we could see more films like this happen in the future. I think that Crazy Rich Asians did that.”
On dressing up as a dominatrix and performing with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band made up of authors such as Dave Berry and Stephen King:
“I was not a singer. For some reason, I thought we were just going to wear costumes and joke on stage or lip synch or something. So I was shocked when I actually had to sing and I had a paralyzed vocal cord—nothing would come out. But I discovered through being with the band, you don’t always have to take yourself seriously, and that when you do perform, it really is about the audience. It’s not about you. You have to get the audience to have fun, to just let go at the same time. and so, it was more about attitude and presenting myself in a way that was comedic. So if you don’t have a good voice, attitude covers a lot. Wearing a dominatrix outfit covers a lot of lack of talent.”
On her early days as a writer:
“I was from the very early ages, a storyteller. I did not, however, think that I would ever be a writer. There was no model out there. There were barely women out there who were acknowledged as writers, let alone an Asian American. So no, I never dreamed that at all. It seemed impossible. It never even occurred to me. So it wasn’t until I was a business writer and writing about things that didn’t matter to me—-telecommunications, account management—that I thought to do something that was much more meaningful to me.”
On settling into life after The Joy Luck Club and overcoming fear, depression and feeling out of control:
“One thing that I did, I wrote down things that were important and I said, ‘Do not lose yourself. You can get sucked into this kind of success, and you might believe you’re better than you are or worse than you are because that’s what you’ll hear from people. You just have to stay solid and know the reasons why you write and what’s important.”
On accusations that she aired her family’s “dirty laundry:”
“I did not encounter people who felt that they had been maligned. In fact, I had people who thought they were in the book who were not. The person who was most exposed in the books, of course, would have been my mother, but my mother was the opposite of what you might imagine. She wanted more books about her. She wanted me to tell the true story. She knew that The Joy Luck Club was fiction, that it was not a representation of her real life.”
On how it feels to finish a book:
“One of the most difficult parts of writing is when I reach the end and I have finished the book, and that is when I have existential death. I’m pretty sure that my life is over once it gets out in public, and I just go through this terrible feeling for about five minutes, and then I just have to say, ‘It doesn’t matter. You wrote the book you wanted to write.'”
Once again, Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir will be shown virtually this Saturday, May 1 during CAAMFest 2021. It also premieres on Monday, May 3 on PBS for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The film made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in February.
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