Email
PrintA recap of author Amy Tan at Tulsa Town Hall
During author Amy Tan’s Town Hall Lecture last Friday morning, an invisible force filled Chapman Music Hall. Not the phantom of the opera, but something close. If you were there, you must have felt it.
Tan, who has written five novels, two children’s books and a memoir, recounted stories about her mother. Tan’s Chinese mother was very demanding, way beyond insistent.
“I was expected to become a brain surgeon by day and a concert pianist by night,” Tan said.
If you read “The Joy Luck Club,” you know about this kind of maternal influence. Tan indefatigably declares that her mother was crazy, a theme in all her books
She shared a remembrance about the loss of a girlfriend when Tan was a child and didn’t yet understand death.
“I kept asking my mother where my friend is. My mother took me to the open-casket funeral and said upon viewing, ‘This is what will happen to you if you don’t obey your mother,’” Tan recalled.
That exaggerated, over-the-top tale sent a shiver through the audience and a collective, empathetic shrug.
Nancy Ha, a junior at Bishop Kelley High School, passed out programs to ticket-holders as they arrived. Through an arrangement, she and other high-school students have been doing so at Town Hall for years, in exchange for listening to the speaker. Ha, from Vietnamese and Chinese lineage, is an honor student, in a scholars’ program and plays the piano. The beautiful, black-haired teenager wants to be a medical doctor when she grows up.
Anything sound familiar here? Is it getting eerie? If one believes in reincarnation, and Tan’s mother certainly did, one could make a case for mystical transference, at least.
But the thought of reincarnation was not what the audience felt hovering about us. Our mothers were in the room.
