Amy Tan discussed how her writing has evolved since writing "The Joy Luck Club", specifically how the expectations following its success made it more difficult to write.
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In the beginning, in the beginning, and then the key difference is that when I started writing "The Joy Luck Club" I was unknown, completely unknown. I've never been published, not even a short story or anything, or one short story in a very tiny circulation magazine, and after "The Joy Luck Club", suddenly it just felt like everybody was watching, and there were the reviews, good and bad reviews, and people saying all the time, "I can't wait for the next one." And suddenly, it wasn't a private undertaking, yeah it was no longer private and I had all these expectations weighing on me and it's taken a long time to undo those expectations. And I try to get back into that place where nobody is watching over my shoulder. So that makes it difficult.
And then my friend was murdered, and I realized this was a really selfish way to look at my life, and I should do what he was going to do, and work with people with disabilities. So I talked my way into a job to do that. And then it went from there. I've had different jobs leading up to my becoming a fiction writer, none of that was planned in a particular way. Certainly not the murder of my friend, not the thing that led me to leave that field five years later or never was planned that I would get published. So many things just came to me. And I would tell myself that there would be, there will be things that come to you without your even asking for it consciously, that actually are about what's important to you, they will come up and that will happen. On the other hand, I wouldn't say it to myself at age 21 because I think it was incredibly good practice to go through all those different stages because all the even the bad stuff, even the death of my father and my brother when I was young, or even the things that my mother and I went through, those were all what made me who I am. Those are the things that I write about, yeah, where I have to look deep inside of me of, you know, what's the, what's the meaning of this, that in this narrative of my life, there's nothing I would take out and say, "Gosh, if I could have I would have thrown this away." Right, it's led to this moment, it's led to who I am and how I think, but that ultimately also means that I have to love who I am. You know, if I didn't like who I am, then I'd say, "Gosh, if I didn't have this, if this hadn't happened, you know, then I could fix it and I would be the person I would have wanted to be." But I am the person I want to be. So I don't, I don't have those feelings of going back and changing them, because I don't have control over it anyway.
You know, I'm somebody who has a problem with forgiveness. So, oh, really? Oh, yeah. You know, when somebody has betrayed me, I have a hard time with that and, and I usually what I do is I just let go of that relationship and I don't really give it a second chance. Um, it's not the one little thing, you know, it's not that one person said, "I really think her book stinks." That would not be enough for me to, you know, give up that relationship, but it would be something a little bit bigger and much more hurtful, and I won't get into those things. But I do sometimes look back and think, "Well, maybe I've cut off so many relationships, because I know so many people, or maybe it's because people see me as a target and so they will, more people will do things like that. I think it's a, not a huge problem, but I think it's an issue that I have to pay attention to.
