East West - The Asian American Lifestyle Magazine

By Shakila Hashem

Amy Tan is dabbling in new territory. Leaping off the page and onto the stage, the novelist is ardently at work, adapting her bestselling novel “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” into an opera.

“I never thought I would do an opera,” she says. The project came about when a dear friend, composer Stewart Wallace, decided to write her a page of music for her birthday. “He was haunted by what he had written. He went out, read the book and was convinced he wanted to make an opera.”

Tan began working on the libretto – or lyrics – for the opera and found herself writing in the new format with ease. “Opera is all about emotion,” she says. And her books are always liberally doused with emotion – tragic, comic and everything in between. 

But still, the opera, which is expected to premiere in San Francisco in 2008, doesn’t mimic the book entirely. Tan says fans are in for a surprise. “We’ve had to change a lot of it. If you try to shoehorn in a story that’s in a book into either a movie or any other format, it’s going to fail. So I knew we’d have to just take the heart and then restructure it. So it’s quite different. We’ve added in rape and murder and incest. And yet it’s still sort of the same story.”

And it’s an eclectic project, merging cultures and traditions. “The composer is Jewish, I’m Chinese, our director is Chinese. The singers are all Chinese. In fact they’re originally from China. I think that’ll be unusual in one way—a Western story set in China with its origins in China but sung now, even the American parts, by Chinese opera singers. We have a Chinese opera rock star whose going to play a mad monk and really wild improvisational Chinese instruments and it will be very dramatic. There are acrobats, there are flying corpses — so a lot of really dramatic things that you won’t get in a book.”

It’s an interesting example of how the arts—and society—have progressed since Tan first began putting pen to paper. But Tan cautions that while much positive change has certainly occurred in the cultural landscape of the United States, we still have room to grow….

On cultural differences and assimilation

“You see that immigration from many different countries has led to a more mixed environment in schools so you don’t have people having the same complete ignorance or stereotypes about people that they used to have before. But in other respects, it’s not perfect. There are complexities in how much emphasis you can place upon culture. For example, when I was growing up, I tended to blame any problem I had emotionally on my culture, my mother. If I didn’t get a toy, it was because she was Chinese and her culture was stupid because she didn’t think those toys were important. If I didn’t get a date —well, it’s because I’m Chinese. And maybe some of that was true, but ‘Chineseness’ became the scapegoat for everything bad in my life. I thought it would have been better now because there are just so many more Asians in schools, as well as other minorities, but it’s still surprising how much the issues are still there.”

On forging a cultural identity

“Generalizations are really assumptions that are waiting to be disproved, and you can say that with anything in life. And I think that’s what people always need to keep in mind. There’s a generalization about identity. People ask me, ‘Do you think you’re more Asian or more American?’ As if there’s a dichotomy or a percentage. I’ve learned over the years that it’s not any one thing. We can’t simply say ‘I’m Asian’ or ‘I’m American.’ It’s ‘I’m this age,’ ‘I’m that age,’ ‘I’m a woman,’ ‘I’m older,’ ‘I’m younger than this person,’ ‘I am living in this city’…there are so many factors. If I’m standing in my sister’s apartment in China, I’m a different person. In my sister’s apartment, I am very American. She is very Chinese. And yet because we’re from the same family there’s something about us that is the same.”

On the nature of change

“Identity to me is something that’s fluid, that’s changeable. People who say that I should be this or I should be that...you can try, but it’s not going to happen. It’s like saying – ‘I’m standing here at this place on the ocean and I want this wave to stop. I’m going to stand here and I’m not going to move. The ocean better stop here.’ It’s not going to do that.”

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