Silent But Deadly: the Chinese Version!

 

Silent But Deadly: the Chinese Version!

New York Times bestselling author, Amy Tan, a Chinese-American shares the following story in her book The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life:

I was at yet another bookstore, about to give another reading. I was waiting in the wings, as the store manager delivered a long introduction on my credentials as an author. Glancing to my side, I saw a wire book rack crammed with cheap and familiar booklets. They were CliffsNotes, self-proclaimed as “your key to the classics.”

CliffsNotes have served as the midnight salvation of many a literature student, and if the sad truth be known, this former honors English major used them to write incisive papers on—dare I say it?—Ulysses, Lord Jim, and Hamlet.

Imagine: There I was, in a bookstore, recalling these past sins, about to read from my own published work. I gave a silent apology to my fellow authors Jim Joyce, Joe Conrad, and Bill Shakespeare, may they rest in peace. And then my eyes landed on another familiar title: The Joy Luck Club. I stared at those CliffsNotes, thinking to myself, But I’m not dead yet.

I flipped through the pages and found an obituary-like biography of the author, me, Amy Tan. I was shocked to learn that I had once carried on “a relationship with an older German man, who had close contacts with drug dealers and organized crime.”

Could this possibly be describing my Franz? Does my personal history of having once dated a loser constitute the sort of information needed by “serious students,” as Cliff refers to them? Will this make them “secure in the knowledge that they have a working understanding of the work”?

In page after chilling page, I saw that my book had been hacked apart, autopsied, and permanently embalmed into chapter-by-chapter blow-by-blows: plot summaries, genealogy charts—and ai-ya—even Chinese horoscopes. Further in, I was impressed to learn of all the clever nuances I’d apparently embedded into the phrase “invisible strength”. According to Cliff, I meant for “invisible strength” to refer to the “human will,” as well as to represent “female power” and “the power of foreigners.” It was amazing what I had accomplished.

The truth is I borrowed that phrase from my mother, who used to say something like it whenever I was whining out loud. She’d say, “Fang pi bu-cho, cho pi bu-fang,” which is commonly uttered by Chinese parents, and which translates approximately to: “There’s more power in silence.”

What my mother intended, that I understand, however, was precisely this: “No one wants to hear you make a big stink over nothing, so shut up.” The strict linguist might want to note that the literal translation of that Chinese phrase runs along these noble lines: “Loud farts don’t smell, the really smelly ones are deadly silent.”

Anyway, that’s the sort of literary symbolism I use with phrases like “invisible strength”—not the sort of analysis you find in CliffsNotes, I might add.