Reliving Her Past

This Saturday, San Francisco Opera will premiere "The Bonesetter's Daughter," an opera based on best-selling Chinese-American novelist Amy Tan's 2001 novel. The libretto, which Tan also wrote, tells the tale of a troubled Chinese-American who, led by a ghost, travels into her immigrant mother's past and unearths their devastating shared secret history: that her grandmother had been raped and ultimately committed suicide. She spoke to NEWSWEEK's Vibhuti Patel in her SoHo loft about her transformative journey into ancestral territory. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What is "The Bonesetter's Daughter" about?
Amy Tan: It's about inheritance, the histories of our families that often go into other countries and cultures. At the heart of the story is the secret tragedy of my own family. Precious Aunty's character is emotionally based on my grandmother; LuLing is inspired by my mother; and Ruth, the writer, is like me in some ways. Our terrible tragedy was passed down like DNA through generations. I've changed that past by reclaiming it.

Why an opera?
I'd had film offers that I rejected because it's a two-year process. That's a long time away from writing. But my friend [composer] Stewart Wallace badgered me, saying this must be an opera. It was an opportunity to learn something musically that I did not take lightly. I have a deep appreciation of music--I had 15 years of classical piano, I play the rhythm dominatrix in a ridiculous costume in a literary rock band to raise money for literacy. I go to the symphony more than to movies. So, I re-imagined the story to make it dramatic. Stewart was my teacher and his "voice"--what he sees and uses to musically represent the world--interested me as a writer. The process excited me.

How did writing the libretto differ from writing the novel?
As librettist, my job was to know the affecting emotions, and because I'd created the original story, I knew when we evoked the wrong emotion. When Stewart wrote angry, strident music for LuLing, I said, "No, it's a more private anger and sadness at her inability to get that across." Voicelessness was part of my grandmother's life, too, but the details are different. I write fiction, not biography. My mother, like LuLing, forced advice and love in a scary way. Discovering the past transformed the way I saw my mother. She lost her memory to Alzheimer's and insisted she saw O.J. murdering his wife. I put that in because it's dramatic--great for opera--she'd act it out like she was actually there.

There's also a lot of gore and violence in the piece.
Many things in that story were true to my life; they deal with tragedy, horror, lingering trauma. In opera, it gets condensed and heightened. All families have traumas which get passed on from generation to generation. Violence has been part of my history. Besides, trauma is story, crisis is story. Love is briefly a story, but betrayal is a bigger story.

How was it to work in another medium?
It's learning the art, seeing how emotion is in other forms, seeing reiteration of themes that are not just words. You hear something at a visceral, almost unconscious level. It's a deepening experience, not a lightbulb moment, when an explosion of emotion comes up. I included things from my own life that are not in the book.

You did research in China?
We were in villages where music is important, hearing songs that an isolated community has sung historically. It was exciting to watch Stewart's ears and mind opening up as he realized these people hold the key to the drama of China. His musical world merged emotionally, culturally, historically with a new world out there. He took elements from their music and transformed them into his vocabulary. He hired percussionists, musicians--even a heavy metal singer--for our opera. Now, I go to China not to see monuments, museums or landscapes, but to hear music. It's amazing to see the country through a specific lens.

What was it like personally to revisit your own past?
The last trip I made, I saw, for the first time, the island where my grandmother went to play mahjong at the invitation of the second wife of the man who raped her. I saw the room where she lived after being forced to become a concubine and where, a year later , after giving birth to my uncle, she killed herself, with my then 9-year-old mother at her side. I had a feeling of being in a prison. I saw the house my mother grew up in, and that of the family into which she'd married. She was jailed for escaping from that abusive husband. When she came out, she tried to kill herself. In 1949, she escaped to America to be with my father who had left in '47. The communists had arrived in Shanghai.

Do you see China as a superpower?
There's phenomenal change with this huge new business class. But 80 percent of Chinese live in poverty in rural areas. What will happen to them? With such rapid change, I worry about instability.

What's your hope for the opera?
Part of it has been fulfilled already as I've had this amazing musical experience, I learned a lot, and created something artistic and satisfying. If people respond enthusiastically, I'll be grateful. But even terrible reviews cannot diminish its success for me, personally. It will hurt, but I won't regret doing what's been so fulfilling. No one can take that away.