I found out later that my Liebling had deserted the German army all right, but from its mental hospital. Oh, well. Mental illness was romantic and even revolutionary in its way.
My mother was, shall we say, less open-minded. It didn’t help matters that Franz once flipped her off, which she misinterpreted as his showing his fist in a threat to beat her up. I thought about telling her what the gesture really meant, then deemed it better that she think he was merely violent rather than disrespectful.
For the months Franz and I were together, ours was a romance of stolen kisses—and kisses only, I might add, although my mother was certain he had defiled me. She wore my ear down, telling me how lazy he was, that his breath stank, that he had no future. My little brother chimed in to say that he looked like Larry of the Three Stooges. My mother took to yelling at me, locking me in the bedroom, and slapping me. She grew frantic, then hysterical, and talked of killing herself so she would not have to see me destroy my life.
One day, sick of my mother’s tirades, I decided I should break up with Franz. Or was it that I was weary of Franz and wanted to use my mother as my excuse? In any case, I remember that our breakup came on the night before some big examinations. Until then I had been a straight-A student. Though I was a junior, I was graduating early and applying to colleges, so these exams were very important. I was looking forward to college, for therein lay the means by which I could escape my mother. Having a ne’er-do-well boyfriend did not fit into my new life as a serious college student. That was not what I told Franz, of course. I blamed my mother for the breakup.
That night, after I made my announcement, Franz threw himself on the train tracks and vowed he would let the next train from Lausanne squish him to pieces if I did not immediately change my mind, hop aboard the next train to Austria with him, and elope. I pleaded with him for an hour and more to please not do this. Then came the warning call of the train. Whoo-whoo! Which would it be—marry him or bury him?
A minute later, after a tearful embrace, we both hurried to the station. While waiting for the train to Vienna, I had a chance to ask myself whether I really wanted to be married to a man whose sole occupation was being the unofficial international champion of foosball. I found a pay phone and called my mother. I did what was only considerate, and let her know I wouldn’t be home for breakfast. Why? Oh, didn’t I tell you? Franz and I are at the train station, about to elope. Before the train took off, bearing me to a fate of certain marital unhappiness, my mother and the police arrived. And so I did not get married, but because of sheer mental exhaustion from a sleepless night of high drama, I flunked my exams.
After this escapade, my mother decided enough was enough. She hired a private detective, who was also the town mayor. Unbeknownst to me, my mother confiscated my diary, which I had written in Spanish, and the detective-mayor had it translated into French. The unintended confession provided in novelistic detail all the evidence the detective needed for the biggest drug bust in Montreux’s history.
This is not to say it was that big—only a small stash of psychedelic mushrooms was found, in a Volkswagen van belonging to some Canadian hippies. The largest part of the illegal goods, four kilos of Moroccan hashish, had already been tossed into Lake Geneva, where, I was told, it was joyfully devoured by the resident geese, which later that day were seen to be flying high.
Franz and his friends were jailed, then deported. Because of my young age, I was not, but I had to appear before a magistrate in Bern and promise I would not do anything bad ever again in my entire life. I would not smoke, not even one cigarette. I would always obey my mother, give her not even one word of defiance.
A few months later I graduated from high school, in my junior year. I returned to the States and in the fall started my freshman year in college as an American Baptist Scholar, chosen for my high morals.
That was my childhood. Told as is, it would not make for good fiction. It is too full of coincidences, too full of melodrama, veering toward the implausible in both tragedy and comedy. But my life is, I believe, excellent fodder for fiction. Memory feeds imagination, and my imagination is glutted with a Thanksgiving of nightmares.
Looking back, I’m convinced it was also my mother who affected my imagination to such a degree that I now hear and see things that others do not. I see connections in coincidences, ironies in lies, and truths in contradictions, all sorts of things that others do not.
But I also see and hear—how shall I say it?—the inexplicable: noisy apparitions, mysterious electrical phenomena, prophetic dreams, bodiless laughter, and the abrupt disappearance of objects more significant than the mates to socks. How would you explain it if you heard the Jeopardy! tune being whistled behind your back when you were alone at home; if paper plates at a funeral reception wafted up and down whenever the name of the deceased was mentioned; if your television set turned on by itself in the middle of the night, tuned to a religious channel; if your phone disconnected, but only when you were talking to your mother?
I’ve had discussions with my husband about this. I told him about hearing footsteps running up and down the stairs, doors slamming, and what resembled the raucous pounding of a couple taking lambada lessons in our bedroom. My husband said our house was old, it had funny acoustics. I brought up the fact that electrical equipment often shorted when I talked about my grandmother. I reminded him that some of these mysteries had followed me across the continent, to Denver, Austin, Atlanta, and New York, and even across the ocean, to London, Amsterdam, Milan, and Munich, where tape recorders and video equipment had malfunctioned, TV and radio stations had gone off the air—all while I was being interviewed. To all that, my husband shrugged. (What do you expect from a man who is a tax attorney? It’s his job to write things off.)
My mother, on the other hand, assured me that I was not crazy, that it was not my imagination or bad structural engineering. There were ghosts in my house, she said, in fact one that lived in the computer. Her proof was the first book I wrote, The Joy Luck Club. Contrary to what CliffsNotes and reviewers had to say, she did not believe that I wove “intimate knowledge of [my] culture into a Chinese puzzle box.” No such thing. The way she saw it, in matters Chinese, I was an idiot. Only after I was published did my status rise to that of idiot savant.
This is how and why her opinion changed: While I was writing The Joy Luck Club, I asked her to tell me more about her parents, both of whom had died when she was a child. My mother revealed that my widowed grandmother had remarried—a disgraceful thing to do, my mother said, but at least she became the first wife to a rich man. Later my grandmother gave birth to a son; two months after that, she accidentally died, from eating opium while having too much of a good time.
When I wrote the story “Magpies,” I changed the details a bit; the young widow is raped by a rich man and becomes his fourth wife, a lowly concubine who gives birth to the man’s first son, the result of the rape. The baby is claimed by a higher-ranking wife, and this so enrages the fourth wife about the worthlessness of her life that she dies, not accidentally while having fun, but with the vengeance of suicide.
When my mother read this story, she asked me, “How you know you grandmother really the fourth wife? How you know what really happen? Why you can write about things you don’t know?” And then she remembered: I had always been able to talk to ghosts.
As a result of the truth of this fiction, my mother came to believe that my dead grandmother had served as my ghostwriter. Sometimes she would greet my computer as if her mother were listening. “Hey, it’s