The Valley of Amazement [Excerpt]
by Amy Tan (USA)
At the age of eight, I was determined
to be true to My Self. Of course, that made it essential to know what My Self
consisted of. My manifesto began the day I discovered I had once possessed an
extra finger in each hand, twins to my pinkies. My grandmother had recommended
that the surplus be amputated before leaving the hospital, lest people think
there was a familial tendency toward giving birth to octopuses.
Mother and
Father were Freethinkers, whose opinions were based on reason, logic,
deduction, and their own opinions. Mother, who disagreed with any advice my
grandmother had to give, said: “Should the extra fingers be removed simply to
enable her to wear gloves from a dry goods store?” They took me home with all
my fingers in place. But then an old family friend of my father’s, Mr. Maubert,
who was also my piano teacher, convinced them to turn my unusual hands into
ordinary ones. He was a former concert pianist, who, early in his promising
career, lost his right arm during the siege of Paris by the Prussians. “There
are only a few piano compositions for one hand,” he said to my parents, “and
none for six fingers. If you intend for her to have musical training, it would
be a pity if she had to take up the tambourine due to lack of suitable
instruments.” Mr. Maubert was the one who proudly informed me when I was eight
that he had influenced the decision.
Few can understand the shock of a
little girl learning that part of her was considered undesirable and thus
needed to be completely removed. It made me fearful that people could change
parts of me, without my knowledge and permission. And thus began my quest to
know which of my many attributes I needed to protect, the whole of which I
named scientifically “My Pure Self-Being.”
In the beginning, the complete list
comprised my preferences and dislikes, my strong feelings for animals, my
animosity toward anyone who laughed at me, my aversion to stickiness, and
several more things I have now forgotten. I also collected secrets about
myself, mostly what had wounded my heart, and the very fact that they needed to
be kept private was proof of My Pure Self-Being. I later added to my list my
intelligence, opinions of others, fears and revulsions, and certain nagging
discomforts, which I later knew as worries. A few years later, after I stained
my undergarments, Mother explained to me “the biology that led to your
existence”—the gist of which was my beginning as an egg slipping down a
fallopian tube. She made it sound as if I had been a mindless blob and that
upon entry into the world I took on a personality shaped through my parents’
guidance.
