Amy Tan, author of the best selling short story collection “The Joy Luck Club” and other novels and collections, visited Guilford on March 30 to give a speech titled “The Opposite of Fate.” The speech was based on her autobiography of the same title. Tan gave the audience a realistic depiction of her life as the daughter of Chinese immigrants questioning her parents and her own identity.

Her parents were two very different people. Her father, as a Baptist minister, believed in “god and miracles,” while her mother believed in “fate, ghosts, Buddhism and that bad things happen if you don’t listen to your mother.”

Touching on the subject of death, Tan drew from stories about her mother.

Tan was introduced to death at a young age. Her father and brother died from brain tumors, and her mother saw this as a curse. Tan’s mother experienced her own mother committing suicide.

From then on, her mom would always give her dark advice. “I was forced to take piano lessons when I was 5 years old,” Tan said. “By 6 years old, my mother was not happy with my lack of progress. She would say, ‘Fine, don’t listen to me. You go outside and play. It doesn’t matter-death anyway.'”

“My mom was crazy, she thought I could see ghosts,” she continued. Tan’s mother arrived at this belief one evening while her friends were over. She tried to make Tan, a young girl at the time who did not want to go to bed, go to the bathroom and brush her teeth.

“Because I wanted to stay up and listen to them talk, I told my mom I couldn’t go in the bathroom because of the ghost,” Tan said. “Other moms would walk in, turn on the light, and say ‘See: there’s no ghost.’ My mom walked in, turned on the light, and said, ‘Where, where is she?’ She believed it was the ghost of my grandmother.”

“The stories she told were hilarious and very interesting,” said first-year Becky McDougall “I’m really glad I went.”

When Tan was older and her mom had moved the family to Switzerland, she realized that she had to reject her mom’s and dad’s beliefs.

“I had to question my own truths. I believed only the truths I found true to me,” Tan said. “There are no absolute truths, my truths are always evolving.”

She used this to explain her fiction: “I’m recreating a universe and creating sense from it. Somehow I turn that into meaning, and that’s what fiction means to me. It’s looking at one possibility of how things happen.”

“She’s a very impressive public speaker, very poised, composed, and charismatic,” said junior Andrew Rose. “It seemed like she was comfortable.”

Though Tan clearly knew how and why she constructed her stories, she admitted: “(I’m) not always able to explain my own work. Luckily, I found a source who can.”

That source is CliffsNotes. While browsing one day she came across the CliffsNotes for “The Joy Luck Club.”

Surprised to see her own novel analyzed, she said, “I thought it was weird because all the other authors were in that library in the sky.”

She said she bought it to see if CliffsNotes knew what she intended the readers to get out of the story.

Tan sarcastically said, “I went on and on through the notes and thought ‘My, I’m so deep.'”

“I really enjoyed listening to her even though I’ve never read any books by her and have no interest to,” said Chris Pugilese, a first-year who works for Conferences and Events. “I was glad I was there even if it wasn’t by choice.”

After the speech, Tan signed books. Pugilese, who had to look official and make sure the line didn’t get out of hand, said, “It was good to see how excited other people were. I guess this book had a great effect on other people’s lives.”

“Each one of us is so unique and individual in this universe that nobody is exactly like any other person, or ever has been or will be,” Tan said. “That makes me think, what is the essence of all of us?