Inspiration for Bitter Melon
Photo taken by Laura Joyce, Goofyfoot Photography
During my junior year, Mrs. Willson, my speech coach, told me about a book she was reading, titled The Joy Luck Club. She loved the book so much that she lent me her copy. Reading The Joy Luck Club transformed my ideas about what fiction could do. It was the first story I had ever read that featured a Chinese-American protagonist. I loved Tan’s voice, poignant yet comic, literary yet accessible. Tan had this ability to make perfect English sound Chinese in its cadence and sensibility. Joy Luck also changed how I viewed my relationship with my own mother. Before reading Joy Luck, I thought that our problems were unique. So imagine my shock when the mothers in Tan’s story said some of the same things to their daughters that my mother had said to me word for word! That was when I first I suspected that my problems with my mother stemmed in part from a conflict of cultures. At the same time, Tan’s book taught me about the universality of mother-daughter issues. In the decade that followed the publication of that book, women of other ethnicities would ask me if I had read The Joy Luck Club. They would then share stories about their relationships with their mothers.
Another major influence for me was my mother’s side of the family. My maternal grandmother was a single mother, and her family had to endure war and poverty. When my mother started working, she continued to live at home and helped support the family. When my uncles started working, they did the same. By the time my mother immigrated to the US, both uncles were married and had their own households, and my grandmother took turns living in homes of the two uncles. When the older uncle immigrated to Canada, my grandmother moved in with the younger uncle. As a doctor, the younger uncle provided for her medically as well as financially. When he and his family immigrated to the US years later, he bought a house that was walking distance from our house, so my grandmother could walk from one house to the other and live in either house. When my grandmother grew older and frailer, the youngest uncle’s wife, who had been a nurse, assumed the role of care giver until my grandmother passed away. In a country where many seniors end up in nursing homes where they are seldom visited, my grandmother never had to live a single day of her life alone.
On the one hand, I deeply respected and admired this family style. On the other hand, I pondered its potential pitfalls. What if the aging parent was difficult, dysfunctional, or even abusive? Should the adult child fulfill her obligation to the parent, or should she break free of that obligation? Should she betray her parent or herself? That question became the seed for BITTER MELON. I intensified the filial burden on Frances by making Gracie a struggling single mother, so that Gracie would view Frances as her ticket to financial freedom. I also made Frances an only child, so she couldn’t share this burden with a sibling. I had them live in a cramped, one bedroom apartment to create a suffocating physical environment that echoed Frances’s psychological environment. To highlight Frances’s moral and cultural dilemma, I juxtaposed Frances’s family with Theresa’s. Though Theresa and Nellie share the same culture, Nellie is financially and psychologically healthier. Hence, Theresa’s family represents the more positive side of this traditional family style.