Tan Explores Uncharted Territory In ‘Secret Senses’

Some women stop hearts. Others stop people in their tracks. Some stop traffic. Now comes Amy Tan with a more unorthodox approach: She stops cassette recorders.

Not that she tries to. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Tan says, shaking the machine, its fresh Duracell batteries and her head. It happens half the time she does interviews, she admits sheepishly.

For much of her life, Tan, 43, the Chinese-American author of “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” has been a lightning rod for unusual events - “weird electrical stuff,” prescient dreams, telephones disconnecting at key moments. She has learned to live with it.

This clearly is a woman whose experience with the supernatural goes much further than her hobby - playing in a band with Stephen King. And the supernatural is the premise upon which Tan’s latest novel turns.

After dealing primarily with mother-daughter relationships in her first two novels, Tan moves into the realm of sisters with “The Hundred Secret Senses” (Putnam, $24.95). It is a fantastic, metaphoric yarn that weaves Chinese traditions about ghosts and past lives into a modern tale about faith and juggling American and Asian values and beliefs.

“I decided to embrace all of the wonderful people in my life who have died, and I came up with this,” Tan says. Many of its characters are named for people in her life who have passed away.

In the story, Chinese-American photographer Olivia Bishop recounts spending much of her life being bothered by and trying to figure out her older, oddball and much more Chinese half-sister, Kwan, who appeared from China as a surprise when Olivia was 6.

Kwan, it seems, has “yin eyes” that allow her to monitor the continual presence of the spiritual world - and its denizens - alongside the living one. For years, she regales Olivia in Chinese and broken English with eerie tales of past lives - an elaborate saga of 19th-century locals and foreign missionaries living in a tiny Chinese village called Changmian.

“Kwan is saying, ‘We all have Hundred Secret Senses. We just have forgotten,’ ” Tan says. “It’s the ability to sense things between two people so naturally that you don’t need other senses.”

As the book progresses and Olivia separates from her husband, Simon, events push the three of them away from their San Francisco homes and into a visit to Changmian, where past and present meet in a most unusual way.

For Tan, this foray into the fantastic was, in a literary sense, uncharted territory. But it resonates with elements of her own life.

“My mother and many people in my life think I have yin eyes,” she says. “I’ve had many things happen that are difficult to explain. So in writing this book, I decided to let go of my skepticism and see what would come through.”

But she is quick to add about her new novel: “It was certainly not to say, ‘Yes, there are ghosts or past lives.’ It’s about love.”

Tan, the American-born daughter of a nurse and an engineer turned Baptist minister who emigrated from China in 1949, learned only at age 26 that her mother had three daughters from a previous marriage - all living in China. Meeting them deeply affected her and made her examine how her “Americanness” and her “Chineseness” interacted within.

“I think I’ve been fascinated by that theme of separation of yourself in two different nations,” she says. “It’s almost a sense of yourself that’s been left in another country. Finding out about it at a later period in life makes me skeptical of many things.”

Educated in linguistics, Tan initially wanted to become an academic - “I didn’t care if anybody read what I wrote; I just wanted tenure” - but found that life unfulfilling. She dabbled in several jobs, including business writing and publishing, before beginning the free-lance fiction that led to her novels.

The surreal has followed her. A friend, Pete, was murdered in 1976 and, she says, two names entered her mind on the night of his death: Ron and John. Four days later, police arrested two suspects with those names.

For nine months, until the convictions, Tan had “yin” experiences. She remembers hearing soothing advice inside her head - not necessarily “hearing voices,” she says, but something more abstract. She dreamed about seeing Pete in an otherworldly land, where he asked her to fly with him.

“I said, ‘I can’t fly - I’m not dead like you.’ He said, ‘Oh, I forgot. Well, you can rent some wings over there,”’ she recalls, grinning. “He laughed. He said, ‘You see, it’s only your fears that keep you from doing what you want to do.’ And so I flew.”

The experience led her to realize the power of metaphor.

Many of the strange experiences stopped, though, until she began writing “The Hundred Secret Senses” two decades later. Then they returned: dreams of her dead father, unusual intuitions, disconnected phones.

Tan takes such experiences stoically but doesn’t discount possibilities - including that friends and family are watching from beyond.

“I don’t think they’re playing pinochle on clouds or anything, but something is creating these coincidences,” Tan says.

“If there are these congenial spirits, I’d like to think of them as having a connection to me, as loving me very much. They don’t tell me how to win the lottery or invest stocks. They just help me be aware in everyday life. And that’s something to pay attention to.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Excerpts from ‘The Hundred Secret Senses’: “Kevin once joked that maybe the Communists had sent us the wrong kid, figuring we Americans thought all Chinese people looked alike anyway. After hearing that, I fantasized that one day we’d get a letter from China saying, ‘Sorry, folks. We made a mistake.’ In so many ways, Kwan never fit into our family. Our annual Christmas photo looked like those children’s puzzles, ‘What’s Wrong with This Picture?’ Each year, front and center, there was Kwan - wearing brightly colored summer clothes, plastic bow-tie barrettes on both sides of her head, and a loony grin big enough to burst her cheeks.”

“My first morning in China, I awake in a dark hotel room in Guilin and see a figure leaning over my bed, staring at me with the concentrated look of a killer. I’m about to scream, when I hear Kwan saying in Chinese, ‘Sleeping on your side - so this is the reason your posture is so bad. From now on, you must sleep on your back. Also do exercises.’ “She snaps on the light and proceeds to demonstrate, hands on hips, twisting at the waist like a sixties PE teacher. I wonder how long she’s stood by my bed, waiting for me to waken so she can present her latest bit of unsolicited advise. Her bed is already made. “I look at my watch and say in a grumpy voice, ‘Kwan, it’s only five in the morning.’ ” ‘This is China. Everyone else is up. Only you’re asleep.’ ” ‘Not anymore.’ “We’ve been in China less than eight hours, and already she’s taking control of my life. We’re on her terrain, we have to go by her rules, speak her language. She’s in Chinese heaven.”