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.