Why Amy Tan Decided Not to Shred Her Archive

Many authors dream of having their notes, drafts and scraps preserved forever in a prestigious literary archive.

But not Amy Tan. Until recently, she had left written instructions for everything except photographs to be shredded after her death, lest she be subjected to the posthumous ordeal of scholars “going through the equivalent of my underwear drawer.”

Now, she’s changed her mind. The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, has acquired her archive — 62 boxes of photographs, notebooks, letters and literary manuscripts, from childhood writing to drafts of best-selling novels like “The Joy Luck Club.”

So why the change of heart? In a recent telephone conversation, Tan listed acceptance of “posterity,” coaxing by her longtime editor, and, well, the need to clear out space in her garage.

“I do consider it a great honor to have my archive there,” she said of the Bancroft, which also holds papers from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joan Didion and other prominent California writers. “My 22-year-old mind is thrilled: Accepted into Berkeley!”

Tan, born in Oakland in 1952 to Chinese immigrant parents, shot to literary fame in 1989 with “The Joy Luck Club,” an intergenerational tale inspired in part by the discovery that her mother had left three previous children behind in China. At the time, Tan — a former graduate student in linguistics at Berkeley — was working as a business writer, publishing short stories here and there.

The book, which became a 1993 Hollywood movie, sold nearly six million copies in the United States. It was followed by six other novels, including “The Kitchen God’s Wife” and “The Bonesetter’s Daughter.”

Tan, who lives in Marin County, said that early in her career, she was wary of being pigeonholed as a “hyphenated Chinese American writer,” discussed in terms of themes — immigration, mothers and daughters — rather than her art. Today, she said, she’s more accepting of her role as a boundary expander.

“The fact is, I was among the first of Asian American writers to be published and widely read, and also eventually lifted out of the ethnic literature pile and placed under the rubric of American literature,” she said.

The archive also includes photos, documents and other material relating to her family history, including some datebooks kept by her father, an engineer and Baptist minister who left China in the late 1940s.

“There are a lot of family photos documenting the Chinese American community of the 1940s and ’50s,” Kate Donovan, the Bancroft’s director, said. “To me, it’s an archive that feels very grounded in place.”

The archive was acquired partly through purchase, partly through donation, Donovan said. The purchase price, which is not being disclosed, was paid for with endowment funds, not state money.

Before the acquisition, Tan had intense conversations with Donovan about her concern that the archive would inadvertently expose the intimate thoughts and business of friends and colleagues. (“I wanted to be protective of other people’s privacy,” she said.)

Donovan said that there were no access restrictions on any material. But some could be added for future material as Tan, who held some journals and other material back, adds to the collection.

But at the same time, the collection, like Tan’s fiction, is enriched by private stories shaken loose from other sources.

The collection includes material recently uncovered by researchers for the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” including love letters Tan’s father had written to her mother while they were having an affair in China.

Tan had known that her mother, who was married to another man, had been tried for adultery, a charge which carried a possible prison sentence. But she had never seen the letters, which were preserved in the court files.

“That to me was thrilling,” she said. “It was him talking about how much he loves her.”

While researching her 2017 memoir, “Where the Past Begins,” Tan found old letters from American government officials, warning her parents that they had overstayed their student visas.

“I never knew until they died that they were under the specter of deportation,” she said. “If that had happened, we would have had to leave with them, and then I never would have become a, quote unquote, American writer.”

The archive also testifies to the more whimsical side of Tan’s career. There are sketches and notebooks from “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” her recent collection of essays and drawings about nature. (As a child, Tan had wanted to be an artist, but was discouraged by her parents.)

And then there is material relating to the Rock Bottom Remainders, a now-defunct literary-world supergroup featuring Stephen King, Matt Groening, Barbara Kingsolver and others.

Tan — who once described the band as “a contest of sorts to say how bad you were and then to blow people away with how semi-good you really were” — was a backup singer and “lead rhythm dominatrix.”

“She said, ‘I don’t’ supposed you’d want my whip later?’” Donovan said. “I said, ‘I would absolutely want your whip later.’”