Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/amy-tan-san-francisco-opera-take-novel-from-page-to-stage Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Spencer Michels reports on how best-selling author Amy Tan's darkest family secrets from China became the focal points for a world-premiere opera in San Francisco. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. AMY TAN, Author: The story starts off quite simply. "These are the things I know are true. My name is LuLing Liu Young." SPENCER MICHELS, NewsHour Correspondent: Like many of Amy Tan's best-selling novels, "The Bonesetter's Daughter" is a story about mothers and daughters. But this, Tan's most personal story, is infused with autobiographical tellings of her family's darkest secrets from China.Now those secrets are central to the San Francisco Opera's world premier production based on the novel. The opera, like the novel, centers on Tan's grandmother, whose story and true identity became known to Tan only a few years ago, as her own mother was dying of Alzheimer's. AMY TAN: She was raped by a man who was well-to-do, and she had nowhere else to go. She had lost face. And she had to join this man's household, because she was now pregnant with this man's son. And she found the only way she could gain her power was to kill herself. SPENCER MICHELS: Tan, whose earlier acclaimed novel "The Joy Luck Club" became a movie, has been intricately involved in the opera, "The Bonesetter's Daughter." She not only wrote the libretto, but she has been coaching some of the performers. AMY TAN: You don't know why, you still feel guilty, you did it to not feel guilty, and you still do.