The arts are important on several levels.

People standing together, looking at art or reading together art or listening to same music.

They share something communally that is often emotional.

This is our dialog.

We didn't have that.

You know, the richness of our lives would not be there.

The things that feed our minds in our hearts and that the generations of of the ideas and values that we're passing on, that's all within the arts.

And you just feel that if everyone felt that that communally in that way, we would have humanity that works for a kinder purpose.

I'm Amy Tan, and this is how art changed me as a kid.

I always loved to draw.

Part of that was my ability to go into a private place and be by myself and not having anybody tell me what to do.

Nobody scolding me.

My parents were immigrants who came to the States in 1947 and 49, and they were very pragmatic people who had lost their identities.

And when you come to this country, you have to work hard and keep your focus on survival and then making your life better for your kids.

So, no, there was no emphasis on the arts.

My parents knew I loved to draw, but they warned me that I could never make a living out of doing anything.

That was fun.

Guess what?

Writing is an act of making sense of the world as I see it and as I feel it.

And I make up stories.

Because in real life, you can't contain all the variables as they occurred at the time.

So I bring in all these pieces and the emotions, and I dig and dig and dig and dig.

And eventually I come up with one truth.

And it's about the way things felt and why that was true.

People think fiction is lies.

You just contrive all kinds of things that are not true.

Fiction is always about finding personal truth.

That is what it is for me.

And so it's my truth.

It's not everybody else's is not the reader's truth.

But amazingly, when you're more specific about your personal truth, a lot of people take that as their personal truth because we're all finding meaning.

We want to find that.

We want to find value, we want to find purpose.

We want to make sense of the things that were traumatic in our lives, the failures, the tragedies, the, you know, the romances that didn't happen.

All of that.

And I found I could do that in a story.

I want to make that very clear that fiction is not to do something contrived to educate people and make people think better about whatever it is in the world that needs to be delved into more.

But at the same time, that's what it does.

That's what art does.

It's like a subterfuge for getting to people in a way, because it approaches that through the spirit of the person, through the individuality of what you're feeling and what you're sensing is important.

The perspective that is fresh and new and you have to have it come from within you.

The privilege of it is you don't.

You can't expect it.

You don't deserve it.

But then somehow the magic happens and people like it.

This is a book that has a photo of my grandmother on it.

My mother's mother.

It's Shanghai 1910, and you can see she has really elaborate clothing on.

And I discovered later on this was the clothing, the costume of a courtesan, whatever it was, she had a terrible life where she was.

She fell in love with a young man who was a scholar.

They married against her parent's wishes, eventually married him, and then he died during the pandemic.

She remarried and there was a story in which she might have been raped and then impregnated, forced to become a fourth wife, the concubine to a very wealthy man.

And she was so just in such despair over the fact that she had no choice in her life but to stay in this station where she was disrespected, that there was a stain on her back.

As my mother used to say, that she could never wash off, that she opted to kill herself on the New Year, and it was an act of revenge.

Although there is some thought she may have only meant to scare him because my mother said she would never leave me.

That's the child's understanding and it is so poignant to me that she would have believed that her mother would have stayed for her and endured whatever torment just to be with her daughter.

And I think that could have been the truth as well.

I think about her every time I write a book.

Her picture is in front of me on my desk.

She's the woman who had no choice.

She's the woman who had circumstances in society that placed barriers around her, placed her in a cage.

And I think I am so lucky because I have my choices.

I have a job.

I have the ability to leave a situation whenever I want.

I have all these things.

She didn't have, and I do that with her in mind.

In a way, I become her when I'm writing.

The impulse that she had to destroy herself is the impulse I have to create.

In 2016, I started to draw, which was something that I always wanted to do as a kid.

And the reason why I did it is that I was pushed there by despair.

There was a lot of racism going on and I felt it for the first time and heaps felt violent.

And so I started to go into nature and to draw do nature journaling and soon found that I was consumed with watching the behavior of birds and writing down in a private journal.

My thoughts about what I was seeing and my guesses.

And then I started to draw these birds that would allow me to meditate about the birds life and its survival in the world.

Everything about what a bird does is about survival.

And I was able to look at that as a template almost in terms of what was happening in the world and our survival.

They were always meant to be private, meaning I could just write whatever I wanted in the journal, I could ask those ethical questions, I could reflect on what I felt.

And my editor was the one who came and said, I think we should publish this because I didn't have a novel at the time.

Here again, when we think about art and what appeals to people, even with something done for very private specific reasons, there are people out there who feel exactly the same, and the comments they hear most often is that they had the same despair they realized in reading this book.

They too could go out into nature.

They could also start drawing.

They could do something that would bring back joy in their lives, because joy in itself is meaningful.

But it's also a protest against anything that is making you despair.

Happiness is a protest.