Editor’s note: Travel writer Michael Shapiro is in Corte Madera, California for the annual Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference. He’s on the conference faculty and is writing about the gathering for World Hum.
I first met Amy Tan last September, at a benefit for New Orleans’ residents who were suffering from the ravages of Katrina. Tan and her husband arrived with a couple of Yorkies, each well-behaved dog in its own little basket. She was one of two dozen San Francisco Bay Area writers last year who turned up on a moment’s notice to read at Book Passage.

On Thursday, more than 140 “students” who signed up for the four-day seminar crammed the store’s event room to hear Tan and Tim Cahill discuss “cross-cultural currents.” Before the evening concluded Tan revealed a fascinating tidbit about the “Note to the Reader” in her most recent book, Saving Fish from Drowning.

The book follows a group of well meaning but loutish tourists through Myanmar and is narrated by a “dead, semi-omniscient narrator.” This opens up all sorts of intriguing possibilities for unfolding the story, but Cahill advised the aspiring writers in the audience to think twice about trying to emulate Tan.

“If this is your first book,” he warned, “the dead, semi-omniscient narrator is probably not a good idea.”

That was a successful laugh line, and the conversation then turned serious as Cahill and Tan discussed how to help people understand one another in an ever more polarized world. Stark facts and figures, they said, rarely change anyone’s mind.

“But if you can tell a good story about someone who lost 15 relatives in Lebanon,” Cahill said, “you might make someone feel a bit different.” Cahill has a story in the current issue (August) of National Geographic Adventure titled “Along the Devil’s Highway” about illegal immigrants crossing Arizona’s border with Mexico. He did some radio interviews about the piece and said that, whatever side the interviewer was on, he or she had already made up his or her mind before the conversation. “They all knew precisely what we should do,” Cahill said, “but they were never there.”

Tan said stories are the way into the heart: “A story has a more visceral impact on the reader than a ‘piece’ or an ‘article.’” Tan has just received her first travel assignment: to write a story for National Geographic about a Dong tribal village in China. A first-ever magazine assignment and it’s from the Yellow Book. Not a bad way to start a travel writing career.

Tan, who is of Chinese ancestry but grew up in the U.S., started writing her first book, “The Joy Luck Club,” before she visited China. While she was working on that book her mother became gravely ill. Amy promised her that if she recovered she’d take her to China. Mom rallied and Tan said her journey to her homeland, done for karma points, turned out to be essential to the success of “The Joy Luck Club.” That trip helped Tan give her book a sense of place and make the landscape and character more genuine. “The goal of the writer is to make everything believable,” she said.

Tan said she did not feel more Chinese in China, but more American. “It’s a wonderful discovery of who you are when you’re dislocated,” she said. Like many fiction writers, Tan said her goal is to convey what’s true about places and universal human experience. But fiction gives her the freedom to explore our notions of truth in an age where it’s not easy to sort out what’s genuine.

To that end, she said readers should carefully consider whether her “Note to the Reader,” in which she says she got the whole story from a medium, is true. “People assume that if it says ‘Note to the Reader’ it’s true,” Tan said. “But do you really believe I got the whole story from a ghost?”

Michael Shapiro wrote a cover story entitled “Land Beyond Time” about Wales for the May-June issue of National Geographic Traveler. He’s also written recent stories for Islands about Kauai and Chiefs Island in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. His work also appears in the New York Times, Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle. Shapiro’s book, A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration, is a collection of 18 interviews with the world’s leading travel writers, conducted where they live.

Photo: Tim Cahill and Amy Tan sign books at Book Passage. (Michael Shapiro)

Previously:
* Talking Travel Writing with Tim Cahill
* Welcome Guest Blogger Michael Shapiro