My mother's secrets: in an excerpt from her new book, The Opposite of Fate, Amy Tan reflects on her embattled relationship with her mom--and how time and loss finally drew them closer.(book bonus)

From: Good Housekeeping | Date: April 1, 2004| Author: | Copyright information

When I was in 20s, at a time when my mother and I were not getting along that well, she asked me, in her Shanghai-inflected English, "If I die, what you remember?" Here we go, I thought, the old Chinese-torture routine. I answered something like: "Come on, you're not going to die."

She persisted, "What you remember?"

I struggled to come up with an answer. "You know, all kinds of things. Like, well, you know, you're my mother."

And then my mother said, in a voice both sad and angry: "I think you know little percent of me."

Those words came back to me a few years ...

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