Free The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan Page B

pounds, and although I had a chronic joint problem in my shoulders, my ownpain disappeared whenever I needed to lift her from bed to chair or chair to bed. It seemed to me she was fast becoming weightless and would soon disappear.
    Four years before all this, in 1995, my mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She was several months shy of her eightieth birthday. The plaques on her brain had likely started to accumulate years before. But we never would have recognized the signs. “Language difficulties,” “gets into arguments,” “poor judgment”—those were traits my mother had shown her entire life. How could we distinguish between a chronically difficult personality and a dementing one?
    Still, I began to look back on those times when I might have seen the clues. In 1991, when we were in Beijing, she had declined to go into one of the many temples of the Summer Palace. “Why I go see?” she said, and retreated to a cool stone bench in the shade. “Soon I just forget I been there anyway.”
    My husband and I laughed. Wasn’t that the truth? Who among us could remember the blur of tourist sites we had been to in our increasing span of years?
    I recalled another time, a couple of years later, when we had gathered at the home of family friends to watch a televised interview of my mother, which had been taped earlier that day. The subject was the opening of the movie The Joy Luck Club. The interviewer wondered whether watching the film had been difficult for her, given how much of it was true to her life: “Did you cry like everyone else in the audience?”
    My mother watched her televised self as she answered in that truthful, bare-all manner of hers: “Oh, no. My real life worser than this, so movie already much, much better.” Those were my mother’s words, but they were rendered into better Englishthrough subtitles. She was perplexed to see this. The son of our family friends called out to her, “Hey, Auntie Daisy, why are they translating what you’re saying? Don’t they know you’re speaking English?” He had the misfortune of saying this with a laughing face. My mother became livid. Forever after, she would speak about this young man, whom she had always treated like a dear nephew, with only the bitterest of criticisms about his character.
    I wondered: Was her grudge toward him a sign that she was already ill? Yet my mother had always borne grudges. She never forgot a wrong, even an accidental one, but especially not an arrogant one. When her brother and sister-in-law who were visiting from Beijing told her they needed to return to China sooner than expected because of an important government meeting, my mother tried to persuade them to stay longer in California. What was more important, she cajoled, the Communist Party or family? Her sister-in-law, who had enlisted with the party in the 1930s as a young revolutionary, gave the politically correct answer. My mother was shocked to hear it. She took this to mean that her sister-in-law considered her to be worth less than a speck of dirt under the toe of her proletariat shoes. Later that day, my mother recounted to me what her sister-in-law had said. She added to that a number of slights that her sister-in-law had apparently delivered in the past week, and complaints about how, the last time she had visited them in Beijing, her sister-in-law had cut off the sleeves of an expensive shirt my mother had given to her brother, so it would be cooler. On and on my mother went, until her stream of injustices eventually did the long march through the fifty-five years of a formerly harmonious relationship.

    If we, her children, did anything to suggest we were not one hundred percent in her camp, if we tired of listening and suggested with weariness—or rather, genuine concern—that she try to “calm down for your own sake,” she would become even more furious. “Not my sake,” she’d retort, “ your sake.” Her face stiffened, her jaw