Netflix Celebrates AAPI Month With Their Documentary On Asian-American Novelist Amy Tan

By Esther Lombardi

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Amy Tan: An Unintended Memoir just launched on Netflix as part of their Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Month coverage. It first appeared on PBS as part of the American Masters series, but as Amy Tan says, “This doc has legs.” I love this intimate portrait of Tan. It offers a sneak peek into the life and misadventures of our favorite bestselling author. In a very real sense, she opened up and let all the stories pour out, intermingled with animation, photos, interviews, and so much more.

I first “met” Amy Tan through Joy Luck Club and Warrior Woman. I read the fiction and heard the stories about Tan from Professor Mackey in her literature and fiction-writing classes. Then, I got the chance to hear Tan speak to a packed-gym crowd when she came to my college campus to speak and read from her latest novel. (And, yes, I was among the throng who stood in the long, winding line to get her autograph.)

I think a lot of us have stories about Tan. She has inspired so many through her life and work.

And Amy Tan said to my aunt, no it’s okay let the child be. After watching her story, I am so thankful for that moment. That Amy Tan saw in me a spirit worth encouraging. And that I became a writer after all. I’m so inspired by the audacity of Amy Tan and her life’s influence.

— 🌉 Jari 🅿️⭕️EⓂ️💤Bradley 🌉 (@jab_poet) May 21, 2021

This new documentary is about the woman that I’ve mostly imagined from her books, her spoken words, and from what I’ve read of her life. It’s a complex portrait, but that’s what fed into the vivid portraits that she has brought to life. She listened. She let the stories wash over her, and she captured the family history, culture, and stories.

The writing was more than just a discovery of family, though. As she says in the documentary: “It was the notion that you could write and find out what you really believed and felt. All these things that had been submerged; they just came out. And it was through fiction because fiction gave you a place of safety.”

Really enjoying documentary about Amy Tan on Netflix. Covers her life but also digs into issues about intergenerational trauma, mental health and Chinese American identity.

— J. Lam (@zengarden17) May 21, 2021

When she was in her 30s, she knew she had to write and that she would write, but she didn’t know that she would be able to make a living at it. Even after the astronomical success of The Joy Luck Club, she still thought it would be a short-lived success, that she’d be back to her business writing, with bringing her stories to life on the side.

Kevin Kwan, author of bestselling Crazy Rich Asians, points to the fact that Tan was able to cross over into becoming a mainstream mass-market success. She paved the way for other writers of color, but she also was able to paint portraits of characters that are somehow universal. It’s that quality that makes Isabel Allende say, “Wow, they are just like me…and that makes it so close, so personal, so touching.”

Tan says, “I didn’t seek to be a politician. I didn’t seek to be a representative of a whole community of people. I just hope to write some good stories.” Despite the criticism and expectations, she could not give in to the demands for propaganda. She had to be true to herself, tell the stories that were important to her, but also paint a tapestry out of that “legacy of trauma and tragedy, suicide, rape, children left behind in China.”

“I know my story and my life. But to have it reflected back in a story put together by somebody else was very moving.” says bestselling author Amy Tan, who is the subject of a new documentary, ‘Unintended Memoir’. https://t.co/n9xhjZ70NC

— MAKERS (@MAKERSwomen) May 19, 2021

Tan cried tears of fear when her novel was published. She had not expected to succeed, and the expectations from everyone else were so much, too much. She had to come to terms with all of it. Ultimately, she once wrote, “What is the past but what we choose to remember. They can choose not to hide it, to take what’s broken, to feel the pain and know that it will heal.”

Tan’s musings take us on a journey through memory, remembering, and forgetting. It’s about coming to terms with the past and finding joy. In Where the Past Begins, she writes, “My childhood, with its topsy-turvy emotions, has, in fact, been a reason to write…. And each story we are untangling a knot in a huge, matted mess. The work of undoing them one at a time is the most gratifying part of writing, but the mess will always be there.”

Tan is at a point in her life and her writing where she wants to enjoy the wonderment of it all, without obligation, demand, or expectation. She still surveys the “moments of the past that led to this one,” in a collusion of memory and imagination that spill out like a weightless resonance that plays upon us like a heartsick melody of words.