Amy Tan's Faith vs. Fate Dichotomy

Some years ago, a friend who knew I was into writing recommended that I read Amy Tan's memoir, The Opposite of Fate. This year, I finally did in hopes of appeasing my frustrations in writing fiction. I loved how she wrote the memoir that I decided to read The Joy Luck Club, her first book. I liked it, too, that it convinced me to learn chess. I learned that fiction writing did not necessarily mean use of only pure imagination (I suck at that) and one can start as old as I am and still be good at it (Amy Tan began even older!).

But there was one thing about both writings that struck me, and not in the good way: her faith vs. fate dichotomy.

There is this passage in The Joy Luck Club:

My mother believed in God's will for many years. It was as if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said "fate," because she couldn't pronounce the "th" sound in "faith."

And later, I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.

The second paragraph felt so, so wrong. (Yes, I mean 'felt.' I only started thinking about it when I decided to figure out why it felt wrong.) She seems to depict fate and faith as contrary extremes, in which faith has something to do with a perception of control. In her memoir, she elaborates: 

And in my family, there were two pillars of beliefs: Christian faith on my father's side, Chinese fate on my mother's. Picture these two ideologies as you might the goalposts of a soccer field, faith at one end, fate at the other, and me running between them trying to duck whatever dangerous missile had been launched in the air.

Still, this did not make sense. True, Christian faith and Chinese fate do not belong together, but are they really opposite ends of the same spectrum? Perhaps, this was just how Amy felt, being caught in the middle of contrary beliefs. But I don't think the contrast between these two has anything to do with being in control of one's own life, as she seems to depict in the other parts of her writings, because precisely this lack of control of one's own life is entailed by both faith and fate.

Fate, she contrasts with chance:

This was not chance that they met twice, my mother would tell me whenever she recounted this story. It was fate.

-The Opposite of Fate

Hence, the belief in fate consists of believing in the necessary unfolding of events, wherein one event, being intricately connected with all others, cannot be avoided. This thing happened because these other things were going to happen, and so on and so forth. 

Faith, on the other hand, she talks about this way:

My father put his life in God's hands, and he encouraged us, his children, to believe that if we had absolute faith, God would take care of the rest. Miracles would happen. . .

In one of his last entries, written at the end of May 1967, he stated that he still firmly believed that God would grant him a miracle and save his sixteen-year-old son from dying of a brain tumor. He had absolute faith. By my father's own handwritten definition: "Faith is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we still cannot see it ahead of us." 

-The Opposite of Faith 

Now, there seems to be two contrary notions in Amy's concept of faith. The first comes from the first passage I quoted, 1) belief in God's will, and 2) belief that something we want is going to happen, which was written by her father. These two can be reconciled if what we want to happen is God's will (meaning we submit to God's will), or if God's will is what we want to happen (meaning God's purpose is to grant our wishes).

Her mother subscribed to the latter reconciliation, as it fit her Chinese belief in things one must do to avoid disaster or attract good fortune. She believed in a God who had no will of his own, one who simply grants wishes. On the other hand, her father, although a minister, meant by "something we want," precisely what he wrote, "something we want," presuming also the second reconciliation. Unfortunately, at the heart of true Christianity is the first reconciliation, and there was absolutely no indication that this ever crossed anyone's mind. This, I believe, is the source of error and my discomfort.

The faith in Amy's mind did have an illusion of control. Her mother believed that she could control God, hence control what is to happen, by performing rituals, and offering things like in one of the stories in The Joy Luck Club. Her father believed that by fervently believing that God can, God will.
Her parent's notions are not different at all. One tries to control God's will by works, while the other by faith. Sadly, it doesn't work that way and Amy realizes that--to some degree, at least.

These days I realize that faith and fate have similar effects on the believer. They suggest that a higher power knows the next move and that we are at the mercy of that force. They differ, among other things, in how you try to cull beneficence and what you do to avoid disaster.

-The Opposite of Faith

Faith and fate are not at all about control, rather they are both about being at the mercy of some higher power. Therefore, rather than opposite ends of a single spectrum, I believe they are more rightly imagined to be the same end of two parallel pillars.