AUTHOR AMY TAN is no stranger to misfortune. When she was 14 years old, her father and brother died of brain tumours. A decade later, her best friend was tortured and murdered, forcing Tan to abandon her doctoral studies at the prestigious University of California in Berkeley. Four years ago, her mother died of Alzheimer's disease, and two weeks later Tan's literary agent, who helped her write a series of phenomenal bestsellers, succumbed to breast cancer.
As misfortunes go, Tan thought she had seen them all. Until the night she saw a naked man standing next to her bed.
It was November 2001 and Tan had awoken from a sound sleep to find a nude man standing in the bedroom doorway of her home in San Francisco. Tan figured it was her husband, Lou - but the man was silent. 'So I thought, oh no, someone has just died and Lou's come to tell me,' recalls Tan.
As the man walked over to her bed, Tan called out her husband's name but got no answer. Then as she reached out to touch the man, 'my hand went right through him', says Tan. All she could think was, 'Lou has died and turned into a ghost'.
Tan, 51, attributed the phantom visitor to extreme fatigue or an overactive dream life. So she and her husband, who had been watching television in the living room, dismissed the matter - until other visions came calling. These included two little girls skipping side by side, a fat poodle dangling from the ceiling, something dead and decaying, plus plenty of aliens and spiders. 'I knew I was hallucinating,' says Tan. 'I just didn't know why.'
Tan was suffering from late-stage Lyme disease, an insidious bacterial illness caused by a deer tick, which has plagued her since 1999. The disease brought on a slew of ailments, including chronic depression, paranoia, agoraphobia, heart palpitations, insomnia, stiff joints and rashes. Yet the cause had escaped detection for four years even though Tan spent at least US$60,000 on doctors, surgery, cat scans and sleep studies. Her brain was so badly affected that she could no longer write.
For someone who has been a fixture on The New York Times bestseller list since 1989 and whose books have been translated into dozens of languages from Estonian to Tagalog, there could have hardly been a more terrible fate.