Last night I made my last road trip for this present series to hear a writer I think might have something to say to me. Amy Tan, the acclaimed author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen-God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, and, most recently, The Bonesetter's Daughter, appeared at Messiah College, about 25 miles from where I live.

Unlike the appearances by Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky and Galway Kinnell, this had been heavily promoted in the local newspaper, which was a sponsor. And, also unlike the others, you had to pay to get in, $15 for a seat on the floor, $12.50 for a balcony perch. I chose the balcony because I knew that the auditorium is actually a basketball court where they place chairs for events like this. Thus all the seats are on the same plane. The balcony seats are on risers, like bleacher seats with padded backs.

Because of the heavy promotion (and also because of Tan's popularity), turnout was huge. There were probably more than a thousand people there. The program gave the "rules of the game." (That's a little joke. Tan's first published story, which she wrote at the age of 33  in a workshop not unlike the ones I attend, was called "Rules of the Game." It became part of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club.) Ms. Tan would speak, and then take questions for fifteen minutes. To ask a question one should raise one's hand and wait for an attendant to come with a microphone. At the conclusion of the event, Ms. Tan would sign books. Patrons were limited to a total of two books and were advised that only a signature would be offered as there was no time for personalization.

She talked a lot about her mother, especially her mother's final days and the process of assembling her obituary. Daisy Tan's life had many complications, including an early marriage to a "very bad man" in China and her having to leave her first three daughters there when she emigrated to the United States. (Amy and her two brothers are the children of a second marriage.) Amy's father, a Chinese-born engineer and Baptist minister, and her teenage brother both died of brain tumors when Amy was 16. Like Maxine Hong-Kingston, another Chinese-American writer, Amy Tan experienced an upbringing marked by a blend of Chinese and American culture as well as Christian teaching mixed with traditional Chinese spirituality. She rebelled against what she saw as her mother's expectation to control her daughter's choices and the two were for a time estranged.

Amy Tan's message was that autobiography informs fiction work, but fiction is not merely what happened to you with the names changed. I liked hearing this, because it's what I believe is driving my own work. She read some excerpts and then related the threads from her own experience or what she had heard was the experience of others that contributed to the fictional vision.

In particular, she told the would-be authors among the audience to write what is important to them, that self-discovery, or "figuring it out," is the point of all writing. Her books take longer to write as she gets older (The Bonesetter's Daughter took five years) because she has more questions now, not fewer.

I have not read much Amy Tan. "Rules of the Game" was in an anthology I taught from, and it is in the same vein as Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Maxine Hong-Kingston's The Woman Warrior. That is, it concerns the conflicts that beset any mother-daughter pair, but these are exacerbated by the daughters' need to identify more fully with American culture than with their mothers' cultures.

A dramatic moment came near the end of the question period. Messiah College is affiliated with the Church of the Brethren, an offshoot of the Mennonite tradition, and it professes an evangelical spirit that is Bible-based. The motto of the college is "Christ Preeminent."

A young man rose and said that he was in a class that had recently concluded a study of some of Tan's works. He asked her to make a statement expressing her personal profession as a born-again Christian who accepts Jesus Christ as her personal savior. (Such a statement is commonplace among members of this and similar traditions.)

She answered that although she had been brought up as a Baptist, she could not make a statement so constructed. Her spirituality, she said, proceeds from the Christianity she learned as a child but also from her Chinese roots as well, and that to call herself "born again" in the way that phrase is usually understood would be misleading. She finds her spiritual expression, she said, in the act of writing.

Tan has been criticized for writing the same book four times. I can't comment on that, since I haven't read enough of her work to know, and also because I have yet to write the same book once! But being at her presentation gave me one more example of someone who continues trying to "figure it out," no matter where that process leads.