Biography of Amy Tan

Amy Tan (born 1952) is known for her lyrically written tales of emotional conflict between Chinese-American mothers and daughters separated by generational and cultural differences. Together with her distinctive writing style and rich imagery, Tan's treatment of such themes as loss and reconciliation, hope and failure, friendship and familial conflict, and the healing power of storytelling have brought her popular success and critical attention.

Tan was born in Oakland, California. Her father was a Chinese-born Baptist minister; her mother was the daughter of an upper-class family in Shanghai. While still in her teens, Tan experienced the loss of both her father and her sixteen-year-old brother to brain tumors and learned that two sisters from her mother's first marriage in China were still alive (one of several autobiographical elements she would later incorporate into her fiction). Tan majored in English at San Jose State in the early 1970s rather than fulfill her mother's expectations of becoming a neurosurgeon, and after graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, she began a career as a technical writer. After meeting her new-found sisters in China in 1987, Tan was, she has said, "finally able to say, `I'm both Chinese and American.' ... Suddenly some piece fit in the right place and something became whole." As a release from the demands of her technical writing career, she turned to fiction writing, having gained inspiration from her reading of Louise Erdrich's novel of Native American family life, Love Medicine. Tan's first novel, The Joy Luck Club, received the Commonwealth Club gold award for fiction and the American Library Association's best book for young adults award in 1989 and stayed on the New York Times's bestseller list for nine months. In 1993, with Tan serving as a producer and coauthor of the screenplay, The Joy Luck Club was made into a critically acclaimed film. It was adapted for the stage in a production directed by Tisa Chang for Pan Asian Repertory in 1999.Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, was published in 1991 followed by the children's books The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994).

The Joy Luck Club comprises sixteen stories told by four Chinese immigrant women and their four American-born daughters, linked together by the narrative of Jing-mei Woo, whose mother had founded a women's social club in China to sustain its members' spirits during the communist revolution. In the novel, the club becomes a metaphor for the reconciliation of the conflict between maternal expectation and tradition, and filial individuality and cultural independence. In The Kitchen God's Wife, Tan again focused on the mother-daughter relationship in the context of the transition from the suffering and traditions of the Chinese past to the freedom and anxiety of the Chinese-American present. In particular, Tan explored themes of secrecy and misunderstanding, physical abuse and illness, and female friendship and acceptance in the story of the reconciliation of a mother and daughter alienated from each other by the personal truths they conceal from each other. Written for children, The Moon Lady developed a story first told in The Joy Luck Club: a young girl's experience of danger, magic, and wish fulfillment at a celebration of the Moon Festival in traditional China.

Some reviewers of The Joy Luck Club argued that Tan's thematic development was unsuccessful and resulted in strained, "over-significant" scenes, while others found her use of multiple narrative voices to be "limiting" and "over-schematic." However, critical reception of the novel was generally favorable. Carolyn See, for example, described Tan as a "magician of language" while Michael Dorris called Tan a "writer of dazzling talent." Tan solidified her critical reputation with The Kitchen God's Wife. Reviewers found it superior in structure and execution to The Joy Luck Club and applauded Tan's decision to narrow the scope of the narrative to a single mother-daughter relationship. Critics generally commended Tan's storytelling ability and characters development. Josephine Humphreys wrote that The Kitchen God's Wife proved "something profound ... about the usefulness of storytelling as a way of ... evaluating human experience."

Amy Tan's novels, The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, were enthusiastically received by critics as well as the book-buying public. Focusing on the lives of Chinese-American women, Tan's books introduce characters who are ambivalent, as she once was, about their Chinese background. Tan remarked in a Bestsellers interview that though she once tried to distance herself from her ethnicity, writing The Joy Luck Club helped her discover "how very Chinese I was. And how much had stayed with me that I had tried to deny." Upon The Joy Luck Club's release, Tan quickly became known as a gifted storyteller, a reputation she upheld with the publication of The Kitchen God's Wife. Impressed with The Joy Luck Club,Detroit News contributor Michael Dorris proclaimed Tan "a writer of dazzling talent."

Despite her achievements, Tan's literary career was not planned; in fact, she first began writing fiction as a form of therapy. Considered a workaholic by her friends, Tan had been working ninety hours per week as a freelance technical writer. She became dissatisfied with her work life, however, and hoped to eradicate her workaholic tendencies through psychological counseling. But when her therapist fell asleep several times during her counseling sessions, Tan quit and decided to curb her working hours by delving into jazz piano lessons and writing fiction instead. Tan's first literary efforts were stories, one of which secured her a position in the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, a fiction writers' workshop. Tan's hobby soon developed into a new career when her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, was published in 1989.

Set in the late 1980s, The Joy Luck Club details the generational and cultural differences between a young woman, June, and her late Chinese mother's three Chinese friends. June's mother and the three older women had formed the Joy Luck Club, a social group, in San Francisco in 1949. Nearly forty years later, June's mother has died. The surviving members, the "aunties," recruit June to replace her mother, then send her to China to meet her step-sisters and inform them of the mother's death. When June expresses reservations about her ability to execute this assignment, the older women respond with disappointment. June then realizes that the women rightly suspect that she, and their own daughters, know little of the women's lives and the strength and hope they wished to give the next generation. Throughout the novel, the various mothers and daughters attempt to articulate their own concerns about the past and the present and about themselves and their relations.

The Joy Luck Club was praised as a thought-provoking, engaging novel. In Quill and Quire, Denise Chong assessed: "These moving and powerful stories share the irony, pain, and sorrow of the imperfect ways in which mothers and daughters love each other. Tan's vision is courageous and insightful." In her review for the Toronto Globe and Mail, Nancy Wigston declared that Tan's literary debut "is that rare find, a first novel that you keep thinking about, keep telling your friends about long after you've finished reading it." Time reviewer John Skow found the work "bright, sharp-flavored," adding that it "rings clearly, like a fine porcelain bowl." Some critics were particularly impressed with Tan's ear for authentic dialogue. Carolyn See, for instance, wrote in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that Tan ranks among the "magicians of language." Dorris placed the book within the realm of true literature, which "is writing that makes a difference, that alters the way we understand the world and ourselves, that transcends topicality, and by those criteria, The Joy Luck Club is the real thing."

Tan followed The Joy Luck Club with The Kitchen God's Wife, in which a young woman in California realizes a greater understanding of her mother's Chinese background. A generation gap exists between the two heroines: Mother Winnie has only awkwardly adapted to the relatively free-wheeling ways of American, particularly Californian, life; daughter Pearl, on the other hand, is more comfortable in a world of sports and fast food than she is when listening, at least initially, to her mother's recollections of her own arduous life in China. As Winnie recounts the secrets of her past, including her mother's mysterious disappearance, her marriage to a psychotic and brutal man, the deaths of her first three children, and her journey to America in 1949, Pearl is able to view her mother in a new light and gathers the courage to reveal a secret of her own.

Critics hailed The Kitchen God's Wife, admiring its poignancy and bittersweet humor. Sabine Durrant, writing in the London Times, called the book "gripping" and "enchanting," and Charles Foran, in his review for the Toronto Globe and Mail, proclaimed Tan's work "a fine novel" of "exuberant storytelling and rich drama." In a Washington Post Book World review, Wendy Law-Yone asserted that Tan exceeded the expectations raised by her first book, declaring that "The Kitchen God's Wife is bigger, bolder and, I have to say, better" than The Joy Luck Club. Referring to The Kitchen God's Wife in a Time review, Pico Iyer affirmed, "Tan has transcended herself again."

In her third novel, Tan shifted her focus from the mother-daughter bond to the relationship between sisters. The main characters in The Hundred Secret Senses are half- sisters Olivia and Kwan. Olivia is the daughter of an American mother and a Chinese father who died before her fourth birthday. In adulthood, she is a pragmatic, somewhat priggish yuppie. Kwan, her Chinese half-sister, arrives in her life when she is six. Twelve years older than Olivia, clumsy, and barely able to speak English, Kwan is an immediate source of resentment and embarrassment to Olivia. Kwan's belief that she can speak with spirits is anther source of humiliation, one that leads her stepfather to commit her for electroshock therapy. Through the years, Olivia treats Kwan rudely and dismissively, yet her older sister remains devoted to her and is determined to awaken Olivia to the reality of the spirit world. To this end, the two travel to China, where Kwan believes they lived another life together in an earlier century.

Tan's most recent novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), tells the stories of Ruth, a middle-aged woman in contemporary San Francisco, and her mother LuLing. Luling was raised in 1930s China by a renowned bonesetter's beautiful and willful daughter, who was ultimately destroyed by the conventions of pre-war Chinese society.

Associated Works

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Amy Tan (1952-)
• At the time of Tan's birth:
• Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the U.S.
• A polio epidemic struck more than 50,000 Americans, killing 3,300
• Kurt Vonnegut published Player Piano
• Dave Brubeck and his San Francisco quartet pioneered "modern" or "progressive" jazz
• The times:
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• 1960-present: Postmodernist period in American literature
• 1990-1991: Gulf War
• Tan's contemporaries:
• Rush Limbaugh (1951-) American political commentator
• Sally Ride (1951-) American astronaut
• Rita Dove (1952-) American writer
• Tommy Hilfiger (1952-) American designer
• bell hooks (1952-) American author, critic, activist
• Liam Neeson (1952-) Irish actor
• Selected world events:
• 1955: Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg won acclaim with "Howl"
• 1961: Alan Shepard made the first manned space expedition
• 1963: President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas
• 1966: Truman Capote published In Cold Blood
• 1968: New York's Stonewall Inn riot launched the gay rights movement
• 1976: Legionnaire's Disease killed 29 members of the American Legion at a Philadelphia hotel
• 1986: U.S. space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all 7 astronauts
• 1995: A shopping mall collapsed in Seoul, Korea, killing hundreds

Further Reading

• Bestsellers 89, issue 3, Gale, 1989, pp. 69-71.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 59, 1990.
• Canadian Literature, summer, 1992, p. 196.
• Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1989; March 17, 1991.
• Chicago Tribune--Books, March 12, 1989, pp. 1, 11.
• Critique, no. 3, 1993.
• Detroit News, March 26, 1989, p. 2D.
• New York Times, April 1, 1996, p. A10.