Amy Tan

Born: February 19, 1952
Oakland, California
Asian American writer

Amy Tan is known for her lyrically written (using flowing, melodic language) tales of emotional conflict between Chinese American mothers and daughters separated by generational and cultural differences.

Early life

Amy Ruth Tan was born in Oakland, California, on February 19, 1952. Her father was a Chinese-born Baptist minister; her mother was the daughter of an upper-class family in Shanghai, China. Throughout much of her childhood, Tan struggled with her parent's desire to hold onto Chinese traditions and her own longings to become more Americanized (integrated with American ideals). Her parents wanted Tan to become a neurosurgeon (a doctor who performs surgery on the brain), while she wanted to become a fiction writer. 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 California, in the early 1970s rather than fulfill her mother's expectations of becoming a surgeon. After graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, she began a career as a technical writer (a person who writes about mechanical and computer issues). 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.

First novels

Despite Tan's achievements, her 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 rid herself of her workaholic tendencies through psychological counseling. But when her therapist fell asleep several times during her counseling sessions, Tan quit and decided to cut back her working hours by jumping 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.

Tan's 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 best-seller list for nine months. In 1993, Tan produced and coauthored the screenplay (script for a movie) for The Joy Luck Club which 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 year 2001 saw the release of yet another successful novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter.

Tan's The Joy Luck Club is made up of sixteen stories told by four Chinese immigrant women and their four American-born daughters, linked together by the narrative of June, whose mother had founded a women's social club in China. 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 half-sisters and inform them of the mother's death. When June expresses doubts about her ability to execute this assignment, the older women respond with disappointment. June then realizes 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 demonstrate their own concerns about the past and the present and about themselves and their relations.

Critical praise

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 uncertain 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.

Tan's The Joy Luck Club was praised as a thought-provoking, engaging novel. In Quill and Quire, Denise Chong wrote: "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." 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."

Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife deals with a young woman in California who 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 freewheeling 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 difficult 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 the United States 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 Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife, admiring its touching 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.

Tan continues to write. In 2001 her novel The Bonesetter's Daughter was released to much of the same praise as her earlier books.

For More Information

Bloom, Harold, ed. Amy Tan. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000.

Kramer, Barbara. Amy Tan, Author of The Joy Luck Club. Springfield, NJ: Enslow, 1996.

Shields, Charles J. Amy Tan. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002.

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. 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."

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. □

Tan, Amy (1952–), born in Oakland, educated at San Jose State and at Berkeley, achieved wide critical and popular success with her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), concerning the generation gap between the protagonist June, and three older Chinese women, members of the social group Joy Luck Club, which June's mother co‐founded. The real theme is the difficulty of love and communication between mothers and daughters. Her next, The Kitchen‐God's Wife (1991), also about a mother and daughter and the struggle to communicate well between old and new cultures and generations, was again both a critical and popular success. Recent novels include The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001). The Opposite of Fate (2003) is a collection of biographical essays.

Amy Tan 1952–, American novelist, b. Oakland, Calif. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she has taken for her theme the lives of Asian-Americans and the generational and cultural differences among them, concentrating on women's experiences. Tan's novels include The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), and Saving Fish from Drowning (2005). She has also written a children's book, The Moon Lady (1992), and essays, e.g., the autobiographical pieces collected in The Opposite of Fate (2003).