amytan

Amy Tan, also known as An-Mei Tan, was born in Oakland,
California, in 1952. She was the second of three children
and the only daughter born to John and Daisy Tan. During
her early years, Amy�s family moved from place to place,
finally settling down in Santa Clara, California. Her father, John Tan, was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who came to America to escape the turmoil of the Chinese Civil War. Amy�s parents were quiet people, who kept largely to themselves. Amy, however, eagerly sought to mix and merge with the American society around her. She learned to resent her Chinese appearance, heritage, and customs, for she felt they kept her from being in mainstream America. Throughout
her youth, she struggled to erase her Chinese identity. Life
grew even more difficult for her when her father and her
brother, Peter, died of brain tumors within a year of eachother when she was only fifteen years old. At this time Amy learned that in China, Daisy had divorced an abusive husband but lost custody of her three daughters. She was forced to leave them behind when she escaped on the last boat to leave Shanghai before the Communist takeover in 1949. Amy's situation is not unlike June's in The Joy Luck Club, her first novel. Her mother moved her and her remaining brother, John, to Switzerland. The move simply made Amy more rebellious. Amy and her mother were in constant conflict by this time.

Amy was always a good student. When she was eight years
old, she won an essay contest, which marked the beginning
of her desire to become a writer. Her mother, however,
wanted her to become a concert pianist or a neurosurgeon.
The independent Amy followed her own desires. After
graduating from high school in 1969, Amy enrolled in
Linfield College in Oregon to study medicine. This was a Baptist College that her mother picked out for her, and Amy was strongly urged to enter the pre-med course which she did enroll in. Later to her mother's dismay, Amy followed her boyfriend to San Jose City College and pursed the study of English linguistics. She later transferred to San Jose State University and received a Bachelor�s degree in English and a Masters degree in Linguistics. Amy went on complete a doctoral program in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. While still a student, in 1975 she married her boyfriend, Louis De Mattei, a tax attorney.

In 1976, Amy became a language-development consultant
for the Alameda County Association for Retarded Citizens.
Although she also spent time writing business publications,
she wanted to write fiction. In 1986, after her mother was
hospitalized following a heart attack, Amy wrote a short
story called �End Game�. The story deals with a child
prodigy and her strained relationship with her mother. Amy promised that if her mother regained her health, Amy would take her to visit China. Her mother became well and they departed for China. This experience was a revelating experience for Tan as she began to see her heritage and her often-difficult relationship with her mother in a new light. Amy wrote a few more short stories on the topic and was encouraged by an agent to make these into a book. Amy expanded the stories into a collection of tales and named it The Joy Luck Club. In May 1989, the book was published and was received with overwhelming response, including rave reviews; it was soon on the best-seller list. For the book, Amy was nominated for the National Book Award for fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award. She was honored with the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for fiction and the Commonwealth Club Gold Award.

After the resounding success of her first novel, in 1991 Amy
wrote The Kitchen God�s Wife, which is based on the life of
her mother in China. In 1992, Amy published The Moon Lady, a children�s book expanding on an episode from The Joy Luck Club. Amy next wrote China�s Boxer Rebellion; and The Hundred Secret Senses was published in 1998 and her latest offering, The Bonesetter's Daughter, released in 2001. Today she is acknowledged as one of the most successful writers in blending the old world and the new world into effective fiction.