A

TAN, Amy

Born 19 February 1952, Oakland, California

Daughter of Daisy (Tu Ching) and John Tan; married Lou de Mattei, 1974

Amy Tan's fiction, infused with the spirit of the fairytales she read avidly as a child, earned the author a fairytale success in real life. While still in her thirties, Tan published two novels to spectacular critical acclaim and commercial gain. She grew up in San Francisco, the child of Chinese immigrant parents who made it out of China just before Mao came to power. Drawing on the tensions and dislocations of this background, her novels depict a new aspect of an honored American literary experience, the immigrant adventure.

In the first, The Joy Luck Club (1989), and even more so in the second, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), Tan exhibits an extraordinarily satisfying storytelling gift: pacing, imagery, descriptive vividness, laced with suspense, humor, emotion, and psychological reality. Clearly a writer with a modern sensibility, she also includes acute social observations in the manner of the 19th-century novel, and the mix results in a masterful tapestry of individual and social anguish. Both novels describe mother-daughter relationships in which exotic elements of Chinese background clash against a contemporary feminist point of view. The mothers are oppressed, but not victims; the daughters strive to place themselves beyond the control of these strong mothers, claiming their own space and time, without losing the richness of their beginnings and their loyalties. The resolutions of the conflicts are emotionally satisfying, without a trace of romanticizing lies or sentimentality.

In "Two Kinds," a short story published in the February 1989 Atlantic Monthly, Tan describes the narrator's mother's background: "She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls." Tan's fiction tells and retells variations of this story, while engaging a modern audience with the further labyrinthine irony and pain of other-daughter love, complicated by dual, conflicting cultures and needs. Further, in The Kitchen God's Wife, the reader is swept into the detailed horrors of the havoc and devastation suffered by the Chinese people throughout the social upheavals of this century.

Tan's father was an engineer and Baptist minister. She knew her mother had been married before, but she learned only at twenty-six that she had half sisters from that marriage still living in China. Tan herself was a middle child and only daughter of her mother's second marriage. Both her father and her older brother died of brain tumors in the 1960s. Her remarkably resourceful mother took Tan and her younger brother from the "diseased" house to Montreux, Switzerland, where Tan finished her high school years. When the family returned to the Bay Area, Tan enrolled in Linfield College, a Baptist school in Oregon, but soon followed her boyfriend to San Jose State University (B.A., 1963), changing her major from premed to English. Her mother had harbored unrealistic hopes for her daughter. "Of course you will become a famous neurosurgeon…and, yes, a concert pianist on the side."

What Tan had always wanted to be was a writer, ever since she won a writing contest at age eight. Disappointing her mother, she married her boyfriend, Lou de Mattei, earned a master's degree in linguistics (San Jose State, 1974), worked at a variety of freelance technical writing jobs, and wrote her stories on the side. She and her mother became more and more estranged until a trip to China resolved Tan's ambiguities about her past heritage and her present sense of herself. For the first time, she felt Chinese as well as American. "When I began to write The Joy Luck Club, it was so much for my mother and myself," to explain the turbulent disagreements of their lives together. She has reported that the writing of her first novel was like "taking dictation from an invisible storyteller." One is reminded of Harriet Beecher Stowe's statement that God had dictated Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Tan's third published book is for children. The Moon Lady (1992) is "set in the China of long ago…a story of a little girl who discovered that the best wishes are those she can make come true herself."

Superficially, Amy Tan's next book, her third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), has much in common with its predecessors. The mother-daughter paradigm in those books is only slightly altered; Tan presents Olivia, a California-born, modern, practical, skeptical career woman and her much older half-sister Kwan, who is nurturing, Chinese-born, unassimilated, accented; Kwan also communicates with the "world of yin," a ghost world. Again, the two women are set in opposition; in Olivia's eyes Kwan is odd, intruding, unsophisticated—a nearly lifelong source of embarrassment and guilt.

The book's plot sends Olivia, her husband, Simon, and Kwan on a pilgrimage back to China. Nineteenth-century China is again explored, this time through Kwan's account of the lives of hers and Olivia's reincarnated selves. However, the heart of the story rests in the resolution of the two sisters' world views, which occurs in Olivia's acceptance of mystery and opening herself to a spiritual life—rather than the acceptance of anything specifically generational or Chinese.

Tan is undoubtedly the best known (and bestselling) Chinese-American author. The film adaption of The Joy Luck Club, for which she cowrote the script, was a box office hit. While her success may have opened doors for other young Asian-American writers, it is also true that every Asian-American writer published in the 1990s has had his or her work compared to Tan's. Though Tan enjoys her fame, she does not relish being pigeonholed as an ethnic writer; she'd like her work (and that of other hyphenated American writers) to be found not on multicultural reading lists but on ones simply for American literature. Regarding her own work, she points out that "the obsessions I write about are very American—marriage, love, the idea that you can create your own life."

Tan doesn't take herself too seriously as a literary star. She's appeared on Sesame Street, and her second children's book, The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), is the tale of a mischievous, independent-thinking kitten who changes history. Tan has also appeared as the leather-clad, whip-yielding lead singer of a band called the Rock Bottom Remainders with fellow band members (and fellow authors) Dave Barry and Stephen King.