Amy Tan

Amy Tan’s literary works have incorporated the universal themes of love and family relationships, making her a popular writer. Although works of fiction, Tan’s stories are loosely based on events from her life and offer realistic portrayals of the Chinese American, as well as the universal human, experience. Tan has also published popular works of nonfiction, including a memoir.

Full name: Amy Ruth Tan

Birth name: An-Mei Ruth Tan

Early Life

Amy Ruth Tan was born February 19, 1952, in Oakland, California. Her father, John Yuehhan Tan, was an electrical engineer in Beijing but left China in 1947 to escape the Chinese Civil War. After arriving in the United States, he became a Baptist minister. Tan’s mother, Du “Daisy” Ching, divorced an abusive husband to whom she was married for twelve years in China, and lost custody of their three daughters. After Ching left China in 1949, she married John Tan in the United States. The family settled in Oakland, where they had three children: Peter, born in 1950, Amy, born in 1952, and John, born in 1954.

When Tan was fifteen years old, both her older brother and her father, diagnosed with brain tumors, began undergoing chemotherapy. They died within eight months of each other in 1967 and 1968. Following their deaths, Tan’s mother took her and her brother John to Europe. The family traveled through the Netherlands and Germany before finally settling in Montreaux, Switzerland. In Switzerland, Tan attended the Institut Monte Rosa Internationale, an American school with children from different cultures. During this time, Tan’s mother told her and her brother about her abusive first marriage and that they had three half sisters in China.

When Tan graduated from high school in 1969, the family moved back to San Francisco. For one year, Tan attended Linfield College, a small Baptist school in Oregon, before transferring to San Jose City College in California to be with her new boyfriend, Louis DeMattei, an Italian American law student she met on a blind date. Tan switched from pre-medicine to a double major in English and linguistics, eventually transferring to San Jose State University. Although she still thought of being a writer or artist, she never took a course in creative writing.

Tan graduated with honors from San Jose State in 1973 and won a scholarship to attend the Summer Linguistics Institute at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In 1974, Tan earned a master’s degree in linguistics at San Jose State, and received a graduate minority fellowship for doctoral work at the University of California. On April 6, 1974, she married DeMattei, who had begun working as a tax lawyer.

Tan dropped out of the doctoral program during her second year and, from 1976 to 1980, worked as a language-development consultant in Alameda County, directing training projects for children with developmental disabilities. After five years, emotional and work-related stress caused her to resign. From 1981 to 1983, Tan worked as an editor and reporter for the medical journal Emergency Room Reports. She briefly wrote speeches, pamphlets, and brochures for corporate clients before becoming an independent freelance writer.

Life’s Work

Tan had always thought of writing as a hobby because she believed that she could not make money as writer, but her work in the medical journal field and as a freelance writer convinced her otherwise. Tan began reading fiction and writing short stories. Her short story “Endgame” earned her an invitation to join the Squaw Valley Community of Writers at the University of California at Irvine. This selective workshop for beginning writers helped Tan learn the processes of editing and rewriting. It also helped her to realize that she had many stories to tell. “Endgame” was published by a local literary magazine, FM Five, and later was reprinted in the November 1986 issue of Seventeen as “Rules of the Game.”

Literary agent Sandra Dijkstra saw the story and contacted Tan, offering to be her agent and encouraging her to continue writing. Tan sent Dijkstra some stories and they began planning for a book. However, in 1986, Tan’s work was delayed following her mother’s hospitalization for chest pains. When her mother recovered, she and Tan traveled to China for three weeks in October 1987. While in China, Tan met her half sisters, an experience that helped her better understand both her American and her Chinese heritage.

When Tan’s book proposal was completed, it sold to the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons for an advance of $50,000. Tan immediately stopped freelancing and began working on the book, drawing inspiration from her experiences in China and from stories she had heard from her mother and aunt when she was growing up. The result was a novel about Chinese American mothers and daughters called The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989. The book was a huge success and was a finalist that year for the National Book Award for fiction. In 1993, a film adaptation of The Joy Luck Club was released, for which Tan cowrote the screenplay. The book and film’s commercial and critical success made Tan famous.

Tan started numerous drafts for a second book, but she was uninspired and threw them away. Eventually, Tan decided to fictionalize the story of her mother’s life in China during World War II, her abusive marriage, and her experience of leaving three daughters in China and coming to the United States. Although she made some changes to the story, Tan kept the book close to her mother’s experience. The Kitchen God’s Wife was published in 1991. Like The Joy Luck Club, the book also received positive reviews and became a bestseller.

Tan’s next work was a children’s storybook called The Moon Lady, published in 1992. Her planned third adult book, The Year of No Flood, was never finished because Tan grew tired of writing it after talking about it too much in advance. In 1994, Tan published a children’s book titled The Chinese Siamese Cat. Based on her memories of her cat, the book was adapted into a PBS television series that debuted in 2001 as Sagwa the Chinese Siamese Cat. Tan served as the creative consultant for the show. In 1995 Tan published The Hundred Secret Senses, a novel that follows the relationship between two half sisters. It received mixed reviews but was still a bestseller.

In the late 1990s, Tan began working on a book about her mother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. During this time, she was also helping a close friend who was battling cancer. Her mother died on November 22, 1999, at age eighty-three, and her friend died two weeks later. Although Tan had already given her publisher the manuscript of her newest book, Tan took the manuscript back and rewrote it. The Bonesetter’s Daughter debuted in 2001. It, too, became a bestseller. The book was made into an opera performed by the San Francisco Opera in 2008, for which Tan wrote a libretto.

Tan became very ill in 1999. After suffering for eighteen months from serious flu-like symptoms, she was diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease, which doctors said she had contracted from a tick bite. Following treatment, it took almost two years before Tan fully recovered. The disease left her with lesions in her brain, resulting in epilepsy and neuropathy—a numbness in the feet that causes balance problems—and a sleep disorder. She later wrote about her illness in the book The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (2003).

In 1999, Tan selected and edited the annual edition of The Best American Short Stories, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Her 2005 novel, Saving Fish from Drowning, was an Editor’s Choice Selection in Booklist. Also in 2005, Tan received the Commonwealth Award for Literature. In 2006, Tan wrote the foreword for the collection Tails of Devotion: A Look at the Bond Between People and Their Pets, proceeds from which benefited San Francisco animal charities.

Tan published The Valley of Amazement in November 2013. The novel, set in early twentieth-century Shanghai, tells the story of a group of courtesans, including the protagonist, Lulu, who is half-Chinese and half-American. Lulu’s mother, Violet, is an American who owns and runs a courtesan house in Shanghai’s International Settlement, and eventually abandons Lulu. The novel is the first of Tan’s books to feature sex scenes, and while mother-daughter relationships are common in her fiction, Tan takes a new approach to the theme in The Valley of Amazement. In 2017, Tan published a memoir titled Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir. The book explores the challenges Tan faced in her childhood and uncovers family secrets. A documentary about her life, Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir, aired on PBS in 2021. Tan began working on a sequel to the original film The Joy Luck Club in 2022.

Having turned to the comforting biodiversity of the natural world amid a social atmosphere of increased racism and divisiveness in the United States in 2016, Tan had rediscovered a love of a drawing while watching birds in her backyard. After taking a nature journalism course, she wrote what would become The Backyard Bird Chronicles (2024), a collection of observations and sketches. Meanwhile, she had earned membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2022 before receiving a National Humanities Medal from President Joe Biden in 2023.

Tan was a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a self-deprecating amateur rock band comprised of prominent writers who gave concerts to raise money for charity. Between 1992 and 2012, the band raised about two million dollars for literacy programs. After the band’s founder, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, died in 2012, the band released a multimedia e-book in tribute, Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (By Authors) Tells All in 2013.

Throughout her career, Tan has supported numerous charitable organizations, including organizations working for orphans, Lyme disease research, animal rescue, lung cancer research, and freedom of speech, among others. Tan’s essays and short stories appear in numerous anthologies and textbooks. She has also lectured at universities worldwide.

Significance

Tan’s work connects with readers on many levels. In addition to shedding light on the Chinese American experience, Tan’s works focus on relationships and family—especially mothers and daughters—as well as the universal themes of love, loss, redemption, and forgiveness. It is difficult to classify Tan’s novels and short stories as pure fiction, because they contain elements of biography, history, mythology, personal memories, and folk tales. In addition to receiving critical praise, Tan has become one of the most commercially successful writers of her generation. In recognition of her legacy, the documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir was released in 2021.

Bibliography

“Amy (Ruth) Tan.” Feminist Writers. Ed. Pamela Kester-Shelton. St. James, 1996.

"Bio." Amy Tan, amytan.net/bio-1. Accessed 3 July 2024.

Huntley, E. D. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Greenwood, 1998.

Kinsella, Bridget. “Fifty Shades of Tan.” Publishers Weekly, 9 Aug. 2013, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/58667-fifty-shades-of-tan-amy-tan.html. Accessed 3 July 2024.

Rosinsky, Natalie M. Amy Tan: Author and Storyteller. Compass Point, 2007.

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

Tan, Amy. "Author Amy Tan's 'Backyard Bird Chronicles.'" Interview by Meghna Chakrabarti. On Point, WBUR, www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/05/01/author-amy-tans-backyard-bird-chronicles. Accessed 3 July 2024.

Tan, Amy. "The Resilience of Amy Tan." Interview by Alexandra Chang. Harpers Bazaar, 24 May 2021, www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a36341983/amy-tan-joy-luck-club-unintended-memoir-interview/. Accessed 19 July 2021.