Amy Tan

Amy Tan was born in 1952 in Oakland, California, the only daughter of Daisy and John Tan who had both emigrated from China just a few years earlier. Amy, whose Chinese name is An-mei, meaning "Blessing from America," was the middle child. At her birth, the Tans already had a son, Peter, born in 1950; another son, named John after his father, was born in 1954. Both Daisy and John Tan had unusual backgrounds that would in due course provide their daughter with a great deal of narrative material for her novels.

In 1969, Amy Tan - all of seventeen years old - graduated from the Institut Monte Rosa Internationale, a high school in Montreux, Switzerland, and the Tan family returned to the United States, to the San Francisco area. Amy began her college career at Linfield College, a Baptist institution in Oregon chosen by her mother probably because the school was small and conservative. After two semesters, however, Amy left Linfield to transfer - much against her mother's wishes and advice - to San Jose City College because she had fallen in love and wanted to be near Louis DeMattei, her boyfriend who happened to be Italian American rather than Chinese. For Daisy Tan, however, the last straw was Amy's decision to change her major from pre-med to a double major in English and linguistics, thus ending the possibility that one of the Tan children would one day enjoy a high-paying career as a neurosurgeon. The rift between mother and daughter was significant: they did not speak to one another for six months.

Like a growing number of contemporary writers, Amy Tan crafts novels that resist facile and definitive classification into any of the conventional fictional genres. That the books are novels is widely acknowledged, although Tan has said that she intended The Joy Luck Club to be a collection of short stories. Readers and critics alike do, however, agree that Tan's work incorporates or echoes other genres including nonfiction and poetry. In fact, a significant source of the charm and artistry of the three Tan novels is their shape as fictional narratives that embrace elements of biography and autobiography, history and mythology, folk tale and Asian talk story, personal reminiscence and memoir. Tan's novels reify and reinterpret traditional genres by casting them in a variety of modes - realistic, comic, tragic, tragicomic, allegorical, fantastic, naturalistic, and heroic - that metamorphose seamlessly into each other in Tan's signature narrative style. Commentary is juxtaposed with memory, fable with history, pidgin English with California-speak, American culture with Chinese tradition, past with present in a collision of stories and voices and personalities, filtered through the point of view of an Asian American author who lives between worlds, who inhabits that border country known only to those in whose minds and sensibilities cultures clash and battle for dominance.

As a writer whose background includes Chinese tradition, Western Protestantism, American and Swiss education, experience in business writing, extensive readings in contemporary fiction, but more importantly the hyphenated condition common to all Americans of recent ethnic derivation, Amy Tan shares a number of common concerns and themes with other Asian American writers. Like them, she writes about the liminal identity of the hyphenated American, about the cultural chasms between immigrant parents and their American-born offspring and the linguistic gaps between generations, and finally about the need to discover a usable and recognizable past. But she does not write exclusively about the Asian experience, nor is her style specifically and wholly Asian despite its frequent allusions to traditional Chinese folk genres and its borrowings from the talk story tradition. Writing in an experimental tradition that includes the works of James Joyce and William Faulkner, Louise Erdrich and Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan constructs novels that explore critical issues by presenting multiple perspectives in parallel and intersecting narratives. Tan's three novels - The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, and The Hundred Secret Senses - are textual collages, palimpsest narratives, stories that interrupt traditional linear narrative with interpolations of myth and fable, poetry and chant, autobiography and talk story, dreams, imaginings, and visionary tales.