Amy Tan (born February 19, 1952) is an American writer whose works explore mother-

daughter relationships and the Chinese American experience. Her novel The Joy Luck

Club was adapted into a film in 1993 by director Wayne Wang.
Tan has written several other novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred
Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of
Amazement. Tan's latest book is a memoir entitled Where The Past Begins: A Writer's
Memoir (2017). In addition to these, Tan has written two children's books: The Moon
Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an
animated series that aired on PBS.
Tan was born in Oakland, California. She is the second of three children born to Chinese
immigrants John and Daisy Tan. Her father was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister
who traveled to the United States in order to escape the chaos of the Chinese Civil
War. Tan attended Marian A. Peterson High School in Sunnyvale for one year. When she
was fifteen years old, her father and older brother Peter both died of brain tumors within six
months of each other.

Tan's first novel, The Joy Luck Club, consists of sixteen related stories about the
experiences of four Chinese American mother-daughter pairs. Tan's second novel, The
Kitchen God's Wife, also focuses on the relationship between an immigrant Chinese
mother and her American-born daughter. Tan's third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses,
was a departure from the first two novels, in focusing on the relationships between sisters.
Tan's fourth novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, returns to the theme of an immigrant
Chinese woman and her American-born daughter.

Though she has won several awards for her work, Tan has also received substantial
criticism for her "complicity in perpetuating racial stereotypes and misrepresentations as
well as gross inaccuracies in recalling details of the Chinese cultural heritage". Sau-ling
Cynthia Wong, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote that Tan's novels
"appear to possess the authority of authenticity but are often products of the American-born
writer's own heavily mediated understanding of things Chinese". Another writer stated that
the popularity of Tan's work can mostly be attributed to Western consumers "who find her
work comforting in its reproduction of stereotypical images”. The often negative depiction of
Chinese culture and Chinese men in Tan's work has raised eyebrows, with one scholar
going so far as to say that the storylines of her novels "demonstrate a vested interest in
casting Chinese men in the worst possible light". This, in addition to the lack of cultural and
historical accuracy in Tan's work, has led several writers and scholars to accuse Tan of
"pandering to the popular imagination" of Westerners regarding Chinese people