http://www.amytan.

net/

Amy Tan is a ChineseAmerican writer whose works

explore
mother-daughter
relationships. She was born on
February 19, 1952, in
Oakland, California. Both of
her parents were Chinese
immigrants.
Her father, John Tan, came to America to escape the turmoil of
the Chinese Civil War. In China, Daisy, her mother, 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. Her marriage to John Tan
produced three children, Amy and her two brothers.

In the late 1960s, after Amy's father

and oldest brother died of brain
tumors, Mrs. Tan moved her surviving
children to Switzerland, where Amy
finished high school, but by this time
mother and daughter were in constant
conflict.
Amy Tan received her
bachelor's
and
master's
degrees in English and
linguistics at San Jose State
University. In 1974, she and
her
boyfriend,
Louis
DeMattei were married. They
were later to settle in San
Francisco.

In 1987, Amy Tan and her mother visited China. The trip gave
her a new perspective on her often-difficult relationship with
her mother, and inspired many of her stories.

Novels
o
The Joy Luck Club (1989)
o
The Kitchen God's Wife (1991)
o
The Hundred Secret Senses
(1995)
o The
Bonesetter's
Daughter
(2001)
o
Saving Fish from Drowning
(2005)
Children's books
o
The Moon Lady, illustrated by
Gretchen Schields (1992)
o
Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese
Cat, illustrated by Gretchen
Schields (1994)

Non-fiction
o
The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (2003)
o Mother (with Maya Angelou, Mary Higgins Clark) (1996)
o
The Best American Short Stories 1999 (Editor, with Katrina
Kenison) (1999)

Amy Tan does not see herself as

primarily a Chinese-American
writer focusing on the immigrant
experience. She objects to being
limited because of her heritage.

Placing on writers the

responsibility
to
represent a culture is
an onerous burden.
Someone who writes
fiction
is
not
necessarily writing a
depiction
of
any
generalized group, they
are writing a very
specific story.

Now the woman was old. And

she had a daughter who grew
up speaking only English and
swallowing more Coca-Cola
than sorrow.

Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins

the conversation as if we were already in the
middle of an argument.
"Pearl ah, have to go, no choice," my mother
said when she phoned last week.

My sister Kwan believes she has yin

eyes. She sees those who have died
and now dwell in the World of Yin,
ghosts who leave the mists just to
visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in
San Francisco.

She often told me about

her father, the Famous
Bonesetter from the
Mouth of the Mountain,
about the cave where
they found the dragon
bones, how the bones
were divine and could
cure any pain, except a
grieving heart.

The worst part about all

of this is that I don't
remember how I died. In
those last moments, what
was I doing? Whom did I
see
wielding
the
instrument of death? Was
it painful? Perhaps it was
so awful that I blocked it
from my memory. It's
human nature to do that.
And am I not still human,
even if I'm dead?

choice, chance, luck, faith, forgiveness,

forgetting, freedom of expression, the pursuit
of happiness, the balm of love, a sturdy
attitude, a strong will, a bevy of good-luck
charms, adherence to rituals, appeasement
through prayer, trolling for miracles, a plea
to others to throw a lifeline

UUrrbbaannLegen
Legenddss

Its embarrassing to start my

acceptance speeches with a list
of errata, which then seems to
only show how truly

unworthy I am
to be standing before the podium

um 7: Tan has never had a fight with her publisher in a bookstore, nor
m and fling books around, causing other patrons to run for their li
s her publisher and she have always had an amicable relationship, and the o
ight is over the bill at a restaurant, but only as an ostentatious show of po
ost times, Tan lets her publishers win. They pay the bill.

/
t
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.
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a
ht t p : / /

The book is a meditation

on the divided nature of
this emigrant life. The
New York Times

With wit and sensitivity,

Amy Tan examines the
sometimes painful, often
tender, and always deep
connection
between
mothers and daughters.
Amazon.com

When first published The Joy Luck

Club spent 40 weeks on The New
York Times Bestseller list. It was
nominated for the National Book
Award and the National Book
Critics Circle Award and was a
recipient of the Commonwealth
Gold Award and the Bay Area
Book Award.
The Joy Luck Club was adapted into
a feature film in 1994, for which
Amy Tan was a co-screenwriter with
Ron Bass and a co-producer with
Bass and Wayne Wang.

The mothers, and the daughters:

oOo
Suyuan Woo Jing-mei "June" Woo
An-mei Hsu Rose Hsu Jordan
Lindo Jong
Waverly Jong
Ying-ying St. Clair
Lena St. Clair
The daughters know one side of their
mothers, but they don't know about their
earlier never-spoken of lives in China.
The mothers want love and obedience from their
daughters, but they don't know the gifts that the
daughters keep to themselves.

The Joy Luck Club

Feathers From a
Thousand LI Away
o The Joy Luck Club: Jing-Mei Woo
o Scar: An-Mei Hsu
o The Red Candle: Lindo Jong
o The Moon Lady: Ying-Ying St. Clair

The Twenty-Six
Malignant Gates
o Rules of the Game: Waverly Jong
o The Voice from the Wall: Lena St.
Clair
o Half and Half: Rose Hsu Jordan
o Two Kinds: Jing-Mei Woo

 American Translation
o Rice Husband: Lena St. Clair
o Four Directions: Waverly Jong
o Without Wood: Rose Hsu Jordan
o Best Quality: Jing-Mei Woo

Queen Mother of the

Western Skies
o Magpies: An-Mei Hsu
o Waiting Between the Trees:
Ying-Ying St. Clair
o Double face: Lindo Jong
o A Pair of Tickets: Jing-Mei Woo

"Feathers from a thousand

Li Away" has the feel of a fairy
tale. It is about the mothers'
hopes for their daughters and
about transformation. Although
communication is impossible
because
of
the
language
difference, the mother in the tale
waits patiently to communicate
with her daughter. The feather is
the mothers' Chinese heritage,
which they want to pass on to their
daughters. This section gives us
the mother's stories in China.

"The Twenty-Six
Malignant Gates"
introduces the mothers'
protectiveness, which
is
expressed
in
warnings.
The
daughters ignore the
warnings, to their own
harm. This section
presents the daughters'
childhood traumas and
development and their
lack of communication
with their mothers.

"American
Translation"

refers
to
the
American
daughters
as
the
reflections of their
Chinese
mothers;
hence,
they
are
translations.
The
daughters, now adults,
discover that their
mothers warnings and
advice were valid.

"Queen Mother of the

Western Skies" states the
theme explicitly, "How to lose
your innocence but not your
hope. The mothers, who lose
their innocence through their
terrible sufferings, never lose
hope for their daughters. The
living mothers and daughters
come to an understanding, and
there is hope for the daughters
and their relationship with their
mothers.

Themes in The Joy Luck Club

Identity
The mothers do not question their identities, having
come from a stable culture into which their families
were integrated. Their daughters, however, are
confused about their identities.
Communication between American daughters and
Chinese mothers
The mothers see their duty as encouraging and
pushing their daughters to succeed; they feel they
have a right to share in their success (the Chinese
view). The daughters see the mothers as trying to live
through them and preventing them from developing
as separate individuals (the American view).

 Connection of the past and the present.

The mothers' past lives in China affect their daughters'
lives in this country, just as the daughters' childhood
experiences affect their identities and adult lives.
Power of language
Without proficiency in a common language, the Chinese
mothers and American daughters cannot communicate.
Chinese culture versus American culture

References

http://amytan.net/
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/mela
ni/cs6/tan.html
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/tan0b
io-1