Why We Read Amy Tan

by Sidney Watson - Professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University

We are all the products of our parents’ and our grandparents’ stories--stories that at best we only partially understand. Through fictionalizing the stories of her own family, Amy Tan reveals the powerful shaping forces within these family relationships, especially between mothers and daughters. She also explores the ways in which the immigrant experience can deepen the tensions between the generations.

Tan was born in 1952 in Oakland, California to two recent immigrants from China, John and Daisy Tan. Her father was a Baptist minister, and Tan has credited the stories within his sermons as an important influence in awakening her interest in writing. But it is the stories of the women in her family and her own reaction to her Chinese heritage that most directly underlie her fiction.

In 1924 Tan's grandmother, the widowed Jing-mei, unwillingly became the fourth wife of a wealthy man. Just a year later she committed suicide by eating a New Year's cake she had laced with opium. Nine-year-old Daisy, Tan's mother, witnessed her mother's death. Later Daisy endured an arranged marriage with an abusive husband. She eventually fled her marriage, leaving her daughters in China, and travelled to the United States where she remarried.

Tan grew up largely unaware of these family tragedies and often resentful of her Chinese heritage. She remembers feeling ashamed of her Asian features and being embarrassed by her mother’s accent and her Chinese cooking.

When Tan was 15, her father and older brother died of malignant brain tumors. Grieving their loss, Daisy Tan moved her two daughters and remaining son to Switzerland and returned to more traditional Chinese customs and beliefs. It was during this period that Daisy told her children of their half-sisters in China.

The family eventually returned to the San Francisco area where Tan upset her mother by transferring from the school her mother had chosen to San Jose City College to be near her Italian American boyfriend, Louis DeMattei. She also changed her major from pre-med to a double major in English and linguistics. Mother and daughter didn't speak for six months. Tan went on to earn a masters degree in linguistics and marry DeMattei.

After college Tan became a very successful freelance business writer. Dissatisfied with her job, she took up an extensive reading program and wrote her first short story, "Endgame," about the strained relationship between a Chinese chess prodigy and her mother. The publication of the story attracted the attention of literary agent Sandra Dijkstra, who encouraged her to begin work on the collection of short stories that became The Joy Luck Club.

In 1987 while working on the book Tan travelled with her husband and mother to China where she met her half-sisters. She found herself identifying deeply with the land and people of China. This experience forms the framing narrative for the stories that make up The Joy Luck Club.

In the years since the commercial and critical success of The Joy Luck Club in 1989, Tan has continued to write novels as well as essays and children's literature, many of which continue to explore the themes raised in The Joy Luck Club.