Amy Ruth Tan was born on on February 19,1952 and is an American author known for the novel The Joy Luck Club, which was adapted into a film of the same name, as well as other novels, short story collections, and children's books.
28 Facts About Amy Tan
2.
Amy Tan's latest book is a memoir entitled Where The Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir.
3.
Amy Tan is the second of three children born to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan.
4.
Amy Tan's 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.
5.
In 1987, Amy Tan traveled with Daisy to China, where she met her three half-sisters.
6.
Amy Tan's mother wanted Tan to be independent, stressing that Tan needed to make sure she was self-sufficient.
7.
Amy Tan later found out that her mother had three abortions while in China.
8.
Amy Tan met him on a blind date and married him in 1974.
9.
Amy Tan later received bachelor's and master's degrees in English and linguistics from San Jose State University.
10.
Amy Tan took doctoral courses in linguistics at University of California, Santa Cruz and University of California, Berkeley.
11.
Amy Tan began writing her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, while working as a business writer, and joined a writers' workshop, the Squaw Valley Program, to refine her draft.
12.
Amy Tan submitted a part of the draft novel as a story titled 'Endgame' to the workshop.
13.
Author Molly Giles, who was teaching at the workshop, encouraged Amy Tan to send some of her writing to magazines.
14.
Stories by Amy Tan, drawn from the manuscript of The Joy Luck Club, were published by both FM Magazine and Seventeen, although a story was rejected by the New Yorker.
15.
Amy Tan eventually accepted a second offer from Putnam Books, for $50,000 in December 1987.
16.
Amy Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, focuses on the relationship between an immigrant Chinese mother and her American-born daughter.
17.
Amy Tan's third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, was a departure from the first two novels, in focusing on the relationships between sisters, inspired partly by one of the half-siblings Amy Tan sponsored to the United States.
18.
Amy Tan's fourth novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, returns to the theme of an immigrant Chinese woman and her American-born daughter.
19.
Amy Tan was the "lead rhythm dominatrix", backup singer and second tambourine with the Rock Bottom Remainders literary garage band.
20.
Amy Tan's work has been adapted into several different forms of media.
21.
Amy Tan has received criticism from some for her depiction of Chinese culture.
22.
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote that Amy 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".
23.
Amy Tan 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".
24.
Amy Tan has accused Tan of "pandering to the popular imagination" of Westerners regarding Chinese people.
25.
Amy Tan said that every year for ten years, on the anniversary of the day she identified the body, she lost her voice.
26.
In 1998, Amy Tan contracted Lyme disease, which went misdiagnosed for a few years.
27.
Amy Tan co-founded LymeAid 4 Kids, which helps uninsured children pay for treatment.
28.
Amy Tan wrote about her life with Lyme disease in The New York Times.