I. Biographic Sketch
I. Biographic Sketch
A. Family Background and Education
Amy Tan was born on February 19, 1952, to John and Daisy Tan who immigrated to United States to escape from the Chinese civil war in 1949, when the communist took over the country. Born in Oakland, California, Tan lived and moved several times with her father, who was an electronic engineer and a Baptist minister, and her mother, a vocational nurse. When she was merely fourteen, Tan and her brother Peter moved to Switzerland with Mrs. Tan after John Tan and the eldest son of the family died of brain tumors. There in Switzerland, Tan managed to graduate from high school as a foreigner, striving to live with her mother through arguments and family turmoil. In 1969, the family moved back to States and settled down in Santa Clara, California. The constant conflict between Tan and her mother lasted for some time so that they did not contact nor communicate with each other for half of a year.
Like many Chinese parents' expectation of wanting their offspring to become medical doctors, Tan's mother was no exception. Mrs. Tan has high expectation on Tan and hence she sent her off to Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, for her medical education. Despite faithfully committing to her mother's wish, Tan met Lou DeMattei and followed him to San Jose City College to continue her study. She changed her study subject to linguistics and graduated as a double major: BA of linguistics and English. San Jose State University granted her a master degree in linguistics in 1973, and after that, she was admitted as a doctoral student in linguistics with fellowship in University of California at Berkeley. Yet, she decided to quit the program after one year and began to work as a language development consultant. By then, she has become Mrs. DeMattei, and the family was prosperous with Lou's tax law business and her own career of helping disabled children. The job later got her a position of editing a medical journal. But after 1983, Tan switched to be a business/technical writer.
The blooming financial environment, however, did not bring along happiness for Tan. She was mentally troubled and hence began to seek for professional psychological help. After a failure of psychological counseling session, Tan set her heart to writing for curing herself. She then started to write to share and to cure.B. Significant influence on Tan and her work
It is the constant conflict with Daisy Tan, her mother, and the emotional turmoil that Daisy has bestowed on her that have made Tan discover the resources of scheming her successful novels. Daisy Tan's early life and biographical stories were legends themselves. Grew up in an old esteemed family in Shanghai, she witnessed her mother's tragic life. After her scholar husband's death, Jingmei, Tan's maternal grandmother, was raped and taken as a low-ranked concubine by a wealthy industrialist. She brought Daisy with her to live in the wealthy family in Shanghai and confided her dilemmatic suffering with her daughter before she committed suicide. Daisy grew up with painful loss of her mother and got married early, but she did not live a happy life afterward; instead, Daisy was maltreated by her violent and abusive chauvinist husband Wang Zo that later took away her right of visiting her three daughters, and further had her persecuted to prison for two years after she escaped and divorced him. During the Sino-Japanese War, she flew with John Tan, a brilliant student who rejected MIT's offer but attended Berkeley Baptist Divinity School, and thereafter, they immigrated to States.
II. Her Works
Raised by a determined mother whose legendary biographical stories are already fascinating, Amy Tan explicitly expressed her love-hate relationship with her strict mother who had one time mentally tormented her with overloaded expectation and emotional dramatic reactions. Fed with ancient Chinese legends, folk stories, traditions and superstitious beliefs, Tan grew up in a bicultural environment, feeling the complexity and difficulty in her life, just like many second-generation Chinese-Americans.
A. Joy Luck Club
This first novel of Tan's was not meant to be a novel, originally; yet after her story appeared in several major magazines, an agent came to her and encouraged her to compile all those interesting short stories into a novel that is addressing to the community. Tan accepted the idea and initiated her writings avidly. Furthermore, there was Daisy's depression and heart attack that almost took away her life; all of the misfortunes brought Tan clear acknowledgement of the fear of losing her mother and the fulfillment of her mother's wishes. The short stories were hence arranged, organized and published as a novel with the plot interwoven with four pairs of mother-daughter relationships.
Within each female character in Joy Luck Club, there are shadows of Daisy Tan, Daisy's mother and Tan. Tan depicts the conflicts, love, upheaval, entangled and the dilemmatic situations between the elder generation and the younger one. The conventional Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters learn from each other through the pivotal events and issues such as rivalry, female defiant position against the patriarchy, family secrets, racism, the search of self and identity and the silence which is usually the undertone of suffering, anger, acquiesce or submission.
Despite that some critics regard Tan's overall manipulation in Joy Luck Club, the novel turns Tan's name a worldwide well-known one. The novel is translated to more than twenty languages and endorsed by major awards. Yet, while most readers and critics received the writer as a powerful and marvelous story teller, Huntley pointed out that "Tan contends that Asian American issues ¡V particulary Chinese American life ¡V are not the primary driving force behind her writng" (38) when she faces the label that categorizes her as an "Asian American writer." Huntley considers her works revealing universal concerns and themes, but regards her voice as one that speaks out for "a distinctive diaspora culture" and for the ethnic minority of her kind.B. The Kitchen God's Wife
In addition to the family history as the main scheme for her second novel, Tan continues the discussion of the mother-daughter dyad between two generations and further weaves in the issues of marriage, gender equality, identity-development, friendship and cultural dislocation. What's worth mentioning is that Tan takes her father as the model for the character of Jimmy Louie, whose stories and history have strong impact on Weili, the protagonist.
C. The Hundred Secret Senses
Tan's third novel further complicates mother-daughter dyad by juxtaposing the binary oppositional experience of the ancient orient and the modern occident. The half sisters of Olivia, the American gal, and Kwan, the Chinese young woman, adding up Simon, Olivia's husband, go on a trip to China. The business trip makes the couple of Olivia and Simon face the problem of their marriage in the eye, and with Kwan's role of replacing the absent mother, Olivia experiences the myth of reincarnation.
Reference
Feng, Pin-chia. "Amy Tan." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 173. American Novelists Since World War II, Fifth Series. Eds. James R. Giles and Wanda H. Giles. Bruccoli Clar Layman Book. Gale, 1996. 281-289.
"Amy Tan." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Gale.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Amy Tan: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
Huntley, E. D. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Xu, Wenying. "Amy Tan." Asian American novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. 365-373.