THE AUTHOR
Amy Tan is not a typical American success story—not by a long shot. Born in Oakland on Feb. 19, 1952, her family lived in several northern California communities before finally settling in Santa Clara. The young girl found all that around to be disruptive. Later, she said, "I moved every year, so I was constantly adjusting ... living in my own imagination."
Born to Chinese immigrants, Tan led an atypical life. Her father, John, was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who came to America to escape the turmoil of the Chinese Civil War. The frenetic early life of her mother, Daisy, inspired Tan's novel, The Kitchen God's Wife. In China, Daisy 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. Daisy’s marriage with John produced three children, including Amy and her two brothers.
When Amy's father and oldest brother died of brain tumors within a year of one another, Daisy moved with her two surviving children to Switzerland, where Amy finished high school. Even there, however, the Tan family life was anything but idyllic. Mother and daughter squabbled constantly and stopped speaking for six months when Tan left the Baptist college her mother had selected for her to attend. Instead of majoring in pre-med as her mother had desired, she received her bachelor's and master's degrees in English and linguistics from San Jose State University. Not long after, she met boyfriend Louis DeMattei, whom she married before the couple moved to San Francisco.
Amy and a business partner founded a business-writing firm, providing speeches for salesmen and executives for large corporations. After a dispute with her partner, who believed she should have given up writing to concentrate on the management side of the business, she decided to become a full-time freelance writer. Her career got off to a good start, thanks to the money the business-writing company generated. With the proceeds, she bought a house for her mother. Although she and her husband lived well on their joint incomes, the harder Tan worked, the more disillusioned she became. The work had become a compulsive habit for which she sought relief through various creative efforts. She studied jazz piano, hoping to channel the musical training forced on her by her parents in childhood into a more personal expression. She also began writing fiction.
Her first story, Endgame, won her admission to the Squaw Valley writer's workshop taught by novelist Oakley Hall. The story appeared in FM, a literary magazine, and was reprinted in Seventeen. A literary agent, Sandra Dijkstra, was impressed enough with Tan's second story, Waiting Between the Trees, to take her on as a client. Dijkstra encouraged Tan to complete a volume of short stories.
As Tan set off on her new career, her mother Daisy grew seriously ill. Tan promised herself that if she recovered, she would take Daisy to China to see the daughter she was forced to abandon forty years earlier. Daisy regained her health, and mother and daughter departed for China in 1987.
The trip was eye-opening for Tan, giving her a new perspective on her often-difficult relationship with her mother and inspiring her to complete the book of stories she had promised her agent.
On the basis of the completed chapters and a synopsis of the others, Dijkstra found a publisher for the book, by that time renamed The Joy Luck Club. With a $50,000 advance from G.P. Putnam's Sons, Tan quit business writing and finished her book in a little more than four months.
Upon its publication in 1989, Tan won enthusiastic reviews. Her book spent eight months on the New York Times best-seller list. Paperback rights sold for $1.23 million. Since then, the book has been translated into seventeen languages, including Chinese. Her subsequent novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), confirmed her reputation and garnered good sales. Since then, Tan has published two books for children, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, as well as the adult novel, The Hundred Secret Senses (1998).
A year after Tan’s phenomenal literary debut, Daisy died in her San Francisco home. By the time of her death, she was not only Tan's mother but also her muse, her conscience, and a constant and confounding mystery. Daisy was 83 years old. By then, her memory, her health, but not her indefatigable humor were stained by Alzheimer's disease. She had been a woman of infinite superstitions and nearly epic fears.
She had also been a woman of stories.
Daisy provided her daughter with enough conflict, dialogue, and characters for a lifetime of writing. Even now, her mother's voice, which Tan emulates to perfection--the accent, the comical diction--remains strong in the daughter's mind. The mother, Tan learned while researching her obituary, led many lives and harbored numerous secrets. Among them: Daisy Tan was not her real name. Her real name was Li Bingzi. Her death, then, brought Tan not only pain but also wonder.
"My mother's many names were vestiges of her many selves, lives I have been excavating most of my adult life," Tan wrote in a New York Times essay concerning her dilemma. "What I know about myself is related to what I know about her, her secrets...and with each discovery I had to reconfigure the growing whole."
Out of that experience came Tan's novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001). Enjoying a break in the whirlwind publicity tour surrounding the book's release, Tan spoke from her Presidio Heights home in San Francisco, where she sat in her office at the top of a steep flight of stairs. "My Stairmaster," she joked of her daily back-and-forth trek. "It's about the only exercise I get."
Today, Tan commutes between San Francisco and New York with her husband, their cat, Sagwa, and their dog, Mr. Zo.
THE ETHICIST
After moving to San Francisco with her husband, an attorney specializing in tax law, Tan studied for a doctorate in linguistics, first at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later at Berkeley. She left the doctoral program in 1976 to pursue a higher call to action, taking a position as a language development consultant to the Alameda County Association for Retarded Citizens. Later, she directed a training project for developmentally disabled children.
In 1998, Tan contracted Lyme disease, which went misdiagnosed for years. As a result, she suffers complications to this day, including epileptic seizures, which were the emphasis for her co-founding LymeAid 4 Kids, an organization to help families with uninsured children pay for treatment. She wrote about her life with Lyme disease in The New York Times. Of the disease, she said:
“Many members of the medical establishment who dictate the official criteria for Lyme diagnosis, treatment and insurance coverage still maintain that Lyme is easy to diagnose. They discount research that shows Lyme bacteria can evade detection by standard blood tests. And they play down late-stage cases like mine, which require intensive, long-term treatment, insisting the disease is always cured with a simple round of antibiotics. Physicians who don't follow these rules have been threatened with loss of their medical licenses while their patients, mocked as hypochondriacs, have to pay exorbitant fees for treatment.
“We need to revise the guidelines based on new research and the plight of those who have suffered from the disease, some of whom have lost their jobs, their homes, their marriages and even their lives.
“I await the day when there is a new standard for diagnosis, treatment and insurance coverage. Only then will I be able to confidently say to those desperate people who reach out to me: "Don't worry. You'll soon be well again."
Not surprisingly, Tan also suffers from depression, for which she takes antidepressants. Although she felt she would have made a good parent, the primary reason she chose to forego motherhood was her fear that she would pass on a genetic legacy of mental instability. Her maternal grandmother died by suicide, her mother frequently threatened to take her own life, and Tan also struggled with suicidal thoughts. She believed that surrendering to her maternal instincts would have condemned her progeny to a similar fate.
Although Tan’s writing has received negative reviews from some critics for the way in which she portrays Chinese culture, she remains unapologetic. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, a professor at 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." She claimed that the popularity of Tan's work is attributable to Western consumers "who find her work comforting in its reproduction of stereotypical images." Author Frank Chin has said that the storylines of her novels "demonstrate a vested interest in casting Chinese men in the worst possible light," accusing the author of "pandering to the popular imagination" of Westerners regarding Chinese culture.
Despite such harsh receptions, Amy Tan has persevered, admitting that her works are not intended to be viewed as representative of general Chinese/Asian-American experiences. She knows that, as an American Chinese, she has her feet grounded in two distinct cultures, and appealing to both equally would be virtually impossible. She chose to slant her characterizations and storylines toward the only country she has ever known as “home.”
To this day, Tan resides near San Francisco in Sausalito, California, with her husband of fifty years, in a house they designed "to feel open and airy, like a tree house, but also to be a place where we could live comfortably into old age." She is, after all, not only a pragmatist but also a philanthropist.
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