Amy Ruth Tan (born February 19, 1952) is an American author best known for her novel The Joy Luck Club (1989), which was adapted into a 1993 film.
Tan has earned a number of awards including the National Humanities Medal, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and the Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service.
Tan is also the author of The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), and The Valley of Amazement (2013). Tan has also written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series that aired on PBS. Her latest book is The Backyard Bird Chronicles (2024), an illustrated account of her experiences with birding and the 2016-era sociopolitical climate.
Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California. She is the second of three children born to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan. Her father was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who traveled to the United States, to escape the chaos of the Chinese Civil War. John Tan was pastor of First Chinese Baptist Church of Fresno, California when Amy was born. She recounts that her father and she would read the thesaurus together, since "he was very interested in what a word contains." This was the beginning of her path to becoming a writer, as she wanted to use words to create stories to make herself feel understood. Amy attended Marian A. Peterson High School in Sunnyvale, for a year. When she was fifteen, her father and older brother, Peter, both died of brain tumors within six months of each other.
Her mother Daisy moved the family to Switzerland, where Amy finished high school at the Institut Monte Rosa, Montreux. During this period, Amy learned about her mother's previous marriage to another man in China, of their four children (a son who died as a toddler and three daughters). She also learned how her mother left those children in Shanghai. This incident was a catalyst for Amy's first novel, The Joy Luck Club. In 1987, Amy traveled with Daisy to China, where she met her three half-sisters.
Amy had a problematic relationship with her mother, who once held a knife to her throat and threatened to kill her while arguing over Amy's new boyfriend. Her mother wanted Amy to be independent and self-sufficient. Amy later found out that her mother had three abortions while in China. Daisy often threatened to kill herself, saying that she wanted to join her mother (Amy's grandmother, who died by suicide). She attempted suicide but never succeeded. Daisy died in 1999 at the age of 83; she had Alzheimer's disease.
After Amy dropped out of Linfield College in Oregon to follow her boyfriend to San Jose City College in California, she did not speak to her mother for six months. Amy met her boyfriend on a blind date, and married him in 1974. Amy later received bachelor's and master's degrees in English and linguistics from San José State University. She took doctoral courses in linguistics at University of California, Santa Cruz and University of California, Berkeley.
While in school, Tan worked as a switchboard operator, carhop, bartender, and pizza maker before starting a writing career.
As a freelance business writer, she worked on projects for AT&T, IBM, Bank of America, and Pacific Bell, writing under non-Chinese-sounding pseudonyms. These projects had turned into a 90-hours-a-week workaholism.
Early in 1985, Tan began writing her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, while working as a business writer. She joined a writers' workshop, the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley, CA, to refine her draft. She submitted a part of the draft as a story titled 'Endgame' to the workshop.
Before attending the program, Tan read Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and was "amazed by her voice... [she] could identify with the powerful images, the beautiful language, and such moving stories." Later, many critics compared Tan to Erdrich. Author Molly Giles, who was teaching at the workshop, encouraged Tan to send some of her writing to magazines. Tan credits Giles with guiding her to the end of writing the book. It began with Giles' seeing a dozen stories in the 13 page draft submitted to the program. Stories by 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.
After the acceptances and a rejection, Tan joined a new San Francisco writers' group led by Giles. Giles recommended Tan to academic-turned agent Sandra Dijkstra, in 1987. In May of that year, an Italian magazine translated and published 'Endgame,' without permission. Dijkstra advised Tan to send her another story; "Waiting Between the Trees" arrived, written as an experiment to decide whether the stories collectively become a novel or a book of short stories. Dijkstra signed up Tan and asked Tan to write a synopsis for the book, along with an outline for other stories.
Working with Dijkstra, Tan published several other parts of the novel as short stories, before sending it out as a full-scale manuscript. She received offers from A.A. Knopf, Vintage, Harper & Row, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Simon and Schuster, and Putnam Books, but she declined them all, as they did not offer sufficient compensation. Tan eventually accepted a second offer from G. P. Putnam's Sons for $50,000 in December 1987. The Joy Luck Club consists of eight related stories about the experiences of four Chinese–American mother–daughter pairs. Tan dedicated the book to her mother, with the following words: "You asked me, once, what I would remember. This, and much more."
Tan predicted to her husband that the novel would disappear from the bookstore shelves after six weeks as was the case for most first novels. Putnam Books auctioned the reprint rights in April 1989, which were bought by Vintage Books, the trade paperback division of Random House. Vintage's successful bid was at US$1.2 million. However, Random House decided to alter plans, and Ivy Books was assigned to print the paperback version, first, in the mass-market version, followed by Vintage, for a smaller audience, as a more expensively produced version. When the paperback version came out, its hardcover had already undergone 27 printings, with sales of over 200,000 copies. By 1991, the book had already been translated into 17 languages.
Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, also focuses on the relationship between an immigrant Chinese mother and her American-born daughter. On its writing inspiration, Tan explained, "My mother said, when I started The Kitchen God's Wife, that she liked The Joy Luck Club very much, it's very fictional, but next time, tell my story." Tan added that there are many fictionalized parts in the story narration, too. Tan, later, referred to this book as the "much more" that she remembered, as mentioned in the dedication page of her first book. This novel is significant, as it narrates a historical period of China between the 1930s and 1940s, including Nanjing Massacre.
G. P. Putnam's Sons released the book in June 1991 and priced the hardcover at US$21.95.
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 Tan sponsored to the United States.
Tan's fourth novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, returns to the theme of an immigrant Chinese woman and her American-born daughter.