Amy Tan facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Amy Tan
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Tan in 2007
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Born | Amy Ruth Tan February 19, 1952 Oakland, California, U.S. |
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Occupation | Writer | ||||||||||
Education | San Jose State University (BA, MA) | ||||||||||
Notable works | The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001) | ||||||||||
Notable awards |
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Spouse | Lou DeMattei (m. 1974) | ||||||||||
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Chinese name | |||||||||||
Traditional Chinese | 譚恩美 | ||||||||||
Simplified Chinese | 谭恩美 | ||||||||||
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Amy Ruth Tan (born February 19, 1952) is an American author of Chinese heritage, best known for the novel The Joy Luck Club (1989), which was adapted into a 1993 film. She is also known for other novels, short story collections, children's books, and a memoir.
Tan has written several other novels, including 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 Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series that aired on PBS. Tan's latest book is a memoir entitled Where The Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir (2017).
Early life and education
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 in order to escape the chaos of the Chinese Civil War. Tan attended Marian A. Peterson High School in Sunnyvale for one year. When she was fifteen years old, her father and older brother Peter both died of brain tumors within six months of each other.
Daisy subsequently moved Amy and her younger brother, John Jr., to Switzerland, where Amy finished high school at the Institut Monte Rosa, Montreux.
Tan and her mother did not speak for six months after Tan had dropped out of the Baptist college in Oregon, to follow her boyfriend to San Jose City College in California. Tan met him on a blind date and married him in 1974. Tan 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.
Career
While in school, Tan worked odd jobs—serving 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.
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. She submitted a part of the draft novel as a story titled 'Endgame' to the workshop. Author Molly Giles, who was teaching at the workshop, encouraged Tan to send some of her writing to magazines. 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. Working with agent Sandra Dijkstra, Tan published several other parts of the novel as short stories, before it was sent as a draft novel manuscript. She received offers from several major publishing houses, including A.A. Knopf, Vintage, Harper & Row, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Simon and Schuster, and Putnam Books, but declined them all as they offered compensation that she and agent considered to be insufficient. She eventually accepted a second offer from Putnam Books, 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's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, also focuses on the relationship between an immigrant Chinese mother and her American-born daughter. 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.
Tan was the backup singer and second tambourine with the Rock Bottom Remainders literary garage band. Before the band retired from touring, it had raised more than a million dollars for literacy programs. Tan appeared as herself in the third episode of Season 12 of The Simpsons, "Insane Clown Poppy."
Tan's work has been adapted into several different forms of media. The Joy Luck Club was adapted into a play in 1993; that same year, director Wayne Wang adapted the book into a film. The Bonesetter's Daughter was adapted into an opera in 2008. Tan's children's book, Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat was adapted into an PBS animated television show, also named Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat.
Other media
In May 2021, the documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir was released in the American Masters series on PBS. (It was later released on Netflix.)
Personal life
In 1998, Tan contracted Lyme disease, which went misdiagnosed for a few years. As a result, she suffers complications like epileptic seizures. Tan co-founded LymeAid 4 Kids, which helps uninsured children pay for treatment. She wrote about her life with Lyme disease in The New York Times.
Tan resides near San Francisco in Sausalito, California, with her husband Lou DeMattei (whom she married in 1974), 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" with accessibility features. In recent years she has developed avid interests in birding and nature journaling.
Awards
- 1989, Finalist National Book Award for The Joy Luck Club
- 1989, Finalist National Book Critics Circle Award for The Joy Luck Club
- Finalist Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize
- Bay Area Book Reviewers Award
- Commonwealth Gold Award
- American Library Association's Notable Books
- American Library Association's Best Book for Young Adults
- 2005–2006, Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature Honorable Mention for Saving Fish From Drowning
- The Joy Luck Club selected for the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read
- The New York Times Notable Book
- Booklist Editors Choice
- Finalist for the Orange Prize
- Nominated for the Orange Prize
- Nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award
- Audie Award: Best Non-fiction, Abridged
- Parents' Choice Award, Best Television Program for Children
- Shortlisted British Academy of Film and Television Arts award, best screenplay adaptation
- Shortlisted WGA Award, best screenplay adaptation
- 1996, Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
See also
In Spanish: Amy Tan para niños
- Chinese American literature