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For many years the standard image of the American writer was of someone always white, usually male, and often triple-named (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Dean Howells, and so on), with all three names sounding very English. The poet Karl Shapiro, born in 1913, tells of his boyhood doubts about his own literary ambitions, since he had never heard of any poet with a name like Shapiro. Earlier in this century, Jewish writers and African-American ones significantly enlarged the dimensions of what the term "American writer" might encompass, and in more recent years writers of a wide variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds have enlarged those dimensions yet again. Of this current generation of writers, there are few more popular or more celebrated than the novelist Amy Tan.
Amy Ruth Tan was born in Oakland, California, on February 19, 1952. Her parents--John Yuehhan Tan, an electrical engineer, and Daisy (Tu Ching) Tan, a vocational nurse--had left China to settle in the United States in 1949, the year of the Communist takeover in China. Both her father and one of her brothers died of brain tumors when she was fourteen, and in 1968 her mother took her and her surviving brother to Switzerland, where, amid much emotional difficulty, she finished high school. The family returned to California the following year. Amy Tan was educated at San Jose State University, attaining a B.A. in English and linguistics in 1973, and an M.A. in linguistics in 1974. She also did postgraduate work at the University of California at Berkeley from 1974 to 1976. In 1974, she married Louis DeMattei, an attorney. According to the jacket copy of The Joy Luck Club (1989), "Though her parents anticipated she would become a neurosurgeon by trade and a concert pianist by hobby, she instead became a consultant to programs for disabled children, and later a free-lance writer." She worked as consultant to the Alameda County Association for the Mentally Retarded from 1976 to 1981, and as a reporter, managing editor, and associate publisher for Emergency Room Reports from 1981 to 1983. She then freelanced as a technical writer for the next four years.
As recounted in her entry in Contemporary Authors (New Revision Series, Volume 54), "Tan's literary career was not planned; in fact, she first began writing fiction as a form of therapy. Considered a workaholic by her friends, Tan had been working ninety hours per week as a freelance technical writer. She became dissatisfied with her work life, however, and sought to eradicate her workaholic tendencies through psychological counseling. But when her therapist fell asleep several times during her counseling sessions, Tan quit and decided to curb her working hours by delving into jazz piano lessons and writing fiction instead."
Given her accidental entry and late start as an author of fiction, it is remarkable that only a few years after these experiences she published what immediately became one of the most popular and acclaimed novels of recent times. In addition to often rapturous reviews, The Joy Luck Club won the Bay Area Book Reviewers award for best book of fiction and the American Library Association award for best book for young adults, and was a nominee for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award. It became a bestseller, and in 1993 it was made, from a screenplay co-written by Tan, into a big-budget, heavily promoted Hollywood film.
The Joy Luck Club, founded in 1949, is comprised of four young Chinese women whose families have settled in San Francisco (Tan's mother was a member of just such a group) who meet regularly to have dinner, to play mah jong, and, by sharing their stories, to keep contact with the lives, the people, and the beliefs that they have left behind on the other side of the world. When one of the four women dies suddenly, her thoroughly Americanized young daughter is persuaded to take her place and ultimately to journey to China to meet her family there, including her mother's twin daughters from an earlier marriage, whom she was forced to abandon many years before in the chaos of a mass flight from the advancing Japanese army. In a vivid and fluid style that conveys a skillful interweaving of the two cultures, Tan tells the moving stories of the mother and her contemporaries and traces the daughter's equally moving progress from embarrassment at her mother's "peculiarities" to understanding of her strength and dignity, culminating in an acceptance of her own heritage.
Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), explores similar themes of cultural clash and of a daughter's growing understanding of and respect for her mother. Like its predecessor, this work was greeted with a chorus of praise, with a number of reviewers maintaining that it was not only the equal of the previous book but was superior to it. Her third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses (1993), dramatizes the two conflicting cultures in a relationship not of mother and daughter but of half-sisters, one from China and the other the American child of an American mother and a Chinese father. The response to this book was more mixed than had been the case with Tan's earlier works. A number of reviewers were put off by the novel's assertion of the reality of reincarnation and of a world of spirits, feeling that Tan had called for a greater suspension of disbelief than they were prepared to make (or than the book had earned).
It is possible, of course, that Tan has simply failed to make her story convincing. But at the same time, a question may legitimately be raised as to whether the adverse criticism is prompted, at least in part, by expectations grounded in and bounded by the dominant realist tradition of mainstream Western fiction. Writers of other cultures have often woven "supernatural" themes into the texture of serious fiction, at times with striking results. The Hundred Secret Senses is, for example, quite reminiscent of The English Teacher (1945), a poignant and beautifully written novel by R. K. Narayan. This autobiographically-based work is set at the end of the British occupation of India. Its narrator and title character, a callow and pompous young man who has tried to shed his Indian identity and imitate the British, is shocked by his wife's sudden death into a development that leads him to a reacceptance of his native heritage and personal identity, culminating in a supernatural--and quite moving--reunion with the spirit of his wife.
In only a handful of novels, Amy Tan has brought a new note and new world into American fiction. In those books, she has shown herself to be a writer of uncommon technical skills, powers of observation, and richness of humanity, a combination of gifts that inspires her many readers to eager anticipation of her future work.
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