Amy Tan
Amy Tan (1952 - ) is an Asian American writer. Her most well known work is The Joy Luck Club. Other works include her memoir, Where the Past Begins, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and The Kitchen God's Wife.
- Amy TanOfficial website of Amy Tan.
- Amy Tan: BiographyAmy Tan is a Chinese American novelist who wrote the New York Times-bestselling novel 'The Joy Luck Club.'
- Amy Tan: BritannicaAmy Tan, in full Amy Ruth Tan, (born February 19, 1952, Oakland, California, U.S.), American author of novels about Chinese American women and the immigrant experience.
Research & Reference
- Amy Tan: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Amy Tan. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
Streaming Media
- Amy Tan: Unintended MemoirWriter Amy Tan’s hit debut novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), catapulted her to commercial and critical success. Born to Chinese immigrant parents into 1950’s America, Amy Tan’s painful family legacy inspired her stories of women without the power to choose their lives. Journey through the groundbreaking author’s life and career with archival imagery, artful animation and original interviews.
Author's Works & Perspectives
Where the Past Begins
FROM NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR AMY TAN, A MEMOIR ON HER LIFE AS A WRITER, HER CHILDHOOD, AND THE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FICTION AND EMOTIONAL MEMORY In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals, and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gives evidence to all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer. Through spontaneous storytelling, she shows how a fluid fictional state of mind unleashed near-forgotten memories that became the emotional nucleus of her novels. Tan explores shocking truths uncovered by family memorabilia--the real reason behind an IQ test she took at age six, why her parents lied about their education, mysteries surrounding her maternal grandmother--and, for the first time publicly, writes about her complex relationship with her father, who died when she was fifteen. Supplied with candor and characteristic humor, Where the Past Begins takes readers into the idiosyncratic workings of her writer's mind, a journey that explores memory, imagination, and truth, with fiction serving as both her divining rod and link to meaning.
The Joy Luck Club
In 1949 four Chinese women-drawn together by the shadow of their past-begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club. Nearly forty years later, one of the members has died, and her daughter has come to take her place, only to learn of her mother's lifelong wish-and the tragic way in which it has come true. The revelation of this secret unleashes an urgent need among the women to reach back and remember...