Amy Tan
Amy Tan, born February 19, 1952, in Oakland, California, is a novelist, memoirist, children’s book writer, and most recently a close observer of birds, painting and writing personal essays thereof. She is best known for her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), published when she was 37. She had served unwittingly a long apprenticeship as a business writer for large corporations, which undoubtedly contributed to the clarity of her prose, a pragmatic flow of information and imagery under firm and confident management. Her parents are first-generation Chinese-Americans, and she has chosen emigration and assimilation - and continuity - as a theme in her fiction. Because of this, Tan has been interpreted as a “representative” writer, someone expressing wide cultural generalities, which she has rejected, and which, frankly, any unbiased reader finds a misguided criticism. Read her for being Amy Tan, an excellent writer, an empathetic human being, an observant artist. Enjoy and marvel.
The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club
“The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a writer and still remains hugely inspirational.” —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians
Amy Tan’s beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters, now the focus of a new documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on Netflix
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s “saying” the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. “To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.” Forty years later the stories and history continue.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.