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.