Amy Tan is one of the first female writers to bring Asian-American society and experiences to mainstream audience. Her books focus mostly on themes such as the difficulty of being a minority, a woman, and having a dual-culture identity.
Her fiction stories are not all biographical, several themes’ and situations arise from incidents in her personal life. The article then focuses on Amy’s life such as how she was born to John and Daisy Tan who are Asian but met and married in US. During her childhood she moved a lot especially after her brother and her father perished of a brain tumor. Her mother chose which college she attended to and her course of study which was Pre-Med. After being in school for a year she moved in with her boyfriend and changed her major to English and Linguistics. Shortly after, she married her boyfriend Lou de Mattei in 1974.
During the early 1980’s she was a freelance business writer. During a trip in 1987 with her mother she visited China and connected with her Chinese roots, Because of this her experiences during this trip became the basis of her first novel “The Joy Luck Club”. This novel gained much popularity and many awards which prompted her to write full time. The unknown writer of the article then goes on to speak about some of her major works and how Amy Tan “captures the culturally rich experiences of Chinese American”. The article talks about such books as “The Joy Luck Club”, “The Kitchen God’s Wife”, “The hundred Secret Senses”, and “The Bonesetters Daughter”.
This article is very helpful to get into some sort of mind set Amy had while writing these novels. The way the article gives a short background story and synopsis of some of the novels is great to linking and pinpointing Amy’s common theme of the hardships of life.
