Amy Tan

In honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, here is some more information about another famous Asian American that you might not know much about.

Amy Tan is a Chinese-American writer. Her first novel was the 1989 novel called The Joy Luck Club about Chinese women and their American born daughters and was eventually made into a movie. I loved this book and movie because I could relate to a lot of the feelings the young girls experienced. Tan has written several other novels and also two children’s books.

Amy Tan was born in 1952 in California. Her parents had immigrated to the United States in 1949 and then moved to Europe when she was a teenager. When she was only fifteen years old, her father and older brother died of brain tumors six months apart. At that time, her mother moved Tan and her younger brother to Switzerland. During this time, she learned about her mother’s previous marriage to another Chinese man and how her mother had to leave her children behind in Shanghai. This became the basis for her first book. Tan returned to the US to go to college. Tan and her mother had a difficult relationship.

She dropped out of the college chosen by her mother and followed her boyfriend to California and eventually married him in 1974. While attending college, she held many different odd jobs including writing as a freelance business writer using non-Chinese sounding pseudonyms.

Tan got Lyme disease in 1998 and suffers epileptic seizures because it was misdiagnosed for several years. She cofounded LymeAid 4 Kids which helps pay for treatment for uninsured kids. She also suffers from depression and chose not to have children so she wouldn’t pass this on to them. Her mother also suffered from it and threatened suicide many times before she died in 1999.

Tan currently lives in San Francisco and taken up drawing.