In addition, Tan has always felt that she disappointed her mother by not becoming a doctor. This sense of loss and her father's and brother's deaths are reflected in The Joy Luck Club in Suyuan Woo's loss of her twin daughters and her death.
Tan did not learn until she was fourteen that she has half-sisters from her mother's previous marriage. The Joy Luck Club contains many autobiographical elements from Tan's life. Amy's mother did not speak to her for six months after this final act of rebellion.
There she attended San Jose City College as an English and linguistics major.
After just two semesters there, Amy went with her boyfriend back to California. Her mother then took the children back to the United States, where Amy enrolled in a Baptist College in Oregon, majoring in pre-med. Amy became even more rebellious, dating a German who was associated with drug dealers and had serious mental problems. Tan took Amy and her other brother to live in Switzerland. The Tans lived in Santa Clara until first her father, then her brother, died of brain tumors. She dreamed of being a writer, while her parents saw her as a neurosurgeon and concert pianist. She deliberately chose American over Chinese whenever she had the opportunity and asserted her independence in any way that she could. At one point, she even slept with a clothespin on her nose, hoping to change its shape. She wanted to look like an American-to be an American. As an adolescent, Tan had difficulty accepting her Chinese heritage. Her first-generation, Chinese-American parents, John and Daisy Tan, settled in Santa Clara, California. Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952. She soon discovered that not only did she enjoy writing fiction as a hobby, she liked that it provided a way for her to think about and understand her life. A self-proclaimed workaholic, Tan wanted to find a way to relax. Author BiographyĪmy Tan began writing fiction as a distraction from her work as a technical writer. Any reader can appreciate Tan's humor, fairness, and objectivity. Readers also love The Joy Luck Club: women of all ages identify with Tan's characters and theirĬonflicts with their families, while men have an opportunity through this novel to better understand their own behaviors towards women. Thus, Tan wrote not only to sort out her cultural heritage but to learn how she and her mother could get along better.Ĭritics appreciate Tan's straightforward manner as well as the skill with which she talks about Chinese culture and mother/daughter relationships. While the generational differences were like those experienced by other mothers and daughters, the cultural distinctions added another dimension. Tan found this particularly difficult as an adolescent. Tan's Chinese parents wanted Americanized children but expected them to think like Chinese. Suyuan continued the club when she came to the United States-hoping to bring luck to her family and friends and finding joy in that hope.Īmy Tan wrote the Joy Luck Club to try to understand her own relationship with her mother. The book's name comes from the club formed in China by one of the mothers, Suyuan Woo, in order to lift her friends' spirits and distract them from their problems during the Japanese invasion. The daughters try to understand and appreciate their mothers' pasts, adapt to the American way of life, and win their mothers' acceptance. Each of the four Chinese women has her own view of the world based on her experiences in China and wants to share that vision with her daughter. Putnam's Sons in 1989, presents the stories of four Chinese-immigrant women and their American-born daughters.
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