Amy Tan
Since Winning the EMMA Award (Book/Novel)
Amy Tan is an American author who is best known for her novels about Chinese American women and the immigrant experience. She has gone on to write various short story collections, children’s books and memoirs.
In 2005, Amy Tan published “Saving Fish from Drowning”, which features a San Francisco art dealer narrating the story of a group of tourists travelling through China and Myanmar (Burma).
In 2013, she published “The Valley of Amazement,” which tells the stories of an American woman who opened a high-class brothel in Shanghai and her daughter, who was trained as a courtesan.
Amy’s memoir, “Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir,” was published in 2017. In it, Tan writes about her relationship with her mother, the death of her father and brother, stories of her half-sisters and grandmother in China, her diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease, and life as a writer.
Amy received the National Humanities Medal in 2021, presented by then-President Joe Biden in 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2022.
Amy is an avid birdwatcher and a board member of the American Bird Conservancy who enrolled in a nature journaling class in 2016. Her work in the class led to her publishing “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” in 2024. This book features journal entries about the birds she observed in her home’s backyard, as well as her own drawings of birds.
Background (Before 2002)
Born on 19th February 1952 in Oakland, California, to Chinese immigrants, Amy had several jobs at school, such as a switchboard operator, carhop (waitress), bartender, and pizza maker, before she began her writing career. She began writing fiction in 1985 and published her first short story, “Rules of the Game,” in 1986.
In 1987, Amy took her mother to revisit China, and for the first time, Amy met two of her half-sisters. This inspired part of her first novel, 1989’s The Joy Luck Club, which details the experiences of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese American daughters and the struggles of the two disparate cultures and generations relating to each other.
“Rules of the Game” was one of the stories interwoven into the narrative, and the perspective switches between eight women. The Joy Luck Club became a success and was named as a finalist for a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award.
In 1993, The Joy Luck Club was adapted into a film, and Amy wrote the screenplay alongside Ron Bass. Their script was nominated for a BAFTA Award and a Writers Guild of America Award.
Amy’s second novel, 1991’s The Kitchen God’s Wife, was inspired by her mother’s history. It follows a Chinese mother who clumsily accepts American ways and her relationship with her thoroughly Americanised daughter. The novel narrates a historical period of China between the 1930s and 1940s, including the Nanjing Massacre.
