Amy Tan is an Asian-American author born in Oakland, California to immigrant parents in 1952. Her parents fled China after the Communist Takeover in 1949. Amy was born three years later. Her mother was a nurse and her father was a Baptist minister from Beijing. After her father and younger brother died of brain cancer when she was only fifteen, she and her mother moved to Switzerland where she finished high school. She later returned to the US, enrolling as a premed student at Linfield College in Oregon.
Her parents wanted her to become a doctor, but she switched her major from medicine to English at San Jose State University. Tan’s mother saw this as a defiance and they didn’t speak to each other for six months. In an interview with The Guardian, she explained that her mother had a talent for telling stories, which was one of her inspirations to write.
Her first story, Rules of the Game, was written when she was thirty-three, and it was for a writer’s conference. She later went on to write a few more stories, which were compiled into one volume called The Joy Luck Club published in 1989. It was later made into a film. In it are stories about Chinese women and their relationships with their daughters. The overall theme of her stories are the struggles of growing up with immigrant parents.
