Salem Press

Short Story Writers, revised edition
Amy Tan

Born: Oakland, California; February 19, 1952

Principal Short Fiction
The Joy Luck Club, 1989

Other Literary Forms
Amy Tan's most important volume of short fiction, The Joy Luck Club, is also often categorized as a novel. That book has been translated into twenty languages. Her second novel The Kitchen God's Wife was a Booklist editor's choice. Her later novels include The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), and Saving Fish from Drowning (2005). Tan has also written two children's books, The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994). Her essays include "The Language of Discretion" and "Mother Tongue." Her first nonfiction work, The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (2003), collects her casual writings that supplement her fiction and her life.

Achievements
One of the most important works of modern fiction by an Asian American writer, Tan's The Joy Luck Club was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Tan also cowrote, with Ronald Bass, the screenplay for a film based on the novel that was released in 1993. Her essay "Mother Tongue" was included in Best American Essays of 1991, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. She received an honorary doctorate from Dominican College in 1991.

Biography
Amy Ruth Tan was born in Oakland, California, on February 19, 1952, the middle child (and only daughter) of John Yuehhan and Daisy Tu Ching Tan, who had emigrated from China. Her father was an electrical engineer in China, but he became a minister in the United States. The family moved frequently, finally settling in Santa Clara, California. After the death of her husband and older son when Amy was fifteen years old, Daisy took the family to Switzerland and enrolled her children in schools there, but she returned to California in 1969.

Tan's parents hoped she would become a physician and concert pianist. She began a premedical course of study but switched to English and linguistics, much to her mother's dismay. She received her bachelor's degree in 1973 and her master's degree in 1974 from San Jose State University. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, from 1974 to 1976, beginning studies toward a doctorate. In 1974, she married Louis M. DeMattei, a tax attorney; they settled in San Francisco.

Tan was a language consultant, a reporter, a managing editor, and a freelance technical writer before she turned to fiction writing. She joined a writing workshop in 1985 and submitted a story about a Chinese American chess prodigy. The revised version was first published in a small literary magazine and reprinted in Seventeen magazine as "Rules of the Game." When Tan learned that the story had appeared in Italy and had been translated without her knowledge, she obtained an agent, Sandra Dijkstra, to help handle publication. Although Tan had written only three stories at that time, Dijkstra encouraged her to write a book. At her suggestion, Tan submitted an outline for a book of stories and then went on a trip to China with her mother. On her return, she learned that her proposal had been accepted by G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Analysis
Amy Tan's voice is an important one among a group of "hyphenated Americans" (such as African Americans and Asian Americans) who describe the experiences of members of ethnic minority groups. Her short fiction is grounded in a Chinese tradition of "talk story" (gong gu tsai) a folk art form by which characters pass on values and teach important lessons through narrative. Other writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, employ a similar narrative strategy.

A central theme of Tan's stories is the conflict faced by Chinese Americans who find themselves alienated both from their American milieu and from their Chinese parents and heritage. Other themes include storytelling, memory, and the complex relationships between mother and daughter, husband and wife, and sisters. By using narrators from two generations, Tan explores the relationships between past and present. Her stories juxtapose the points of view of characters (husband and wife, mother and daughter, sisters) who struggle with each other, misunderstand each other, and grow distant from each other. Like Tan, other ethnic writers such as Louise Erdrich use multiple voices to retell stories describing the evolution of a cultural history.

Tan's stories derive from her own experience as a Chinese American and from stories of Chinese life her mother told her. They reflect her early conflicts with her strongly opinionated mother and her growing understanding and appreciation of her mother's past and her strength in adapting to her new country. Daisy's early life, about which Tan gradually learned, was difficult and dramatic. Daisy's mother, Jing-mei (Amy Tan's maternal grandmother), was forced to become the concubine of a wealthy man after her husband's death. Spurned by her family and treated cruelly by the man's wives, she committed suicide. Her tragic life became the basis of Tan's story "Magpies," retold by An-mei Hsu in The Joy Luck Club. Daisy was raised by relatives and married to a brutal man. After her father's death, Tan learned that her mother had been married in China and left behind three daughters. This story became part of The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife.

Tan insists that, like all writers, she writes from her own experience and is not representative of any ethnic group. She acknowledges her rich Chinese background and combines it with typically American themes of love, marriage, and freedom of choice. Her first-person style is also an American feature.

The Joy Luck Club
Although critics call it a novel, Tan wrote The Joy Luck Club as a collection of sixteen short stories told by the club members and their daughters. Each chapter is a complete unit, and five of them have been published separately in short-story anthologies. Other writers, such as the American authors Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) and Gloria Naylor (The Women of Brewster Place), and the Canadian Margaret Laurence (A Bird in the House), have built linked story collections around themes or groups of characters.

The framework for The Joy Luck Club is formed by members of a mah-jongg club, immigrants from China, who tell stories of their lives in China and their families in the United States. The first and fourth sections are the mothers' stories; the second and third are the daughters' stories. Through this device of multiple narrators, the conflicts and struggles of the two generations are presented through the contrasting stories. The mothers wish their daughters to succeed in American terms (to have professional careers, wealth, and status), but they expect them to retain Chinese values (filial piety, cooking skills, family loyalty) as well. When the daughters become Americanized, they are embarrassed by their mothers' old-fashioned ways, and their mothers are disappointed at the daughters' dismissal of tradition. Chasms of misunderstanding deepen between them.

Jing-mei (June) Woo forms a bridge between the generations; she tells her own stories in the daughters' sections and attempts to take her mother's part in the mothers' sections. Additionally, her trip to China forms a bridge between her family's past and present, and between China and America.

"The Joy Luck Club"
The first story, "The Joy Luck Club," describes the founding of the club by Suyuan Woo to find comfort during the privations suffered in China during World War II. When the Japanese invaders approached, she fled, abandoning her twin daughters when she was too exhausted to travel any farther. She continued the Joy Luck Club in her new life in San Francisco, forming close friendships with three other women. After Suyuan's death, her daughter Jing-mei "June" is invited to take her place. June's uncertainty of how to behave there and her sketchy knowledge of her family history exemplify the tensions experienced by an American daughter of Chinese parents. The other women surprise June by revealing that news has finally arrived from the twin daughters Suyuan left in China. They present June with two plane tickets so that she and her father can visit her half-sisters and tell them her mother's story. She is unsure of what to say, believing now that she really did not know her mother. The others are aghast, because in her they see the reflection of their daughters who are also ignorant of their mothers' stories, their past histories, their hopes and fears. They hasten to tell June what to praise about their mother: her kindness, intelligence, mindfulness of family, "the excellent dishes she cooked." In the book's concluding chapter, June recounts her trip to China.

"Rules of the Game"
One of the daughters' stories, "Rules of the Game," describes the ambivalent relationship of Lindo Jong and her six-year-old daughter. Waverly Place Jong (named after the street on which the family lives), learns from her mother's "rules," or codes of behavior, to succeed as a competitive chess player. Her mother teaches her to "bite back your tongue" and to learn to bend with the wind. These techniques help her persuade her mother to let her play in chess tournaments and then help her to win games and advance in rank. However, her proud mother embarrasses Waverly by showing her off to the local shopkeepers. The tensions between mother and daughter are like another kind of chess game, a give and take, where the two struggle for power. The two are playing by different rules, Lindo by Chinese rules of behavior and filial obedience, Waverly by American rules of self-expression and independence.

"Two Kinds"
Another daughter's story, "Two Kinds," is June's story of her mother's great expectations for her. Suyuan was certain that June could be anything she wanted to be; it was only a matter of discovering what it was. She decided that June would be a prodigy piano player, and outdo Waverly Jong, but June rebelled against her mother and never paid attention to her lessons. After a disastrous recital, she stops playing the piano, which becomes a sore point between mother and daughter. On her thirtieth birthday, the piano becomes a symbol of her reconciliation with her mother, when Suyuan offers it to her.

"Best Quality"
"Best Quality" is June's story of a dinner party her mother gives. The old rivalries between June and Waverly continue, and Waverly's daughter and American fiancé behave in ways that are impolite in Chinese eyes. After the dinner Suyuan gives her daughter a jade necklace she has worn in hopes that it will guide her to find her "life's importance."

"A Pair of Tickets"
This is the concluding story of The Joy Luck Club. It recounts Jing-mei (June) Woo's trip to China to meet her half-sisters, thus fulfilling the wish of her mother and the Joy Luck mothers and bringing the story cycle to a close, completing the themes of the first story. June learns from her father how Suyuan's twin daughters were found by an old school friend. He explains that her mother's name means "long-cherished wish" and that her own name Jing-mei means "something pure, essential, the best quality." When at last they meet the sisters, she acknowledges her Chinese lineage: "I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood."

Other Major Works
NOVELS: The Kitchen God's Wife, 1991; The Hundred Secret Senses, 1995; The Bonesetter's Daughter, 2001; Saving Fish from Drowning, 2005.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: The Moon Lady, 1992; The Chinese Siamese Cat, 1994.

NONFICTION: "The Language of Discretion," 1990 (in The State of the Language, Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels, editors); The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, 2003.

Bibliography
Becerra, Cynthia S. "Two Kinds." In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 8. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Analysis of "Two Kinds" with sections on themes and meaning and style and technique. Also includes a detailed synopsis of the story.

Benanni, Ben, ed. Paintbrush: A Journal of Poetry and Translation 22 (Autumn, 1995). This is a special issue of the journal focusing on Tan and on The Joy Luck Club in particular. It includes articles on mothers and daughters, memory and forgetting.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Amy Tan. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Bloom also provides an introduction to the installment in the Modern Critical Views series. Pulls together the comments of contemporary critics.

Cheung, King-Kok. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997. An essay collection with a critical overview of Asian American literary studies. Most interesting to readers of Tan's novels are essays by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Jinqi Ling, and Donald Geollnicht.

Chua, Ka Ying Vu and C. L. "Rules of the Game." In Masterplots II: Short Story Series, edited by Charles E. May. Rev. ed. Vol. 6. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Student-friendly analysis of "Rules of the Game" that covers the story's themes and style and includes a detailed synopsis.

Cooperman, Jeannette Batz. The Broom Closet: Secret Meanings of Domesticity in Postfeminist Novels by Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordan, Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Jane Smiley, and Amy Tan. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. A study of the role of traditionally feminine concerns, such as marriage and family, in the works of these postfeminist writers.

Ho, Wendy. In Her Mother's House: The Politics of Asian American Mother-Daughter Writing. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 1999. Includes two chapters dedicated specifically to Tan, "Losing Your Innocence But Not Your Hope: Amy Tan's Joy Luck Mothers and Coca-Cola Daughters," and "The Heart Never Travels: The Incorporation of Fathers in the Mother-Daughter Stories of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Fae Myenne Ng."

Huh, Joonok. Interconnected Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan's `The Joy Luck Club.' Tucson, Ariz.: Southwest Institute for Research on Women, 1992. Examines the mother and adult child relationship in Tan's novel. Includes a bibliography.

Huntley, E. D. "Amy Tan." In Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Revised Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson. Vol. 7. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Analysis of Tan's longer fictional works that also offers many insights into her short fiction.

____________. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Discusses Tan's biography and analyzes her novels in the context of Asian American literature. Analyzes major themes such as the crone figure, food, clothing, language, biculturalism, mothers and daughters. Includes useful bibliography.

Lim, Elaine. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. The first critical guide to Asian American literature, Lim's book is an essential introduction to the historical and literary contexts of Tan's work.

Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon, 1990. A chronological and thematic introduction to prose narratives in English by American women of Chinese or partial Chinese ancestry. Includes an extensive annotated bibliography of prose by Chinese American women.

Pearlman, Mickey, and Katherine Usher Henderson. "Amy Tan." Inter/View: Talks with America's Writing Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Provides biographical information on Tan, revealing the sources of some of the stories in The Joy Luck Club.

Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Amy Tan: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Replete with tools for further research, including study questions, an extensive bibliography, and a glossary of Chinese terms found in Tan's works, Snodgrass presents a readable, engaging introduction to both Tan's life and works.

Tan, Amy. "Amy Tan." Interview by Barbara Somogyi and David Stanton. Poets and Writers 19, no. 5 (September 1, 1991): 24-32. One of the best interviews with Tan. Tan speaks about her childhood and her early career as a business writer, her decision to write fiction, her success with The Joy Luck Club, and some of its autobiographical elements.

Karen F. Stein