Amy Tan
1 book analyzed
Biography
Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952, two years after her parents immigrated from China. Her relationship with her mother, Daisy, was the direct source of the novel's emotional core. Daisy had experienced enormous losses in China: three previous children who died, and a disastrous first marriage. Tan did not know about her three Chinese half-sisters until her mother told her as an adult — a revelation that became the novel's central plot. Tan wrote The Joy Luck Club after years of working as a business writer; she began writing fiction as therapy for workaholism and wrote the first stories to read to her mother. When Daisy became seriously ill, Tan took her to China, where Daisy reunited with her daughters from her first marriage. That trip, and everything surrounding it, became the emotional architecture of the novel. Tan has spoken extensively about writing the book as an attempt to understand her mother before it was too late — and her shock when millions of readers recognized their own mothers in Daisy.