Tan, Amy

Best-Selling Mother-Daughter Narratives

Tan was born in 1952 in Oakland, California, the only daughter of Daisy and John Tan, a Baptist preacher. Her mother came from a wealthy Shanghai family, but her maternal grandmother, Jingmei, went through the traumatic experience of rape and was then forced to become the concubine of a wealthy man before she committed suicide when Daisy was only 9 years old. Daisy was forced into an arranged marriage and lost her three daughters when she decided to file for divorce. After the divorce, she emigrated to America, where she remarried.

These family storylines may already be familiar to readers of Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989), which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for nine months, as well as The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), as both her grandmother and mother serve as models for different characters, and several narrative threads incorporate their fates. Mothers, and her own mother in particular, dominate Tan's fiction. Tan relates that even Saving Fish From Drowning (2005), which is not directly concerned with a mother-daughter relationship, was written under the influence of her late mother. In an interview with The Guardian, Tan explains that her decision to adopt a dead narrator was dictated by the death of her own mother, and her willingness to make her the narrator of the story.

Her grandmother's fate was revealed to Tan by her mother when she had just turned 15 years old, and when her family was going through a particularly tragic time: both her father and brother died of brain cancer within a few month of each other. This tragedy brought out the Chinese past of Tan's mother as well as her superstitious attitudes toward life. Tan fought hard to cope with these revelations, which made her unsure about her own identity, as did the frequent moves her mother organized—first to New York, Washington, and Florida, then to Europe, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland. Tan and her mother eventually settled in Montreux, Switzerland.

After a rebellious period, Tan successfully finished her high school studies. When the Tans returned to [Page 1193]the United States in 1969, Amy first enrolled at a Baptist college in Oregon and then to San Jose City College after meeting Louis DeMattei, who was studying there and who later became her husband. After she held a series of jobs, Tan developed an interest in fiction; her debut novel, The Joy Luck Club, made her popular with critics and readers alike. Both The Joy Luck Club and her second book, The Kitchen God's Wife, are concerned with Chinese mothers confiding in their daughters about their Chinese past. Motherhood thus becomes the necessary prerequisite for Tan's storytelling.

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