AmyTan

• **Personal Life** Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952. Her father was a Chinese-born Baptist and her mother was the daughter of an upper-class family in Shanghai. Tan majored in English at San Jose State in the early 1970s. Instead of fulfilling her mother's expectations of becoming a neurosurgeon, she began a career as a technical writer after she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.While still in her teens, Tan experienced the loss of both her father and her sixteen-year-old brother to brain tumors and was told that two sisters from her mother's first marriage in China were still alive. She later met her new-found sisters in China in 1987.
 * AMY TAN**

Some reviewers of //The Joy Luck Club// argued that Tan's thematic development was unsuccessful and resulted in strained, "over-significant" scenes, while others found her use of multiple narrative voices to be "limiting" and "//over//-schematic. Most people did not start enjoying her work until years after they were published.
 * • Professional Life**

• **Major works** Amy Tan uses some of her own life lessons and life experiences to create her novels. Tan's first novel, //The Joy Luck Club,was a// popular and critical success novel about the generational conflict between June, and three older Chinese women. Tan's second novel, //The Kitchen God's Wife,// was published in 1991.This book concerns the difficulty of bridging a communication gap between a Chinese mother and a Chinese American daughterFollowed by the children's books //The Moon Lady//, written in1992, and //The Chinese Siamese Cat, written in// 1994.

The Joy Luck Club received the Commonwealth Club gold award for fiction and the American Library Association's best book for young adults award in 1989 and stayed on the //New York Times'//s bestsellers for nine months. Some other awards she won is:
 * • Awards won**
 * * Finalist National Book Award
 * * Finalist National Book Critics Circle Award
 * * Finalist Los Angeles Time Fiction Prize
 * *Bay Area Book Reviewers Award
 * * American Library Associations's Notable Books
 * *American Library Association's Best Book for Young Adults
 * *Selected for the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read
 * *New York Times Notable Book
 * *Booklist Editors Choice
 * * Finalist for the Orange Prize
 * Nominated for the Orange Prize
 * Nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Award
 * Audie Award: Best Non-fiction, Abridged
 * Emmy Award
 * Parents Choice, Best Television Program for Children
 * Shortlisted BAFTA Film award, best screenplay adaptation
 * Shortlisted WGA Award, best screenplay adaptation

Amy Tan compares her stories to the Chinese culture and her life experiences.
 * • Period and/or Style**

• **Favorite Themes** The relationships between mothers and daughters. The mother and daugther usually are arguing and then learn a life lesson when it is all complete.