Английская Википедия:Amy Tan

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Шаблон:Short description Шаблон:Use American English Шаблон:Use mdy dates Шаблон:Infobox writer Amy Ruth Tan (born February 19, 1952) is an American author of Chinese heritage, best known for the novel The Joy Luck Club (1989), which was adapted into a 1993 film. She is also known for other novels, short story collections, children's books, and a memoir.

Tan has written several other novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), and The Valley of Amazement (2013). Tan has also written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series that aired on PBS. Tan's latest book is a memoir entitled Where The Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir (2017).

Early life and education

Tan was born in Oakland, California. She is the second of three children born to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan. Her father was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who traveled to the United States in order to escape the chaos of the Chinese Civil War. She recounts that she and her father would read the thesaurus together since “He was very interested in what a word contains.” This was the beginning of her path to become a writer since she wanted to use words to "create stories to make me feel understood." Tan attended Marian A. Peterson High School in Sunnyvale for one year. When she was fifteen years old, her father and older brother Peter both died of brain tumors within six months of each other.

Daisy subsequently moved Amy and her younger brother, John Jr., to Switzerland, where Amy finished high school at the Institut Monte Rosa, Montreux. During this period, Amy learned about her mother's previous marriage to another man in China, of their four children (a son who died as a toddler and three daughters), and how her mother left these children behind in Shanghai. This incident was a key part of the basis for Tan's first novel, The Joy Luck Club. In 1987, Amy traveled with Daisy to China, where she met her three half-sisters.

Tan had a difficult relationship with her mother. At one point, Daisy held a knife to Amy's throat and threatened to kill her while the two were arguing over Amy's new boyfriend. Her mother wanted Tan to be independent, stressing that Tan needed to make sure she was self-sufficient. Tan later found out that her mother had three abortions while in China. Daisy often threatened to kill herself, saying that she wanted to join her mother (Tan's grandmother, who died by suicide). She attempted suicide but never succeeded. Daisy died in 1999.

Tan and her mother did not speak for six months after Tan dropped out of the Baptist college her mother had selected for her, Linfield College in Oregon, to follow her boyfriend to San Jose City College in California. Tan met him on a blind date and married him in 1974. Tan later received bachelor's and master's degrees in English and linguistics from San José State University. She took doctoral courses in linguistics at University of California, Santa Cruz and University of California, Berkeley.

Career

While in school, Tan worked odd jobs—serving as a switchboard operator, carhop, bartender, and pizza maker—before starting a writing career. As a freelance business writer, she worked on projects for AT&T, IBM, Bank of America, and Pacific Bell, writing under non-Chinese-sounding pseudonyms.

Tan began writing her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, while working as a business writer, and joined a writers' workshop, the Squaw Valley Program, to refine her draft. She submitted a part of the draft novel as a story titled 'Endgame' to the workshop. Author Molly Giles, who was teaching at the workshop, encouraged Tan to send some of her writing to magazines. Stories by Tan, drawn from the manuscript of The Joy Luck Club, were published by both FM Magazine and Seventeen, although a story was rejected by the New Yorker. Working with agent Sandra Dijkstra, Tan published several other parts of the novel as short stories, before it was sent as a draft novel manuscript. She received offers from several major publishing houses, including A.A. Knopf, Vintage, Harper & Row, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Simon and Schuster, and Putnam Books, but declined them all as they offered compensation that she and agent considered to be insufficient. She eventually accepted a second offer from Putnam Books, for $50,000 in December 1987. The Joy Luck Club, consists of eight related stories about the experiences of four Chinese–American mother–daughter pairs.

Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, also focuses on the relationship between an immigrant Chinese mother and her American-born daughter. Tan's third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, was a departure from the first two novels, in focusing on the relationships between sisters, inspired partly by one of the half-siblings Tan sponsored to the United States. Tan's fourth novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, returns to the theme of an immigrant Chinese woman and her American-born daughter.

Tan was the "lead rhythm dominatrix", backup singer and second tambourine with the Rock Bottom Remainders literary garage band. Before the band retired from touring, it had raised more than a million dollars for literacy programs. Tan appeared as herself in the third episode of Season 12 of The Simpsons, "Insane Clown Poppy."

Tan's work has been adapted into several different forms of media. The Joy Luck Club was adapted into a play in 1993; that same year, director Wayne Wang adapted the book into a film. The Bonesetter's Daughter was adapted into an opera in 2008. Tan's children's book, Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat was adapted into an PBS animated television show, also named Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat.

Other media

In May 2021, the documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir was released in the American Masters series on PBS. (It was later released on Netflix.)

Critical reception

Шаблон:Expand section Tan's writing has been praised for its bravery in exploring both the personal struggles and triumphs of immigrant families. Her first book The Joy Luck Club, was called "a jewel of a book" by the New York Times, noting Tan's "deep empathy for her subject matter" and the "rare fidelity and beauty" of her storytelling. The Joy Luck Club went on to be a bestseller, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. That book, and her subsequent novels have spent forty weeks on the New York Times Bestsellers list.

In 2021, Tan was presented the National Humanities Medal for her contribution to expanding the American literary canon, and in the same year won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Tan also received the Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service for her contribution to world community.

Tan has received criticism, notably from Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote that Tan's novels "are often products of the American-born writer's own heavily mediated understanding of things Chinese", and author Frank Chin, who has said that her novels "demonstrate a vested interest in casting Chinese men in the worst possible light". Tan has dismissed these criticisms however, stating that her works arise from her personal family experiences as a Chinese-American, and are not intended as a representation of the general Chinese/Asian American experience.

Personal life

While Tan was studying at Berkeley, her roommate was murdered and Tan had to identify the body. The incident left her temporarily mute. She said that every year for ten years, on the anniversary of the day she identified the body, she lost her voice.

In 1998, Tan contracted Lyme disease, which went misdiagnosed for a few years. As a result, she suffers complications like epileptic seizures. Tan co-founded LymeAid 4 Kids, which helps uninsured children pay for treatment. She wrote about her life with Lyme disease in The New York Times.

Tan also suffers from depression, for which she takes antidepressants. Part of the reason that Tan chose not to have children was a fear that she would pass on a genetic legacy of mental instability—her maternal grandmother died by suicide, her mother threatened suicide often, and she herself has struggled with suicidal ideation.

Tan resides near San Francisco in Sausalito, California, with her husband Lou DeMattei (whom she married in 1974), in a house they designed "to feel open and airy, like a tree house, but also to be a place where we could live comfortably into old age" with accessibility features. In recent years she has developed avid interests in birding and nature journaling.

Tan began writing her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, while working as a business writer, and joined a writers' workshop, the Squaw Valley Program, to refine her draft. She submitted a part of the draft novel as a story titled 'Endgame' to the workshop. Author Molly Giles, who was teaching at the workshop, encouraged Tan to send some of her writing to magazines. Stories by Tan, drawn from the manuscript of The Joy Luck Club, were published by both FM Magazine and Seventeen, although a story was rejected by the New Yorker. Working with agent Sandra Dijkstra, Tan published several other parts of the novel as short stories, before it was sent as a draft novel manuscript. She received offers from several major publishing houses, including A.A. Knopf, Vintage, Harper & Row, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Simon and Schuster, and Putnam Books, but declined them all as they offered compensation that she and agent considered to be insufficient. She eventually accepted a second offer from Putnam Books, for $50,000 in December 1987.[12][13] The Joy Luck Club, consists of eight related stories about the experiences of four Chinese–American mother–daughter pairs.[

Bibliography

Short stories

• "Mother Tongue"
• "Fish Cheeks" (1987)
• "The Voice from the Wall"
• "Rules of the Game"

Novels

• The Joy Luck Club (1989)
• The Kitchen God's Wife (1991)
• The Hundred Secret Senses (1995)
• The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001)
• Saving Fish from Drowning (2005)
• The Valley of Amazement (2013)

Children's books

• The Moon Lady, illustrated by Gretchen Schields (1992)
• Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, illustrated by Gretchen Schields (1994)

Nonfiction

• Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America With Three Chords and an Attitude (with Dave Barry, Stephen King, Tabitha King, Barbara Kingsolver) (1994)
• Mother (with Maya Angelou, Mary Higgins Clark) (1996)
• The Best American Short Stories 1999 (Editor, with Katrina Kenison) (1999)
• The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2003, Шаблон:ISBN)
• Hard Listening, co-authored in July 2013, an interactive ebook about her participation in a writer/musician band, the Rock Bottom Remainders. Published by Coliloquy, LLC.
• Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2017, Шаблон:ISBN )

Awards

• 1989, Finalist National Book Award for The Joy Luck Club
• 1989, Finalist National Book Critics Circle Award for The Joy Luck Club
• Finalist Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize
• Bay Area Book Reviewers Award
• Commonwealth Gold Award
• American Library Association's Notable Books
• American Library Association's Best Book for Young Adults
• 2005–2006, Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature Honorable Mention for Saving Fish From Drowning
• The Joy Luck Club selected for the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read
• The New York Times Notable Book
• Booklist Editors Choice
• Finalist for the Orange Prize
• Nominated for the Orange Prize
• Nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award
• Audie Award: Best Non-fiction, Abridged
• Parents' Choice Award, Best Television Program for Children
• Shortlisted British Academy of Film and Television Arts award, best screenplay adaptation
• Shortlisted WGA Award, best screenplay adaptation
• 1996, Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement

See also

• Chinese American literature

References

General

• The Bonesetters Daughter-The Opera Шаблон:Webarchive

External links

• Шаблон:Official website
• Шаблон:Usurped, review of The Opposite of Fate in the Oxonian Review
• *Teresa Miller television interview with Amy Tan (60 minutes)
• Interview with Amy Tan from the Academy of Achievement
• Шаблон:LCAuth
• 'I Am Full Of Contradictions': Novelist Amy Tan On Fate And Family, interview on Fresh Air (37 minutes)
• Шаблон:TED speakers