Amy Tan
Amy Tan
Amy Tanis an American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese-American experience. Her best-known work is The Joy Luck Club, which has been translated into 25 languages. In 1993, the book was adapted into a commercially successful film...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 February 1952
CityOakland, CA
CountryUnited States of America
reading influence forbidden-things
The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.
life thinking inspire
God, life changes faster than you think.
loses
I did not lose myself all at once.
mother chinese lessons
My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.
mother heart firsts
A Mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place.
book writing thinking
You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.
failure expected
I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.
genre clear steers
I don't steer clear of genres. I simply haven't steered myself toward some of them.
family mother brother
My mother imparted her daily truths so she could help my older brothers and me rise above our circumstances. We lived in San Francisco's Chinatown. Like most of the other Chinese children who played in the back alleys of restaurants and curio shops, I didn't think we were poor. My bowl was always full, three five-course meals every day, beginning with a soup full of mysterious things I didn't want to know the names of.
want imagine disappear
Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?
responsibility unique giving
External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It's important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that's unique for yourself.
mother eye light
I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.
mother thinking people
I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.
encouragement thinking fiction
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.