It was adapted for the stage in a production directed by Tisa Chang for Pan Asian Repertory in 1999. In 1993, Tan produced and coauthored the screenplay (script for a movie) for The Joy Luck Club which was made into a critically acclaimed film. Tan's 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 best-seller list for nine months. Tan's hobby soon developed into a new career when her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, was published in 1989. Tan's first literary efforts were stories, one of which secured her a position in the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, a fiction writers' workshop. But when her therapist fell asleep several times during her counseling sessions, Tan quit and decided to cut back her working hours by jumping into jazz piano lessons and writing fiction instead. She became dissatisfied with her work life, however, and hoped to rid herself of her workaholic tendencies through psychological counseling. Considered a workaholic by her friends, Tan had been working ninety hours per week as a freelance technical writer.

First novelsĭespite Tan's achievements, her literary career was not planned in fact, she first began writing fiction as a form of therapy. As a release from the demands of her technical writing career, she turned to fiction writing, having gained inspiration from her reading of Louise Erdrich's novel of Native American family life, Love Medicine.

After graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, she began a career as a technical writer (a person who writes about mechanical and computer issues). Tan majored in English at San Jose State, in California, in the early 1970s rather than fulfill her mother's expectations of becoming a surgeon. While still in her teens, Tan experienced the loss of both her father and her sixteen-year-old brother to brain tumors and learned that two sisters from her mother's first marriage in China were still alive (one of several autobiographical elements she would later incorporate into her fiction). Her parents wanted Tan to become a neurosurgeon (a doctor who performs surgery on the brain), while she wanted to become a fiction writer. Throughout much of her childhood, Tan struggled with her parent's desire to hold onto Chinese traditions and her own longings to become more Americanized (integrated with American ideals).

Her father was a Chinese-born Baptist minister her mother was the daughter of an upper-class family in Shanghai, China. Early lifeĪmy Ruth Tan was born in Oakland, California, on February 19, 1952. Amy Tan is known for her lyrically written (using flowing, melodic language) tales of emotional conflict between Chinese American mothers and daughters separated by generational and cultural differences.

The joy luck club writer