Amy Tan storyteller

Author Biography

As a child Amy Tan believed her life was duller than most. She read to escape. Her parents wanted her to be a doctor and a concert pianist. She secretly dreamed of becoming an artist. She began writing fiction when she was 33.
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Influences

The Holy Ghost of my father and the Chinese ghosts of my mother.

The American Dream and the Chinese family's interpretation of that.

Free books from the library every week and reading books that appeared on the banned book lists.

Writing secret letters to my friends about running away to Haight-Ashbury and writing thank you letters as my mother dictated them to me in bad English.

The early deaths of my older brother and father and my mother's belief that I would die next.

An SAT score in the 400s for English and SAT score in the 700s in Spanish

Listening to my mother and her friends gossip in Chinese. Understanding Chinese but not being able to speak it.

Luck and an amazing amount of it.

Web Links

AmyTan.net

A Not-So-Dutiful Daughter

Date of Review:

11/23/2003

Published Work:

Reviewer:

Deborah Mason

Source:

The New York Times

Review Excerpt:

Many of the essays in The Opposite of Fate are sharp and invigorating, like “Mother Tongue,” Tan’s defense of the fierce, primal authority of her mother’s “broken” English. … But it is Tan’s excursions into past lives—her family’s and her own—that make for the most fertile reading.