Amy Tan
...81 to 1983. She then freelanced as a technical writer for four years. "Tan's literary career was not planned; in fact, she first began writing fiction as a form of therapy. Considered a workaholic by her friends, Tan had been working ninety hours per week as a freelance technical writer. She became dissatisfied with her work life, however, and sought to eradicate her workaholic tendencies through psychological counseling. But when her therapist fell asleep several times during her counseling sessions, Tan quit and decided to curb her working hours by delving into jazz piano lessons and writing fiction instead." (Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Volume 54) Within all that process of Amy Tan’s life, she wrote her first novel The Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club, involves four young Chinese women whose families have settled in San Francisco (Tan's mother was in a similar group like that one) who meet regularly to have dinner, to play mahjong, and by sharing their stories, to keep contact with the lives, the people, and the beliefs that they have left behind on the other side of the world. When one of the four women dies suddenly, her thoroughly Americanized young daughter is persuaded to take her place and eventually had to journey to China to meet her family there, including her mother's twin daughters from an earlier marriage, whom she was forced to abandon many years before in the chaos of a mass flight from the advancing Japanese army. “The Joy Luck Club, which was praised as brilliant… a jewel of a book” (The Prose Reader p.191). In addition, The Joy Luck Club won the Bay Area Book Reviewers award for best book of fiction and the American Library Association award for best book for young adults, and was a nominee for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award. It jumped onto the best-seller lists in the spring of 1989, and a few weeks later its paperback rights were sold for $1.2 million (Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times). In 1993 it was made, from a screenplay co-written by Amy Tan, into a big budget, heavily promoted Hollywood film. Amy Tan’s second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), explores similar themes of cultural clash and of a daughter's growing understanding of and respect for her mother. Like its predecessor, this work was greeted with a chorus of praise; with a number of reviewers maintaining that it was not only the equal of the previous book but was superior to it. "Within the peculiar construction of Amy Tan's second novel is a harrowing, compelling and at times bitterly humorous tale . . . [N] one of Tan's fans will be disappointed. “The Kitchen God’s Wife is a more ambitious effort and, in the end, greatly satisfying." (Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times). Amy tan admits, “ I’m glad that I shall never again have to write a second book” (The Prose Reader p.191) for the simple fact that sh...