Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, on February 19, 1952. She grew up in Fresno, Oakland, Berkeley, and the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her father was educated in Beijing and immigrated to America in 1947 and became a Baptist minister, and her mother, forced to leave behind three children from a previous marriage, immigrated to the U. S. 1949 shortly after the Communists took control of China Her father and older brother died from brain tumors when she was fourteen, and soon after this tragedy, Amy, her mother, and her younger brother moved to Europe, where Amy graduated from high school in Montreux, Switzerland in 1969. From 1969 to 1976, Amy Tan attended Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, where she met her husband, Lou DeMattei; San Jose City College; San Jose Unitversity, where she received a bachelor’s degree in English and Linguistics; University of California/Santa Cruz; and University of California/Berkeley.
Originally, Amy Tan had not planned to be a writer. After graduating from college, she worked as a language development consultant to programs serving developmentally disabled children and as a freelance business writer for big-name corporations. In 1985, Tan wrote the story “Rules of the Game” for a writing workshop, and the story became incorporated into The Joy Luck Club as part of Waverly Jong’s story. The Joy Luck Club(1989) was her first work of fiction, and it was on the New York Times bestseller list for longer than any other other book in 1989.
It was a finalist for the National Reviewers Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Club Gold Award, and it won the L. A. Times Book Award in 1989. Her other two books, The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses, have also appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, and all her works have been translated into many different languages. She has also written other stories, narratives, and even childrens’ books, such as The Chinese Siamese Cat.