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Amy Tan Research Paper

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Amy Tan was born on February 19, 1952 in Oakland, California. As a child, her family frequently moved around, eventually settling in Santa Clara, California. Her father, John Tan, was a Baptist Minister and an electrical engineering who came to America to escape the Chinese Civil War. Tan’s mother, Daisy, fled to America to leave behind an abusive marriage in China. The traumatic early life of abuse of her mother would later inspire Amy Tan to write The Kitchen God’s Wife. Growing up, her parents had dreams of her becoming a concert pianist or a doctor, but to their dismay was constantly reading and dreamed of being an artist. When Tan was 15 years old, her older brother, Peter, and father died due to brain tumors. These devastating events lead Daisy Tan to relocate the remaining family, Amy and her younger brother and only remaining sibling, John, to Switzerland. …show more content…

Later, she earned her doctorate in linguistics at UC Santa Cruz and then UC Berkeley. In 1974, she married Louis DeMattei, a tax law attorney. Eventually the couple settled in San Francisco. Right as Tan was beginning to pursue a career as a writer, her mother fell gravely ill. Tan promised to herself to take her mother to China to see her other daughter if she recovered. As promised, in 1987 Tan and her mother returned to China to visit the family she left behind. This trip gave Amy Tan a new perspective on their mother-daughter relationship and inspired Tan to create a book of stories.
Joy Luck Club, her first book, was published in 1989 at age 34 and was a collection of Tan’s short stories. Tan’s first book quickly became a New York Times bestseller and remained there for 8

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