Amy Tan (1952- ) is a pioneering Asian-American author who achieved immediate critical and commercial success with her first novel, The Joy Luck Club , in 1989. Her prominence was increased by the film adaptation in 1993. Tan's novels feature Chinese immigrant families and their dual-culture offspring who are growing up in the United States. She explores generational and cross-cultural conflict within such families, with a particular emphasis on mother-daughter relationships and the desire to find one's sense of self and place in the world; though her stories are placed within an Asian-American context, her themes and characters have universal appeal.

Amy Tan was born to Chinese immigrant parents on 19 February 1952 in Oakland, California, and grew up in Santa Clara. Her father, John Tan, was an electrical engineer who had moved to the United States to escape the Chinese civil war. Her mother, Daisy, had been married before in China: her first husband was abusive, and when she abandoned the marriage she lost custody of her three daughters. She then left China just days before the Communist takeover in 1949, being forced to leave her children behind. Her heart-rending story later inspired Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991). Daisy then married John Tan, and gave birth to Amy and two sons, though her traumatic past caused her to suffer from severe depression and suicidal tendencies, which deeply affected Amy.

The Tan household was strict and religious -- John Tan was a Baptist minister as well as an engineer -- and both parents were ambitious for their children, hoping that their daughter would become a doctor. However Amy was influenced by the US culture in which she was growing up and became rebellious. The family lived in a mostly white area and Amy suffered from the double-bind that often affects the children of immigrant families: she disapproved of white Western prejudice and felt an outsider, yet equally she was absorbed in, and enjoyed, her Western lifestyle, leading to conflict with her family. It was this clash of cultures and generations -- especially between mothers and daughters -- that was to become the predominant theme in her fiction.

When Amy was in her teens, the family was struck by further tragedy: her father and older brother both died of brain tumours within a few months of each other. Daisy, convinced that their Santa Clara home was under a curse, moved Amy and her younger brother to Switzerland, where Amy completed high school. By this time, however, the relationship between mother and daughter was strained and volatile. When the family returned to the United States, Amy rejected her mother's plans for her to study medicine at a Baptist college. Instead she followed her boyfriend, Louis DeMattei, to San Jose State University, where she gained a BA and MA in English literature and linguistics.

In 1974 Tan married Louis, who was by now an attorney, and they eventually settled in San Francisco. She began a PhD in linguistics, but in 1976 abandoned her studies, partly because she was traumatised by the murder of her best friend. She spent a period of time working as a speech therapist for children with learning disabilities -- an area that her best friend had been passionate about. Tan then moved into commercial writing, but, feeling that something was missing in her life, began to write fiction, and had several short stories published in magazines. During this period, Tan and her mother visited China, and met the other daughters that Daisy had left behind many years earlier. Though the relationship between Tan and her mother was always difficult, this visit to China gave her a deepened insight into her mother's early life and further inspiration for her writing. The stories she had been compiling became her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989 to immediate critical acclaim and popularity: it spent 18 months on the New York Times bestseller list.

The Joy Luck Club tells the story of four mother-daughter pairs, in a carefully structured narrative. With the exception of one mother, Suyuan Woo, who is deceased, each of the eight characters narrates two stories (Suyuan Woo's stories are narrated by her daughter, Jing-mei Woo, who also tells two of her own). The sixteen stories are divided into four sections, and the multiple perspectives create a richness and diversity that prevent any one viewpoint dominating, as both generations struggle to understand each other, and past and present try to co-exist. The multi-layered narrative structure helps to convey the complexity of the relationships -- familial, social and cultural -- for, in each of the four pairs, the mother is a Chinese immigrant who is raising her family in the United States. The generational conflicts that exist almost universally are thus made all the more complex by the addition of cultural conflict and misunderstanding: these mothers, often tormented by their own traumatic early lives in China, have chosen to raise their daughters in a society that would allow them more freedom and opportunity, yet simultaneously they find themselves confused and shocked by their daughters' Westernised values and personalities, particularly the wish to assert themselves. Waverley Jong experiences continuous power struggles with her mother, who is determined to instil Chinese obedience in her American daughter:

"Why don't you tell [your mother] to stop torturing you," said Marlene. "Tell her to stop ruining your life. Tell her to shut up."
"That's hilarious [. . .] I don't know if it's explicitly stated in the law, but you can't ever tell a Chinese mother to shut up. You could be charged as an accessory to your own murder."

The Joy Luck Club is acclaimed for its enchanting and poignant storytelling, through which Tan presents complex issues in an accessible style. She offers acute, perceptive and brutally honest insights into the mother-daughter relationship, particularly when it is cross-cultural, and she depicts its intensity in both positive and negative ways.