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Amy Tan was born in 1952 in Oakland, California. Her father was from Beijing and came to America during the Chinese civil war. Her mother, like Jing-mei’s mother, immigrated from China in 1949 amidst the Communist takeover and left three daughters behind. When Tan’s father and older brother both died from brain tumors, Tan’s mother, Daisy, moved the family to Switzerland where Tan attended high school. Upon moving back to America, Tan went to Linfield College in Oregon where she met her husband, Lou DeMattei. She then attended San Jose City College, San Jose State University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of California at Berkeley. Upon earning her M.A. in Linguistics, she became a language development specialist and assisted the U.S. Department of Education in directing a project for multicultural children with developmental disabilities. She later wrote computer manuals for IBM.  

Tan then shifted her focus to fiction, and upon reading Louise Erdich’s Love Medicine, she was inspired by the interwoven narratives about cultural minorities. In 1987, Tan’s mother took her to China for the first time to meet her relatives. She said of this experience, “I belonged to my family and my family belonged to China.” When she returned to America, she continued her work in fiction and completed The Joy Luck Club in less than five months. Among numerous other works, Tan went on to publish five more New York Times bestsellers: The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement.

Although Tan’s works have been lauded as exemplifying the Chinese-American experience, she has voiced displeasure with this sentiment. In her essay “In the Canon, for All the Wrong Reasons,” published in The Threepenny Review in 1996, Tan states, “I am alarmed when reviewers and educators assume that my very personal, specific, and fictional stories are meant to be representative down to the nth detail not just of Chinese Americans but, sometimes, of all Asian culture.” For Tan, these stories are uniquely hers and are not meant to paint the Chinese-American experience with a broad brush. She goes on to say that she does not wish to defend herself or her work from criticism that comes from this assumption. Instead, she expresses her hopes for the future of American literature: “For what it has the potential to become in the twenty-first century—that is, a truly American literature, democratic in the way it includes many colorful voices.” 

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