Amy Tan and the Joy Luck Club Biography The Joy Luck Club Generation Gaps in the Joy Luck Club Cultural Differences Chinese-American Life Amy Tan and the Joy Luck Club On February 19, 1952, Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, to John Yuehhan, a minister and electrical engineer, and Daisy Tu Ching, a nurse and member of a Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan web site). Tan's father fled to America to escape the Chinese Civil War and

Tan's experience with the piano underscores the stark contrast between the way her mother believed fame and fortune work in America, and the way she believed they worked. She writes, "Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me. And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible declarations afterward at

Amy Tan & Family Response to Amy Tan I have come to the United States to study and have left my family, my father, mother, and little sister, behind in Indonesia. I only meet my family on summer break now and I miss them terribly. Like Amy Tan I feel my family is with me all the time. It is the thoughts and memories of their caring that gives me the strength

Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri Both Amy Tan's "Two Kinds" and Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent" tell stories about the cultural clash between eastern cultures and the western world of the United States. This is not the only point of similarity between these two women or their writing styles. Besides the fact that they were second-generation immigrants, both women had mothers who wished them to hold onto their heritage

For Amy Tan, however, attempting, for her parents' sake, to become simultaneously Chinese and American, without compromising either culture, or herself, was a tricky balancing act. As E.D. Huntley adds: Amy Tan spent her childhood years attempting to understand, as well as to come to terms with and to reconcile, the contradictions between her ethnicity and the dominant Western culture in which she was being raised and educated. She lived the

I never really listened to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being somewhere else, about being someone else" (2). Naturally, her poor practice leads to a poor performance in front of her family and peers. Here however, her reactions betray her. Tan reveals that Jing-mei values her mother's acceptance of her above anything. When Jing-mei laments that her "mother's expression was what devastated [her]: a quiet, blank look that