But the blessing seemed inadequate when Amy's elder brother, Peter, died of brain cancer in 1967 and only months later John Tan died of the same disease. After consulting a Chinese geomancer, Daisy Tan decided to move to Europe with fifteen-year-old Amy and her younger brother, John, to cleanse the evil influence of their "diseased house" in Santa Clara. They went first to the Netherlands and finally found affordable housing in a hundred-year-old chalet set amid fourteenth-century houses in Montreux, Switzerland. Tan finished high school at the College Monte Rosa Internationale in Montreux, an outsider among the children of ambassadors, tycoons, and princes and still burdened by her losses and her anger. Because being good had not saved her father and brother, she decided to turn bad. She made friends with drug-dealing hippies and was arrested at sixteen. The nadir of her Montreux year came when she nearly eloped to Australia with a mental patient who claimed he was a German army deserter.
When the Tans returned to the United States, Amy Tan enrolled at Linfield College in Oregon, majoring first in premed and later in English. After meeting Lou DiMattei on a blind date, eighteen-year-old Amy transferred to San Jose State University, where DiMattei was a law student, and put herself through college with the help of a scholarship and income from a job in a pizza parlor.
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