Tan does the same thing with another archetypal subject, and . . . like Austen, she will enjoy a secure place in the literary canon 200 years after the ink dries on the last page of her last book."
Tan was born in 1952, in Oakland, California, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her father was a Baptist minister. Her mother had fled a disastrous marriage in China and only slowly revealed the truth about the children she left behind. When Amy was a teenager, her older brother and her father died of brain tumors within months of each other. Understandably concerned about the safety of her home without an adult male, Tan's mother took her remaining two children and moved to Montreaux, Switzerland. There, the already-tenuous relationship between mother and daughter worsened. In the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Nita Lelyveld observed: "By the time Tan headed to college back in the States, she and her mother were barely speaking. But separated from her mother, hopping from college to college, unsure what to do, she found an unexpected anchor: her own heritage. . . . Still she and her mother fought constantly."
Tan's literary career was not planned. Her mother wanted her to be a neurosurgeon and a concert pianist, and in college she studied literature and linguistics.
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