After meeting her new-found sisters in China in 1987, Tan was, she has said, "finally able to say, 'I'm both Chinese and American.' ... Suddenly some piece fit in the right place and something became whole." As a release from the demands of her technical writing career, she turned to fiction writing, having gained inspiration from her reading of Louise Erdrich's novel of Native American family life,
Love Medicine. Tan's first novel,
The Joy Luck Club, received the Commonwealth Club gold award for fiction and the American Library Association's best book for young adults award in 1989 and stayed on the
New York Times's bestseller list for nine months. In 1993, with Tan serving as a producer and coauthor of the screenplay,
The Joy Luck Club was made into a critically acclaimed film. It was adapted for the stage in a production directed by Tisa Chang for Pan Asian Repertory in 1999.Tan's second novel,
The Kitchen God's Wife, was published in 1991 followed by the children's books
The Moon Lady (1992) and
The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994).
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