Amy Tan - a brief profile

Born in the US to immigrant parents from China, Amy Tan failed her mother’s expectations that she become a doctor and concert pianist. She settled on writing fiction. Her novels are The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning, all New York Times bestsellers and the recipient of various awards.

She is also the author of a memoir.. two children’s books.. and numerous articles.. Her work has been translated into 35 languages..

From bio on her official site amytan.net.

SALON magazine: Have you felt the need to be a role model ever since the success of your first book, "The Joy Luck Club," in 1989?

AMY TAN: I don't feel the need to be a role model, it's just something that's been thrust upon me. Teachers and a lot of Asian-American organizations, for example, say to me, "We need you to come and speak to us because you're a role model."

SALON magazine: Are you comfortable with that?

AMY TAN: No. Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden. Someone who writes fiction is not necessarily writing a depiction of any generalized group, they're writing a very specific story.

There's also a danger in balkanizing literature, as if it should be read as sociology, or politics, or that it should answer questions like, "What does The Hundred Secret Senses have to teach us about Chinese culture?" As opposed to treating it as literature -- as a story, language, memory.

SALON magazine: In "The Hundred Secret Senses," you draw much more on the world of the spirit than in your previous books. Was that a theme that you had always wanted to tackle as a writer, or did more personal experiences compel you to address it?

AMY TAN: It's been a part of my life for at least the past 20 years. I've had a lot of death in my life, of people who have been close to me. So I've long thought about how life is influenced by death, how it influences what you believe in and what you look for.

Yes, I think I was pushed in a way to write this book by certain spirits -- the yin people -- in my life. They've always been there, I wouldn't say to help, but to kick me in the ass to write.

SALON: Yin people?

AMY TAN: Yin people is the term Kwan uses, because "ghosts" is politically incorrect. People have such terrible assumptions about ghosts -- you know, phantoms that haunt you, that make you scared, that turn the house upside down.

Yin people are not in our living presence but are around, and kind of guide you to insights. Like in Las Vegas when the bells go off, telling you you've hit the jackpot. Yin people ring the bells, saying, "Pay attention." And you say, "Oh, I see now." Yet I'm a fairly skeptical person. I'm educated, I'm reasonably sane, and I know that this subject is fodder for ridicule.

SALON: Does that worry you?

AMY TAN: To write the book, I had to put that aside. As with any book. I go through the anxiety, "What will people think of me for writing something like this?" But ultimately, I have to write what I have to write about, including the question of life continuing beyond our ordinary senses.

SALON: You have a very optimistic way of looking at life and death. But these concerns have also been a cause for deep distress in your life, including bouts with serious depression.

AMY TAN: Some of it is probably biochemical, but I think it's also in my family tree. I mean, my grandmother killed herself; she certainly had depression in her life.

And anyone, like my mother, who witnessed her own mother killing herself, is going to be prone to the same disease. My own father died of a brain tumor when I was 14. My brother died of the same disease.

I didn't do anything about it for a long time, because, like many people, I worried about altering my psyche with drugs. As a writer, I was especially concerned with that. A lot of writers believe that the trauma and the angst that you feel is an essential part of the craft.

And depression is still not respectable -- especially taking medication for it.

People look at me as this very, I don't know, Confucius-like wise person -- which I'm not. They don't see all the shit that I've been through (laughs). And going back to the question of being a role model, well, my life hasn't been perfect. I needed help.

SALON: What do you take?

Zoloft. I don't think it's made me a Pollyanna. I can still get angry and upset, but I don't fall into the abyss. I'm grateful that I have some traction now. It doesn't change essentially who you are, but it fixes things just the way insulin does for people with diabetes.

From The SALON Interview: Amy Tan (1995)
http://www.salon.com/12nov1995/feature/tan.html

From Australian Broadcasting Corporation - TV Program transcript
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2001/s298666.htm
Broadcast: 17/05/2001

Best-selling writer Amy Tan reflects on childhood memories
Reporter: Kerry O'Brien

Kerry O'Brien: In your own family history, which is so important to you, your grandmother committing suicide, your mother being raped while still in China, the suicidal tendencies in your mother, the depression of your grandmother, your mother and yourself. How does your depression manifest itself and how have you coped with it?

AMY TAN: I have gone through periods, very dark periods, where I just feel I've lost the meaning of life. Everything seems meaningless.

And the curious thing is, people think depression is just purely a lethargy, that you have no energy to do anything, I actually become it's a kind of anger that I've been so stupid, that I'd never seen the truth of the world and it coats everything.

I ended up, about 1993, realising that I had a problem, an illness that I couldn't control.

And a friend of mine had been telling me that I should take anti-depressants and I thought, 'No, I'm strong enough. I can handle this myself'.

And besides, I worried that it would dull me as a writer.

But I felt suicidal one day and there was absolutely no reason in the world why I should feel that way.

The movie had opened of Joy Luck Club, it had had rave reviews everything should have been what people would consider the top of the world and I felt suicidal.

I started taking anti-depressants and it was a huge difference.

It didn't change my personality.

What it did was it put, it enabled me to stop sliding down the slippery slope.

I was able to get some footing, and it's still hard, you know, to deal with issues in life.

But I'm not sliding down uncontrollably any more.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Your mother didn't discover anti-depressants until just a few years before she died and you expressed the wish that she'd taken them when you were a child, but then, to quote you, 'Part of me thinks that, if she had, I would have grown up happy and never become a writer'.

Do you really believe that good writers are only born through unhappiness?

AMY TAN: No, I don't.

In fact, I had a student come up to me one time and said, 'Is it true that I need to be crazy in order to be a writer?'

And I assured her, no.

I think you have to have an innate curiosity about the world, that you need to question things, that you're not the person who is satisfied having things handed to you, transmitted to you.

You need to acquire them through your own investigation and examination of all the details of your life.

And that you're very, very observant about that life and what fits in with what you're believing at the moment and what you don't think works.

That, I think, is often fed by unhappiness, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way.

Amy Tan spends some of her leisure time jamming with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a musical group composed of such fellow best-selling writers as Stephen King, Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson and Mitch Albom, who give charity concerts, usually for literacy projects.

Tan's trademark song, which she performs in dominatrix gear, is a version of Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made for Walking.

This high-stepping, whip-cracking woman worries about breaking crystal wineglasses?

"I am," Tan says, conjuring a lifetime of joys and sadnesses, "my mother's daughter."

[From The Joys And Sorrows Of Amy Tan, by Paul Gray, TIME mag., Feb. 19, 2001]

[Photo from rockbottomremainders.com]