nel ghosts or seeing foreboding signs in everyday
occurrences. When Tan was 14, her father and
older brother both died of brain tumors, and her
mother decided to leave their bad luck behind by
taking her and her younger brother to Switzerland
in 1968, where she finished high school. The Tans
returned to the San Francisco area the next year,
and Tan studied first at Linfield College in Oregon,
and then transferred to San Jose City College to be
near her future husband, Louis DeMattei. Continu-
ing her parents’ tradition of new beginnings, Tan
also changed her major from pre-med to a double
major in English and linguistics. This irked her
mother, who had wanted Tan to be a brain surgeon
and a concert pianist in her spare time, and the two
did not speak to each other for six months.
Tan graduated with a B.A. in English and lin-
guistics in 1973 and a master’s degree in linguistics
in 1974 from San Jose State University, married De-
Mattei, a tax lawyer, and began work on a doctoral
degree at the University of California. Tan decided
to leave her doctoral program and worked as a lan-
guage development specialist for developmentally
disabled children for five years. Tan then moved
into freelance business and technical writing, a very
lucrative but unfulfilling venture. She produced
work for major corporations, including AT&T
and IBM. However, she became a workaholic and
began therapy to organize her life, eventually work-
ing through her issues on her own with the help of
creative writing. Her first short story, “Endgame,”
about a Chinese chess prodigy and her difficult
mother, was the first creative effort that Tan worked
on within a community of writers. She has since
worked with a group of writers led by Molly Giles
and attended writers’ workshops. Through Giles,
Tan met her literary agent and wrote the short
stories that would become The Joy Luck Club. The
book was selected as a finalist for the National Book
Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics
Circle Award. The novel stayed on the N e w Yo r k
Times best-seller list for almost a year and has been
translated into more than 20 languages. She has
since published four more novels, The Kitchen God’s
Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), and
The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), and SAVING FISH
FROM DROWNING (2005). She also wrote a nonfic-
tion book of personal essays, The OPPOSITE OF FAT E
(2003), and two children’s books, The Moon Lady
(1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994),
which has been adapted into a cartoon series for
children on PBS. She has also written numerous es-
says on literary and linguistic matters. Her work is
both critically and popularly acclaimed.
In her novels, Tan treats themes of complex and
multifaceted familial ties—most often between
mother and daughter, but sometimes between
other family members, as when she writes about
sisters in The Hundred Secret Senses. She often
employs various characters’ voices to tell different
parts of each story, and so her novels are layered
with diverse interpretations of similar events in
each character’s life. The landscapes of the novels
move from the United States to China and back
again, and the time periods involved generally span
several lifetimes, reaching from the present back to
the pre–World War II era. Tan resists being labeled
an ethnic writer, preferring to recognize her novels
as “American” rather than representative of Chi-
nese culture. Her characters’ issues are the issues of
all men and women, not only those who are born
Chinese. Through each novel, Tan’s connection to
her mother’s life story is evident, and her mother’s
gift for storytelling is indelibly preserved.
In her spare time, Tan travels and sings with the
literary rock band Rock Bottom Remainders with
fellow writers, including Stephen King and Dave
Barry. The band performs at benefits that support
children’s literacy programs.Bibliography
Huntley, E. D., ed. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion.
Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary
Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1998.
Vanessa RasmussenTham, Hilary (Hilary Tham Goldberg)
(1946–2005)
Poet, editor, and artist Hilary Tham Goldberg was
born on August 20, 1946, in Kelang (or Klang), Ma-
laysia, to Chinese immigrant parents. She authored282 Tham, Hilary