In 1969, Amy enrolled in Linfield College, a small Baptist university in McMinnville, Oregon. Amy quickly severed all ties with the German.Ī year later, Daisy, Amy, and John returned to San Francisco. Daisy had the man arrested for drug possession and got her daughter hauled before the authorities. 'I just kind of went to pieces.' Perhaps the most dangerous was her relationship with an older German man who had close contacts with drug dealers and organized crime. 'I did a bunch of crazy things,' she told Elaine Woo. Deciding that the remaining family needed to escape from the site of their tragedy, Daisy settled with Amy and her brother in Montreux, Switzerland. When Amy was fifteen years old, her older brother Peter and her father each died of brain tumors within the same year. Her dream seemed unlikely to become reality, however, after a series of tragedies shook her life. Ever since she won an essay contest when she was eight years old, Amy dreamed of writing novels and short stories. But they had not reckoned with her rebellious streak. They decided that she would be a full-time neurosurgeon and part-time concert pianist. 'There is this myth,' she said, 'that America is a melting pot, but what happens in assimilation is that we end up deliberately choosing the American things - hot dogs and apple pie - and ignoring the Chinese offerings' ( Newsweek, April 17, 1989).Īmy's parents had high expectations for her success. She even felt ashamed of eating 'horrible' five-course Chinese meals and decided that she would grow up to look more American if she ate more 'American' foods. By the time Amy was a teenager, she had rejected everything Chinese. In fact, she was so determined to look like an American girl that she even slept with a clothespin on her nose, hoping to slim its Asian shape.

'I felt ashamed of being different and ashamed of feeling that way,' she remarked in a Los Angeles Times interview. She remembers trying to belong and feeling frustrated and isolated. She was the only Chinese girl in class from the third grade until she graduated from high school. Young Amy was deeply unhappy with her Asian appearance and heritage.

'They wanted us to have American circumstances and Chinese character,' Tan said in an interview with Elaine Woo in the Los Angeles Times (March 12, 1989). Although John and Daisy rarely socialized with their neighbors, Amy and her brothers ignored their parents' objections and tried hard to fit into American society. The family moved nearly every year, living in Oakland, Fresno, Berkeley, and San Francisco before settling in Santa Clara, California.

Besides Amy, the Tans also had two sons - Peter, born in 1950, and John, born in 1954. Amy Tan, whose Chinese name, An-mei, means 'blessing from America,' was born in 1952 in Oakland, California, the middle child and only daughter of John and Daisy Tan, who came to America from China in the late 1940s.

The joy luck club novelist