The Life and Career of Amy Tan Essays -- Biography, Chinese-American A

Amy Tan, an accomplished Chinese-American author, is well-known for her incorporation of her Chinese heritage into her works of literature. Amy Ruth Tan was born to John and Daisy Tan on February 19, 2952 (â€Å"Amy Tan Biography†). Although Amy Tan’s parents were both born in China, she was American born. Daisy Tan was born to a wealthy family in Shanghai, China. John Tan, on the other hand, was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister. Amy Tan’s parents met in a dangerous decade of the 1940’s in China while battles were being fought on all fronts. John Tan was working for the United States Information Service during WWII, which made it fairly easy for him to escape China for the U.S. when the war ended. Daisy Tan, however, was not as fortunate; she had been imprisoned. She escaped in 1949 right before the Communist takeover; she left on the last boat to deport from Shanghai to the U.S. Shortly after Daisy arrived in the U.S., her and John Tan arranged to be married. Amy Tan’s parents had two other children besides her; they were John Jr. and Peter Tan. The Tan clan moved around many times while Amy Tan was growing up, finally settling in Santa Clara, California (Chatfield-Taylor 190). Growing up in California, Tan continued to embrace the typical values of Americans. She had taken on American values as her own identity, completely ignoring most of her Chinese heritage. In fact, young Amy Tan would answer her mother’s Chinese questions in English (Miller 1162). Teenage Amy Tan lost both her father and sixteen-year-old brother to brain tumors. Soon after that, she learned that she had two half-sisters in China from her mother’s first marriage (â€Å"Amy Tan Biography†). In 1987, Tan made a trip to China to meet those very same ... ...Despite the difficulties Winnie went through while she was younger, she appears to be a strong woman in America. The novel suggests that perhaps this is because she has learned from her past and had to recreate her ideas about women in America (â€Å"SparkNotes† Par 6). Yet another theme in The Kitchen God’s Wife is the tension between fate and self-determination. The ideas of luck, fate, and destiny are constantly being tried against the ideas of self-determination, free choice, and will. Winnie’s life is full of choices, and these very choices are what causes her to be become such a strong woman (â€Å"SparkNotes† Par 7). Winnie recreates her life in America, which sheds another shard of light on the idea of self-determination over the idea of fate. She chose to recreate herself, and she had to make it happen; fate played no hand in her becoming (â€Å"SparkNotes† Par 8).