Amy Tan once told an interviewer that
after the runaway success of her first
novel, The Joy Luck Club, she made an effort to get away from the theme of
Chinese-American mother-daughter relationships. On the evidence of her new
novel, the attempt didn't last. The book has not just one problematic mother-
daughter configuration, but three, each one marked by her other recurring
themes: Chinese-American identity; the Chinese oppression of women;
abandonment and the search for love. For fans of Tan's early works, this may be a
welcome reprise. For others, it might sometimes feel like a revisiting too far.
Amy Tan is an American writer of Chinese origin. The larger relationship
between China and the US is an emotional one that seems to oscillate between
mutual demonising and mutual romanticising, with an underside of reciprocal
racial and cultural prejudice. If it is like that between two huge nations, Tan
leaves us in no doubt that the effects at an individual level are no
less complicated.
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The heroine of The Valley of Amazement, Violet, is the daughter of an American
madam and a painter. As a child in her mother's upmarket Shanghai brothel in
the early years of the 20th century, Violet assumes herself to be American, a
status she considers superior to the courtesans and servants who surround her.
It comes as a shock, therefore, to discover that her absent father is Chinese. When
her mother later sails to the US in search of a lost son, she is tricked into leaving
Violet behind. It comes as no surprise to find our heroine has in turn been sold
into the life of a courtesan.
Tan's favoured locations of California and Shanghai are revisited here. Shanghai
itself is a hybrid city – a foreign enclave in China. There is a side trip two-thirds
of the way through the novel to a village 300 miles inland, an excursion into
undiluted China, but it is more a nightmare to escape from than a location to
remember. The bulk of the narrative is divided between the west coast of the US
and east coast of China, two geographies and two cultures between which the
characters travel in search of themselves, and the missing parts of their own
biographies.
Lucia, Violet's mother, had set up her cross-cultural courtesan house after she
was abandoned by her Chinese lover, whom she met in California and followed to
China. Once in Shanghai she found, as she had been forewarned, that a pregnant
American woman was not considered a possible bride for the eldest son of a
traditional Chinese family.
True to Tan's customary themes, Lucia and Violet's relationship is fraught,
though not as fraught as Lucia's relationship with her own mother had been. Both
Lucia and Violet rely heavily on the support of a Chinese female friend who
interprets the local culture and teaches each in turn how to do business in it. In
Violet's case, the close companion is Magic Gourd, who was a courtesan in Lucia's
establishment until she was dismissed, in one of the novel's minor quirks,
because of her close relationship with a dead poet. Female friendships have room
to thrive here, not least because of the high mortality rate among the men.
The reader learns about the life of a courtesan in Shanghai in the early
20th century, largely through a long monologue in which Magic Gourd lays out
what awaits the 14-year-old Violet, and plans how the two of them can maximise
the returns on what will, by its nature, be a short career. Tan has used the
implausibly long monologue before, as a means of delivering necessary
information or laying out a plotline. This one is not without interesting detail,
though readers of Arthur Golden's 1997 novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, which was
set in Japan's courtesan culture, will find some of it familiar. The disadvantage of
this technique is that it does little to sustain the reader's engagement with the
character.
Indeed, the characters in this novel retain a certain detachment from each other,
and from the reader. Many are in search of what one calls "pure self being",
without necessarily convincing the reader that the quest will be fruitful. Violet's
narrative tells us as much as we need to know about the conflict of identities she
embodies, also played out in different forms through other characters. As a young
courtesan, she assumes a Chinese identity and her early clients are Chinese; she
marries an American, but is as unacceptable to his family as her mother had been
to her Chinese lover's family.
The novel's title is taken from a series of paintings produced by Violet's artist
father and serves as the imagined place of fulfilment for both mother and
daughter. Each has to learn that the image is an illusion and be reconciled to the
difficulties of seeking, maintaining and losing love instead.
At times Tan skates perilously close to the thin emotional ice of a Mills & Boon,
with the narrative of lost love and lost children, but she is too astute a writer to
fall through entirely. She is a brisk storyteller, and despite its flaws, The Valley of
Amazement packs in enough drama to keep her readers going to the end.
Author Bio
• Also named—En-Mai Tan
• Birth—February 15, 1952
• Where—Oakland, California, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., San Jose State University
• Currently—San Francisco, California
Amy Tan is a Chinese-American writer, many of whose works explore mother-daughter relationships. Her
first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989) brought her fame and has remained one of her most popular works. It
was adapted to film in 1993.
Early yeaars
Tan is the second of three children born to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan. Her father was an
electrical engineer and Baptist minister who traveled to the US to escape the Chinese Revolution. Although
she was born in Oakland, California, her family moved a number of times throughout her childhood.
When she was fifteen, her father and older brother Peter both died of brain tumors within six months of
each other. Tan subsequently moved with her mother and younger brother, John Jr., to Switzerland, where
she finished high school at the Institut Monte Rosa in Montreux.
It was during this period that Tan learned about her mother's previous marriage in China, where she had
four children (a son who died in toddlerhood and three daughters). Her mother had left her husband and
children behind in Shanghai — an incident that became the basis for Tan's first novel,The Joy Luck Club. In
1987, she and her mother traveled to China to meet her three half-sisters for the first time.
Tan enrolled at Linfield College in Oregon, a Baptist college of her mother's choosing. After she dropped out
to follow her boyfriend to San Jose City College in California, she and her mother stopped speaking for six
months. Tan ended up marrying the young man in 1974 and subsequently earned both her B.A. and M.A. in
English and linguistics from San Jose State University. She began her doctoral studies in linguistics at
University of California-Santa Cruz and Berkeley, but abandoned them in 1976.
Career
While in school, Tan worked odd jobs — serving as a switchboard operator, carhop, bartender, and pizza
maker. Eventually, she started writing freelance for businesses, working on projects for AT&T, IBM, Bank of
America, and Pacific Bell, writing under non-Chinese-sounding pseudonyms.
In 1985, she turned to fiction, publishing her first story in 1986 in a small literary journal. It was later
reprinted in Seventeen magazine and Grazia. On her return from the China trip with her mmother, where
she had met her half-sisters, Tan learned her agent had signed a contract for a book of short stories, only
three of which were written. That book eventually became The Joy Luck Club and launchd Tan's literary
career.
Extras
In addition to her novels (see below), Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992)
and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series airing on PBS. She
has also appeared on PBS in a short spot encouraging children to write.
Tan is a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band consisting of published writers, including
Barbara Kingsolver, Matt Groening, Dave Barry and Stephen King, among others. In 1994 she co-wrote,
with the other band members, Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America With Three
Chords and an Attitude.
In 1998, Tan contracted Lyme disease, which went undiagnosed for a few years. As a result, she suffers
from epileptic seizures due to brain lesions. Tan co-founded LymeAid 4 Kids, which helps uninsured children
pay for treatment, and wrote about her life with Lyme disease in a 2013 op-ed piece in the New York Times.
Tan is still married to the guy she ran off with from Linfield College and married in 1974. He is Louis
DeMattei, a lawyer, and the two live in San Francisco.
Books
1989 - The Joy Luck Club
1991 - The Kitchen God's Wife
1995 - The Hundred Secret Senses
2001 - The Bonesetter's Daughter
2003 - The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (Essays)
2005 - Saving Fish from Drowning
2013 - The Valley of Amazement
2017 - Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)
