Word: tans
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...author's San Francisco girlhood with mystical tales of female warriors and monkey kings, Asian Americans were the invisible men and women in American literature. Even after Kingston's success, a dozen years passed before another Asian-American fiction writer achieved fortune and fame. First-time novelist Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, a loosely connected series of stories about Chinese-American mothers and daughters, sold an astonishing 275,000 hard-cover copies. Publishers took note, and this spring brings not only Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, but also splendid debuts by three other Chinese...
Some cynics warn, however, that the fascination with Asian-American fiction may be only skin-deep. "When there is a great success like Amy Tan's book, everyone is out there looking for his or her own Amy Tan," says Shannon Ravenel, the recently retired editor of the annual collection of The Best American Short Stories. Louie, 36, predicts that "if Gus Lee or Gish Jen don't come through with big sales, then the next wave of interest in Asian- American writers may not come for another 15 years." That would be a shame, because each of these authors...
Fairy tales and Amy Tan seem to keep close company. Two years ago Tan was just another struggling, unpublished, 37-year-old writer, making up brochures for computer companies while composing stories on the side. By the end of 1989 she was the author of the most admired novel on the best-seller list, her Joy Luck Club having conquered critics and the public alike. A literary star had been born overnight -- and, in her wake, a fairy tale's difficult postscript: How could she ever live up to what felt like a once-in-a-lifetime success...
...point -- of Tan's novel is forgiveness, and the way in which understanding the miseries of others makes it harder to be hard on them. And as the story all but tells itself -- so seamlessly it feels as if Tan's ancestors are speaking through her -- it bestows on us a host of luminous surprises. The first is that the dowdy, pinchpenny old woman has a past more glamorous than fairy-tale, and more sad. The second is that in the light of her trials, her curious superstitions come to seem as sound as legal evidence. The final surprise...
BOOKS Amy Tan and the new wave of Asian-American writers...