How much is Amy Tan worth?
| Net Worth: | $6 Million |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Professional author |
| Date of Birth: | 19 February 1952 |
| Country: | United States of America |
| Height: | 5′ 2″ |
About Amy Tan
Before embarking on a career as a writer, Tan did a variety of odd jobs while she was in school, including stints as a switchboard operator, carhop, bartender, and pizza maker. She worked as a freelance business writer on projects for AT&T, IBM, Bank of America, and Pacific Bell, all of which required her to write under pseudonyms that did not have a Chinese accent.
Tan was born in the city of Oakland in the state of California. She is the middle child of three to be born to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan. Her father is John and her mother is Daisy. Her father was a Baptist minister and an electrical engineer. He fled China during the upheaval of the Chinese Civil War in order to make a new life for his family in the United States. Tan received a secondary education at the Marian A. Peterson High School in Sunnyvale for a single academic year. Her father and older brother Peter both passed away from brain tumors when she was fifteen years old. Their deaths occurred within a span of six months of one another.
Tan started writing her debut novel, The Joy Luck Club, when she was working as a business writer. She then enrolled in a writers’ group called the Squaw Valley Program in order to improve her manuscript of the novel. She sent in a piece of the unfinished novel named “Endgame” that was written in the form of a short story for the workshop. She was presented with offers from a number of well-known publishing houses, such as A.A. Knopf, Vintage, Harper & Row, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Simon & Schuster, and Putnam Books, but she chose not to accept any of them because the compensation they provided was, in her opinion and that of her agent, insufficient. In the end, she decided to take the second offer that Putnam Books presented her with, which was for the sum of $50,000 and was made in December 1987. The Joy Luck Club is a collection of eight interconnected stories concerning the lives of four sets of Chinese-American mothers and daughters.
The second novel written by Tan, titled The Kitchen God’s Wife, also focuses on the bond between an immigrant Chinese mother and her daughter who was born in the United States. Tan’s third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses, was a break from the author’s first two novels in that it focused on the connections between sisters. The author was partially inspired by one of the half-siblings that was supported to come to the United States. In her fourth book, titled “The Bonesetter’s Daughter,” Tan revisits the story of a Chinese immigrant mother and her daughter who was born in the United States.
In the literary garage band known as the Rock Bottom Remainders, Tan played the roles of “lead rhythm dominatrix” backup singer, and second tambourine player. Before calling it quits as a touring act, the band had already contributed over a million dollars to various reading initiatives. Tan had a cameo appearance in the episode “Insane Clown Poppy.” It was the third episode of Season 12 of The Simpsons.
The work of Tan has been adapted for use in a wide variety of different kinds of media. In 1993, the novel The Joy Luck Club was turned into a stage play, and in the same year, filmmaker Wayne Wang turned the novel into a cinematic adaptation. In 2008, an opera version of The Bonesetter’s Daughter was created and performed. The children’s book written by Tan titled Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat was turned into an animated television show that was also titled Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat and was broadcast on PBS.
Summing-Up
The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement are some of the other works that Tan has authored. Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir is the title of Tan’s most recent book, which is a memoir. In addition to this, Tan is the author of two books for children: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), the latter of which was adapted into an animated series that was broadcast on PBS. Both of these stories have been translated into other languages.
