

And of course, she had said this before the game – that and a hundred other useless things that had nothing to do with my winning.” – “Four Directions,” The Joy Luck Club

This was because she couldn’t figure out how the Chinese dates, based on the lunar calendar, translated into American dates. And even though the birthdates corresponds to only one danger, my mother worried about them all. “It would have been enough to think that even one of these dangers could befall a child.

By signing up you agree to our terms of use Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. So I had a hard time believing this would get published…The fact that it actually became a bestseller was mind-boggling.”įor your reading pleasure and to entice you to read much more of Amy Tan, here are some of the universal scenes of the mother-daughter question which include: the struggle over ensuring our children’s happiness and safety repeating the patterns of self-subservience that the mothers never intended for their daughter and, the everlasting bond between mother and daughter that doesn’t end – no matter how many thousands of miles they may be separated. During that time, there was no market – no acknowledged market – for a book like that. “I was writing short stories, and an agent saw one and wanted to be my agent…I thought she was a scam artist, because this simply does not happen. “I had a really unusual experience, and I would say it should never be a model for how one gets published, especially if you’re not in the mainstream,” Amy Tan recalled in an interview with writer Celeste Ng in The Lily.
