谭恩美简介(共8页).doc

精选优质文档-----倾情为你奉上Amy Tan Two kinds I. Biographic Sketch A. Family Background and Education Amy Tan was born on February 19, 1952, to John and Daisy Tan who immigrated to United States to escape from the Chinese civil war in 1949, when the communist took over the country. Born in Oakland, California, Tan lived and moved several times with her father, who was an electronic engineer and a Baptist minister, and her mother, a vocational nurse. When she was merely fourteen, Tan and her brother Peter moved to Switzerland with Mrs. Tan after John Tan and the eldest son of the family died of brain tumors. There in Switzerland, Tan managed to graduate from high school as a foreigner, striving to live with her mother through arguments and family turmoil. In 1969, the family moved back to States and settled down in Santa Clara, California. The constant conflict between Tan and her mother lasted for some time so that they did not contact nor communicate with each other for half of a year. Like many Chinese parents' expectation of wanting their offspring to become medical doctors, Tan's mother was no exception. Mrs. Tan has high expectation on Tan and hence she sent her off to Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, for her medical education. Despite faithfully committing to her mother's wish, Tan met Lou DeMattei and followed him to San Jose City College to continue her study. She changed her study subject to linguistics and graduated as a double major: BA of linguistics and English. San Jose State University granted her a master degree in linguistics in 1973, and after that, she was admitted as a doctoral student in linguistics with fellowship in University of California at Berkeley. Yet, she decided to quit the program after one year and began to work as a language development consultant. By then, she has become Mrs. DeMattei, and the family was prosperous with Lou's tax law business and her own career of helping disabled children. The job later got her a position of editing a medical journal. But after 1983, Tan switched to be a business/technical writer. The blooming financial environment, however, did not bring along happiness for Tan. She was mentally troubled and hence began to seek for professional psychological help. After a failure of psychological counseling session, Tan set her heart to writing for curing herself. She then started to write to share and to cure. B. Significant influence on Tan and her work It is the constant conflict with Daisy Tan, her mother, and the emotional turmoil that Daisy has bestowed on her that have made Tan discover the resources of scheming her successful novels. Daisy Tan's early life and biographical stories were legends themselves. Grew up in an old esteemed family in Shanghai, she witnessed her mother's tragic life. After her scholar husband's death, Jingmei, Tan's maternal grandmother, was raped and taken as a low-ranked concubine by a wealthy industrialist. She brought Daisy with her to live in the wealthy family in Shanghai and confided her dilemmatic suffering with her daughter before she committed suicide. Daisy grew up with painful loss of her mother and got married early, but she did not live a happy life afterward; instead, Daisy was maltreated by her violent and abusive chauvinist husband Wang Zo that later took away her right of visiting her three daughters, and further had her persecuted to prison for two years after she escaped and divorced him. During the Sino-Japanese War, she flew with John Tan, a brilliant student who rejected MIT's offer but attended Berkeley Baptist Divinity School, and thereafter, they immigrated to States. Tan's first two and the most well known works put one theme center-staged – the relationship of the traditional immigrant mother and the second generation Chinese-American daughter. In accordance with Daisy's stories and Tan's own childhood hardship, growing up under severe supervision and with high standards for everything, she schematically tells the story of her mother, her grandmother and other female related or unrelated acquaintance, along with the aids of the ancient folklores, stories and legends that she learned from her father when she was a child. Through her skillful writing techniques and brilliant story-telling, Tan's first publication of the first novel swept the world and her name has the become a household one. II. Her Works Raised by a determined mother whose legendary biographical stories are already fascinating, Amy Tan explicitly expressed her love-hate relationship with her strict mother who had one time mentally tormented her with overloaded expectation and emotional dramatic reactions. Fed with ancient Chinese legends, folk stories, traditions and superstitious beliefs, Tan grew up in a bicultural environment, feeling the complexity and difficulty in her life, just like many second-generation Chinese-Americans. A. Joy Luck Club This first novel of Tan's w。