Amy Tan Struggles

Millions of immigrant children wander aimlessly between two worlds. Worlds that are both very different, but never feel right. Encountering life from a different perspective, these children have much to offer the world. Born in California, to Chinese parents, Amy Tan is one of those immigrant children.. Her stories share similarities to her struggles of being an immigrant child and her encounters with conflict throughout her life. Amy Tan's experiences influence her books by bringing elements from her life into the characters, conflicts, and ideas in her stories. Amy Tan’s life is seen in many of her books which entail the relationship between Chinese generations and their struggle to balance two cultures. Tan's Chinese parents wanted American

Amy Tan went through many disastrous experiences as she describes her life as being, “this magnet for danger and having all these terrible things happen”(Interview). She felt very unlucky for a while. And then realized in spite of all these things, she stayed alive, which made her a lucky person. Despite many bad things happening to her: the murder of her best friend, all the car accidents, the near-drowning, the robbery, the gun to her head and the mud slide, she still has a positive outlook, which impacts the ideas in her books(Interview). In The Kitchen God’s Wife, she states many ideas inspired by events in her life. Through her words on her pages, she conveys her ideas, as the mother Winnie remembers a “common saying everyone in China was raised with: If you can't change your fate, change your attitude”(Tan, Kitchen). Winnie thinks people who dealt with painful events, no longer blamed fate and no longer looked at the awful things in their life. Instead, these people believed they had something to fight for. Similar to the situation in Amy Tan’s life, Winnie decides to change her attitude and consequently her outlook on life changes as well(Tan, Kitchen). The morals in Tan’s books, result from the events in her