Washington -- This time, her name is above the title on the book jacket. She's being feted at splashy publishing parties, and her promotional tour will take her not just across the country but over the Atlantic. The transformation of Amy Tan from surprise discovery of 1989 to established commodity of 1991 is complete.
Which has netted her, to date, fame, fortune and two cracked teeth, the result of the nocturnal gnashings of an author who hit the top her first time out and now faced the dreaded sophomore jinx that has bedeviled other promising writers.
But if early reviews are to be believed, Ms. Tan's teeth were needlessly martyred. "The Kitchen God's Wife" is receiving mostly warm accolades that, if not as uniformly adoring as those that greeted its predecessor, "The Joy Luck Club," would elate most authors.
Except, perhaps, Amy Tan.
"I'm very wary of this kind of success," the tiny and tempered Ms. Tan said in a recent interview. "I want to judge for myself . . . and not see success measured by the number of books I sell, or the reviews I've gotten. All these numbers, all these things -- as if someone gives you a certificate of success."
Ms. Tan's own definition of success is "not something concrete. It means having a focus in life and a goal. To learn what questions to ask, to do the most to discover what that focus means." And by this definition, she grades herself as "not 100 percent, but fairly much so."
Readers and critics are somewhat more generous in their assessment. "Joy Luck," a poetic and gemlike story told through the distinctive voices of four elderly Chinese women and their Americanized daughters, has sold more than two million copies since it unexpectedly burst on the market in 1989 and turned a free-lance technical writer from San Francisco into a literary celebrity around the world.
And now, "The Kitchen God's Wife" -- the story of a woman's struggle to escape both an abusive marriage and the war-bound and tradition-strangling China of the 1930s and '40s -- seems destined to add to Ms. Tan's repute. Calling it "a harrowing, compelling and at times bitterly humorous tale in which an entire world unfolds in a Tolstoyan tide of event and detail," novelist Robb Forman Dew predicts in the New York Times Book Review that "none of Ms. Tan's fans will be disappointed. 'The Kitchen God's Wife' is a more ambitious effort and, in the end, greatly satisfying."
Dressed in yards of flowing gray -- a silky pants outfit topped by a voluminous kimono-style jacket (the same one she's wearing in the "Kitchen God" book jacket photo) -- Ms. Tan's interview persona also registers in the neutral zone. Neither outgoing nor diffident, neither confessional nor secretive, Ms. Tan, 39, in person is as evenly keeled as her novels are wildly evocative.
Still, her wry wit occasionally peeps through the same remarks you've seen or heard in interviews past (the result, perhaps, of her going on automatic pilot in the presence of the press and/or unimaginative reporters asking the same questions over and over).
Arriving late for this particular interview, she confesses she lost track of time during dinner. "The Occidental," she says, naming a restaurant near the Washington hotel she's staying at, "not the Oriental."
Now writing her third novel, she's also working on a movie version of "The Joy Luck Club" with the respected independent director Wayne Wang. In addition to writing the screenplay, she jokes, she'll be in charge of keeping the numerous Chinese actresses in line, especially those cast as older, less attractive characters.
"I can see them saying, 'Oh, I don't think that's how my character would be. I think she would be a very fashionable lady,' " Ms. Tan says with a laugh, vogueishly patting her own glossy black hair.
Like the daughter characters in her novels, Ms. Tan was born in the United States (Oakland, Calif., in her case) and went through the push-pull conflict familiar to children of immigrants, trying to reconcile their own worlds with those not entirely left behind by their parents. Also like the daughter characters, she is married to American -- a tax attorney named Lou DeMattei -- but she's been quick to point out he is not the insensitive clod that his counterparts may be in her novels.
And, finally, like the daughter in "The Kitchen God's Wife," Ms. Tan's father died of cancer when she was a teen-ager -- in Ms. Tan's case, just months after the death of her older brother, also of a brain tumor.
Perhaps it is understandable, then, that Ms. Tan's books focus on mothers and daughters. A mother's secrets, a daughter's independence and, in between, a massive wall of generational and cultural tensions. These are the themes of Amy Tan's books and, seemingly, Amy Tan's life.
Her novels are such familial romans a clef, in fact, that she says her mother, Daisy Tan, has asked her, "What are we going to write next?"
"The Kitchen God's Wife" is very much her mother's story, Ms. Tan says. Daisy Tan's long-suppressed memories of wartime China finally emerged, at a time when Amy Tan was finally ready to listen.
"She was very much transformed, not so much by the book but by the telling of the stories, letting go of the pain, the anger," Ms. Tan said of her mother, who lives near her, outside San Jose, Calif.
"Before, when I would ask her about war, she would say, 'I don't want to talk about it.' She couldn't bring it to the surface. Now she's become this very adamant person, 'We have to tell what happened to the women of our family.' Before, it was, "It's past, it's past. That's how China was,' " Ms. Tan says, alternating from her voice to her mother's. "But I think it was also that I didn't want to listen. I would say, 'I know, I know, you already told me that.' She never had the sense that anybody cared, anybody listened. So now that I don't say that any more, she tells me new things."
The book is structured as the unveiling of a secret, as Weili (or Winnie) finally tells her daughter Pearl the truth about her horrific past -- abandoned as a child by her mother, married off to an unspeakably brutal man who raped and humiliated her over the years, surviving, just barely, the bombings of the invading Japanese and, finally, the saving grace of escape to America just before the Communists took over.
Like Winnie, Daisy Tan also fled an abusive marriage in China, but at the cost of leaving behind her children. And like Winnie, she gave birth to a pragmatic, ironic American daughter who grew up rejecting her mother's traditional notions of luck and fate and gods and chance.
From "The Kitchen God's Wife":
And there was also this superstition, what I came to think of as her theory of the Nine Bad Fates. She said she had once heard that a person is destined to die if eight bad things happen. If you don't recognize the eight ahead of time and prevent them, the ninth one is always fatal. And then she would ruminate over what the eight bad things might have been, how she should have been sharp enough to detect them in time.
To this day it drives me crazy, listening to her various hypotheses, the way religion, medicine and superstition all merge with her own beliefs. She puts no faith in other people's logic -- to her, logic is a sneaky excuse for tragedies, mistakes, and accidents. And according to my mother, nothing is an accident. She's like a Chinese version of Freud, or worse.
While her mother's generation may turn to gods and herbs to change their fate, Ms. Tan's generation is more likely to turn to their own brand of faith healing -- therapy. And, in fact, Ms. Tan has said she started writing fiction after a psychiatrist repeatedly fell asleep during their sessions. She decided to self-heal instead by trying to write fiction.
A short story that she wrote eventually became part of "The Joy Luck Club," which ultimately freed her from the technical writing she did for various corporations. The book has since been translated into 17 languages but, ironically, hasn't done well in China, perhaps, she says, because of the translation.
"I don't read Chinese, but I had heard the translation changed the tone quite a bit," she said. "It was high literary, very obtuse and hard to understand. It's much the same as what happened in Italy. On the first page of 'Joy Luck,' the daughter says, 'Don't show off.' In Italian they translated it, 'Don't be ostentatious.' It's not to say I'm incapable of using big words. But you change a whole story by changing its language."
Both her books are written in simple language reminiscent of oral storytelling. Ms. Tan said she wrote "Joy Luck" that way so her mother could understand it even though it wasn't in her native tongue.
She speaks of her books as gifts to her mother, now in her mid-70s, but they obviously speak to a wider audience, many of whom she suspects are like her: baby boomer women at a point in their lives when they've either lost their mothers or fear such a loss. Or, perhaps they're feeling the shift that Ms. Tan herself felt, of switching roles with their mothers as they age, become ill or simply require more help.
"I found our relationship changing. She began to depend on me more. She was becoming more like the daughter and I was becoming more like the mother," Ms. Tan recalled. "It was sad for me. It was sad I was the one to protect her.
"I think what happened with [the success of 'The Joy Luck Club], she reclaimed her role again as mother," Ms. Tan said. "She would say, 'This could go away, be careful.' She didn't say it to be mean; it was really a very protective thing. She knew this was the kind of thing that could devastate a person. I like it better this way."
Ms. Tan, unfairly, gets pegged as a mother-daughter expert, her books ersatz "My Mother, Myself"-style treatises for Chinese-American women. And, indeed, while "The Kitchen God's Wife" is structurally based on a mother-daughter relationship, it is much more about war and its ravages on people who had no say in whether it was declared.
"My mother would say, 'Oh, the war, I wasn't affected,' " Ms. Tan recalled. "But then, later, she would say, 'Three times a week, we had to run to the east gate or the west gate [of the city] to escape the bombs.' I would say, 'But I thought you said you weren't affected by the war.' And her answer was, 'I wasn't. I wasn't killed.'
Though her task now is to promote this book through numerous media appearances -- everything from the "Today" show to Larry King -- her thoughts are actually on her next book, which, she pointedly notes, is not about a mother and daughter.
In the meantime, she faces another, and enviable, task -- coping with that thing called success.
"I find I have to go back to being quiet and by myself and with my family," Ms. Tan says, "taking the cat to the vet, fixing the chip on the window."
THE TAN FILE
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Born: Oakland, Calif., Feb. 19, 1952.
Education: Bachelor's and master's degrees, San Jose State University.
What her mother wanted her to become: A neurosurgeon and classical pianist.
What she became: Language development consultant, technical writer, novelist.
On her relationship with her mother: "Our relationship is very intense because it's been so turbulent. There was a period of six months when we didn't speak to each other. There were other times when we had disagreements. I didn't want to hear anything she had to say about anything."
And why she fixed it: "In 1978, she went to China, where her other daughters live. I thought she would see how great her other daughters were and think, 'I can get rid of the spare.' "