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AMY TAN Tan, Amy, Asian American novelist, was born in Oakland, Calif., on February 19, 1952 approximately two and a half years after her parents emigrated from China. Amy Tan grew up in a rather large family as the second-to-youngest child. She attended high school in Switzerland and has been educated at eight different colleges, including Berkley and Oregon University. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, she was fiercely opposed to her Chinese background in her youth, and she even went as far as sleeping with a clothespin on her nose hoping to narrow its Asian shape. Tan's ties to China have so much to do with her mother. Though her father was a deeply religious (Christian) man, her mother always kept her Chinese traditions on reserve. When Tan's father and brother both became terminally ill with malignant brain tumors, her mother called on as many of the Chinese religious traditions that she could. Tan says she is still "haunted" by these spirits that her mother so faithfully believed in; her works are especially reflective of these childhood experiences. After Tan's father and her older brother died from brain tumors within eight months of each other in 1968, her mother revealed that she had three daughters from a previous marriage still living in China. Tan felt sure that she was, in her own words, "the wicked daughter," so she became more rebellious and rejected her background with a renewed vigor.
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