“Born in the U.S. to immigrant parents from China, Amy Tan grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in a succession of twelve homes by the time she graduated from high school. At age 15, she lost her older brother and father to brain tumors. After this tragedy, her mother, fearing a curse, impulsively took Amy and her younger brother to Europe to see the world. After several missteps, the three wanderers settled in Montreux, Switzerland, where Amy fell in love, nearly eloped, played an unwitting role in the drug bust of friends, and still managed to graduate from high school one year early.  

Amy attended five colleges: Linfield College, San Jose City College, San Jose State University, University of California at Santa Cruz, and University of California at Berkeley.  She received her B.A. with a double major in English and Linguistics, followed by her M.A. in Linguistics.  She worked as a language development specialist for county-wide programs serving developmentally disabled children, birth to five, and later became  director for a demonstration project funded by the U.S. Department of Education to mainstream multicultural children with developmental disabilities into early childhood programs.  In 1983, she became a freelance business writer, working with telecommunications companies, including IBM and AT&T. 

In 1985, Amy began writing fiction as an incentive to cut back on her heavy freelance workload.  She attended her first workshop at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and then joined a writers group led by writer and creative writing teacher Molly Giles.   Her first story was published in 1986  in a small literary magazine, FM Five, which was then reprinted in Seventeen  and Grazia.   Literary AgentSandy Dijkstra read her early work and offered to serve as her agent, even though Amy asserted she had no plans to pursue a fiction writing career.  In 1987, Amy went to China for the first time, accompanied by her mother.  When she returned home, she learned that she had received  three offers for a book of short stories, of which only three had been written.  The resulting book, The Joy Luck Club, was hailed as a novel and became a surprise bestseller, spending over forty weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List.” 
From amytan.net