Online<\/a><\/p>\nShe remembers her father\u2019s station wagon \u2014 a woody \u2014 and swimming at a public pool.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember a tree in the front of the parish house, and I remember picking fruit with my parents or just sitting. I didn\u2019t pick anything. I just sat below, and my brother dropped some piece of fruit on my head and made me cry,\u201d Tan said.<\/p>\n
Tan will speak at the Saroyan Theatre in downtown Fresno. The event starts at 10:30 a.m.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou will hear the surprising facts of why it was very unlikely that I would become a writer or an artist. I will also show the ways in which I eased into this latest book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and what went into that \u2014 learning to draw, for one thing, learning to observe birds and how that came about \u2014 which are skills that also relate to writing,\u201d Tan said.<\/p>\n
GV Wire is a sponsor of San Joaquin Valley Town Hall.<\/p>\n
About The Joy Luck Club<\/p>\n
Tan is best known for her bestseller The Joy Luck Club.<\/p>\n
She started writing fiction on the side. Her main job was working in the business world.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was writing business articles, and I was doing that about 90 hours a week. I thought my life was pretty meaningless because it was on subjects of telecommunications and account management, which were not exactly a passion of mine,\u201d Tan said.<\/p>\n
She always loved to read, so she started to write fiction. It helped her discover things about herself.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of fiction is representing a kind of personal truth \u2014 maybe it\u2019s a description of love gone awry or being betrayed or finding out years later that your parent did love you, or whatever it is. Those kinds of moments are so startling when you\u2019re writing a story that it takes you back and it becomes, that\u2019s how it felt like. That is what it was like. And that is the personal truth that I look for. And when I found it the first time writing fiction, I knew I would do it the rest of my life, regardless of whether I got published. It was that worthwhile,\u201d Tan said.<\/p>\n
She did get published, and The Joy Luck Club put her on the map. She did not expect it to be a success.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the book got published, I was startled. I thought my life was out of control. I never dreamt it, so why is this happening? I didn\u2019t trust it. I thought it\u2019s going to go away \u2014 do not get comfortable with it.<\/p>\n
Fame meant, Tan said, everything she ever wrote \u2014 like notes \u2014 would be archived. But fame has its advantages. Tan was touring the Omaha Zoo during her GV Wire the interview.<\/p>\n
The book also became a hit Hollywood film. Tan said she saw the dailies as the movie filmed. She estimates she has seen the movie 10 times.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know all the lines because I wrote them. I\u2019ll tell you the best thing about watching that movie was the time I went to the premiere with my mother,\u201d Tan said.<\/p>\n
During one emotional moment in the movie, when a little girl watches her mother die, the premiere-goers cried. Tan\u2019s mother was the only one with a dry eye.<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked, \u2018How did you like it? Are you OK?\u2019 And she said, \u2018In China things were worse. This is already better. This is good,’\u201d Tan said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amy Tan closes out the San Joaquin Valley Town Hall lecture series Wednesday in what is a homecoming.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[112,114,113],"class_list":["post-265796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fresno","tag-fresno","tag-fresno-headlines","tag-fresno-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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