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CLick for signed COPY OF THE Backyard Bird Chronicles Born in the U.S. in 1952 to immigrant parents from China, Amy Tan grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She 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 1981, she became a freelance business writer, working with management consulting and telecommunications companies, including IBM and AT&T. In 1985, Amy attended her first fiction workshop at the Community of Writers in Palisades Tahoe. She and several participants formed a writers group, led by author and creative writing teacher Molly Giles. Her first story, “Rules of the Game,” was published in 1986 in a small literary magazine, FM Five. It was reprinted in Seventeen, and soon after translated into Italian and published in Grazia. Literary agent Sandy Dijkstra read the story and offered to serve as her agent. In 1987, Amy went to China for the first time, accompanied by her mother. When she returned home, she learned that she had received several offers based on her submission of three short stories. The resulting book of connected stories,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.
