The Joys And Sorrows Of Amy Tan

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The child Amy, born in Oakland, Calif., in 1952, went through a tumultuous life, including, during her 15th year, the deaths of her brother Peter and her father John of brain tumors within six months of each other. She survived her enraged mother's decision, holding a knife to Amy's neck, "to kill me first and then kill herself." She entertained rebellious crushes on druggy, inappropriate boys as a way to drive her frantic mother further up the wall.

The adult Amy has also made it through, at least so far, the peculiar ordeal of celebrity. It began after The Joy Luck Club ascended from the status of best seller to classic-in-embryo, when its author began facing demands to utter windy, geopolitical profundities. "People would ask me about trade sanctions in China. They'd ask me about the 1 million missing baby girls. I saw it as a great danger that people would see the book as some sort of template for how Chinese families are," she says. "To me, my family was the most weird entity. I happened to grow up in it, so that was my point of reference. I'm so much a specifist as a writer. I'm not a generalist."

Fame does have its compensations. Tan mentions in passing that she has visited the White House five times and that she has had dinner with the Clintons on New Year's Eve in Hilton Head, S.C. She also had the unusual thrill of sneaking her two tiny Yorkshire terriers, Lilli and Bubba, in a mesh bag past the guards at the Supreme Court Building for a meeting with Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

She will take her Yorkies with her on her upcoming tour to promote The Bonesetter's Daughter because she won't ask her husband to come along. "It would be too boring for him," she says, but she dreads being alone in hotel rooms. "I was raised with a sense of danger, so it's very much a part of my life. When I'm in a hotel, I think of fires that could happen, and where I should run to or what floor I'm on. I've had my hotel room broken into three times by strangers in the times that I've gone on tour. It's not even [always] a crime. Hotels will sometimes give a key accidentally to someone checking in when there's already someone else in that room. The dogs would bark if somebody were trying to get into the door; they would alert me."

Barring such misadventures, Tan hopes to get some writing done on the road, but she will miss her space in the Presidio Heights condo, where she can work with the shades pulled down from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. without interruption. Except, she admits, those she inflicts on herself: "I have a terrible addiction that has destroyed a lot of my writing time. It's called eBay. I buy everything on eBay. I buy wineglasses. I don't want to worry about breaking crystal wineglasses, so I buy them off eBay for a dollar. When they break, who cares?"

What gives? Tan is rich and famous. She spends some of her leisure time jamming with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a musical group composed of such fellow best-selling writers as Stephen King, Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson and Mitch Albom, who give charity concerts, usually for literacy projects. Tan's trademark song, which she performs in dominatrix gear, is a version of Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made for Walking. This high-stepping, whip-cracking woman worries about breaking crystal wineglasses? "I am," Tan says, conjuring a lifetime of joys and sadnesses, "my mother's daughter."