American - Novelist | February 19, 1952 -
My grandmother. She's someone I never met, and I would've loved to have met her. She's been a huge influence on our entire family, not just me. She is a mystery. It's not clear exactly what about her is truth and myth.
Amy Tan
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In the mid-1800s, they were known also as 'singsong houses,' and the courtesans were actually master musicians.
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I was shocked, and I ended up contacting three academics to find out if it could possibly be that my grandmother was a courtesan.
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For many courtesans, it was over by age 22.
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In a second-class courtesan house, the courtship was much briefer. It could even be one night; usually it went on a little bit longer. But as the years went by, that period of courtship was shorter and shorter.
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Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.
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My older brother and I read all the time. My father read, but only things related to religion. One year, he did read a set of stories that was called something like '365 Stories' out loud to us. They followed a family for the year, a page a day. They were about kids with simple problems - like a wheel coming off their bicycle.
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I measured my success by how many clients I had and how many billable hours I had.
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When my mother read 'The Joy Luck Club', she was always complaining to me how she had to tell her friends that, no, she was not the mother or any of the mothers in the book.
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Luck is in every part of China. Many Chinese stores and restaurants have the word 'luck' in their names. The idea is that, just by using the word 'luck' in names of things, you can attract more of it. I think that's true in my life as well. You attract luck because you go after it.
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I just feel very lucky to be able to write fiction because I think, otherwise, I would have had to spend a fortune on a psychiatrist - and I still wouldn't get 1/100th of what I get writing fiction.
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