The Best Amy Tan is a Braised Amy Tan

When the Hyphen editorial team discovered that Amy Tan was the recipient of the third annual Litquake Barbary Coast Award for contribution to the Bay Area literary community, there was a flurry of confused emails: What exactly was this award and why did Amy Tan deserve to win it? I decided to go and investigate how the San Francisco literary community celebrates one of Asian America's most (in)famous writers.

As I sat in the half-full Herbst Theater this past Wednesday, in a crowd that seemed to be made up of mostly middle-aged white people, I considered what exactly I thought of Amy Tan's winning this award. Obviously, as we have covered at Hyphen extensively, though Tan indeed put "the Bay Area on the literary map" -- the point of the award as explained by Litquake's founders Jack Boulware and Jane Ganhal -- The Joy Luck Club and Tan's subsequent bibliography has irked many an Asian American.

Earlier this year, Hyphen blogger Claire curated a blog carnival dedicated to immigration stories in some way inspired by the controversy and success around The Joy Luck Club on its 20th anniversary. Tan's work is criticized for over-exoticizing the Chinese American experience and also for her continued dismissal of Asian American men as viable characters. The conversation and blog carnival brought up the real discussion: that we Asian Americans who dismiss Tan's work do it almost more because of the way mainstream America eats it all up with a spoon, therefore marginalizing any Asian American experiences which do not involve high melodrama and escapes from ethnic enclaves into the arms of white men and surburban success. I wondered how you could possibly have a "roast" -- as the Barbary Coast Award night is supposed to be -- when there are so many of us who roast the Amy Tan literary experience on the regular.

Would there be ironic jokes made about these issues throughout the night? Would someone read a passage from Tan's work and talk about how oppressive the Amy Tan syndrome has been to the rest of the Asian American community when it comes to good writing? I was kind of excited.

Full article at Hyphen
http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2009/10/the-best-amy-tan-is-a-braised.html#more