Amy Tan has a complicated relationship with her own fame. In 2026 alone, the writer has been honored with four different special recognitions, including the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement and the Authors Guild Preston Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community. “Awards make me very uncomfortable,” she told California. “It’s not out of false humility—[awards] cause me to reach into myself and say, what did I really do? Did I do it for a reason? What are they acknowledging about my work?”
Tan has been publishing fiction since the mid-1980s. Her debut novel, The Joy Luck Club, about first-generation Chinese immigrant women and their daughters, was published in 1989 to immediate acclaim. It was the right time for a writer like herself, she noted, just when “baby boomer women were getting older and their mothers were getting old.” It was also at a time when the publishing industry was beginning to look for minority voices. She had attended Berkeley on a graduate minority fellowship (“something that would probably not be given to an Asian student these days,” she observed).
Cal’s Alum of the Year Award was added to Tan’s list of achievements this year. For all her ambivalence, Tan says she doesn’t take the accolades lightly. “I’m honored, I’m thankful to the person who nominated me, the people who voted,” she said. The award took her back to her student days in the 1970s, and “how much in awe I was of all the people at Berkeley, … one of the greatest schools that we have in the world.”
California spoke with Tan while she explored the zoo in Omaha, Nebraska. She was there for a performance with her band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, which has featured a rotating lineup of fellow writers including Stephen King and Dave Barry. “It’s more comedy than musical talent,” she said. Outside of writing and music, she’s also an avid birder. This fall at the Monterey Jazz Festival, she is performing a musical piece she wrote that incorporates birdsong and bird rhythms. Given her wide range of interests, it makes sense that she seems to feel at home in student mode.
Tan did graduate studies in linguistics at Berkeley in the late 1970s, and though she didn’t complete a degree, she still feels the campus enriched her writing life and considers the university to be her “link to the world of linguistics.”
“I don’t think a lot of people recognize the fact that what I do as a writer is very much the same with language as what linguists do,” she said. “Language is dynamic. Language is history. Language is sociology, anthropology—and that’s all there in my fiction.”
Berkeley wasn’t easy for Tan—she put herself through school by working multiple jobs (including at a pizza parlor where she was once held at gunpoint). About a year into her degree, her best friend was murdered, making her rethink her career aspirations to “get a job at a university and sit in a wonderful office and write papers.” Her friend had been working on creating special equipment for people with disabilities, and Tan left Berkeley to work with disabled children. “I wanted to make sense of a meaningless act,” she later told the Los Angeles Times.
Tan remains deeply connected to Berkeley, remaining in touch and collaborating with friends from graduate school. Last year, she donated a portion of her archive, which includes unpublished drafts and manuscripts, to the Bancroft Library.
Tan debated whether to make her papers public for more than a decade. “It’s the equivalent of showing people your underwear drawer, your worst picture … all the things that would make you self-conscious,” she said. As a writer, she noted that self-consciousness is “one of her worst enemies.” But ultimately, she decided, “I don’t want to censor myself.”
“The nice thing about it being at Berkeley,” she added, was not just that the Bancroft is such a stellar library, but also, “I live close by, and if I want to visit myself, and my other incarnations over time, I can do that.”
Making her papers public is just one example of Tan’s constant efforts to step out of her comfort zone. “As a writer you have to reach a place of discomfort,” she said. “Discomfort, conflict, confusion, contradictions … that’s the place to start a story.”
Apoorva Tadepalli is a freelance writer and book critic.
