Daisy Tan; Mother of ‘Joy Luck Club’ Author

Daisy Tan, the mother of author Amy Tan and the inspiration for her second book, “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” has died at the age of 83.

She died Monday of Alzheimer’s disease at her home in San Francisco.

“In a way, she was really my muse,” Amy Tan told the San Francisco Chronicle this week. “She was not a literary person. She was not someone who read fiction. She did not read most of my books. And yet she was my muse.

“The questions she had, the fact she never felt that anything was impossible--what’s in all my books is the quality of hope that she had in her life.”

Amy Tan, encouraged by her mother to switch from freelance writing to novels, gained fame with her first, “The Joy Luck Club,” in 1989. It told the story of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American daughters and became a popular motion picture in 1993.

In dedicating that book to her mother, the author wrote: “You asked me once what I would remember. This, and much more.”

The second book came about, Amy Tan said in a 1991 interview, because: “After she read ‘Joy Luck Club,’ my mother said she thought I had a great imagination because she thought none of the stuff in ‘Joy Luck Club’ had happened. She said ‘Next time, tell my true story.’ ”

Like Winnie Louie, the heroine of “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” Daisy Tan related to her daughter the story of her hard life and abusive marriage in China before she moved to San Francisco in 1949.

“The Kitchen God’s Wife,” Amy Tan said when it was published, was the “much more” she referred to in the dedication to the first book.

A Times reviewer praised the 1991 novel, saying: “It’s as if this beautiful book were asking, ‘Who can escape the pull of one’s own history, one’s own generation, and who can escape the pushing away of one’s own children--who?’ ”

Only slightly less directly, Daisy Tan also inspired her daughter’s stellar bestseller “The Joy Luck Club,” which has sold well over 2 million copies.

The author decided on the mother-daughter theme, she told The Times in 1989, when her mother suffered a heart attack, forcing her to consider the possibility of her mother’s dying before she got to know her better.

“I realized there were so many things I didn’t know about her,” she said. “I decided maybe this will be a good outlet for writing . . . to try to capture the feeling of what she’s been trying to say to me all these years.”

Daisy Tan fled Shanghai to escape her abusive first husband, leaving three daughters behind as well. When she arrived in San Francisco, she married Baptist minister John Tan, the father of the author and two sons.

When her husband and one son died of brain cancer in 1968, Daisy Tan took her surviving son and Amy to Switzerland to escape what she called the “diseased” house in San Francisco. But after a year of being unable to purchase soy sauce, she brought her children home to California.

Daisy Tan was later reunited with her Chinese daughters and remained close to the author, who bought her a condominium.

Besides her children, Daisy Tan is survived by two brothers and seven grandchildren.