Amy Tan is an American writer whose works explore the relationship between mother and daughter and the American experience for Chinese immigrants (Orr, 2010). She wrote A Pair of Tickets as the final part of her best known work The Joy luck Club. In 1989, The Joy Luck Club was published, and had a phenomenal success that made the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for seven months. Tan was named the Finalist for the National Book for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Also she received the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for fiction and the Commonwealth Club Gold Award (Bloom, 2002).
Amy Tan, whose Chinese name, An-mei, means "blessing from America," was born in 1952, in Oakland, California. She is the only daughter from three children born to Chinese immigrants Daisy (née Li), and John Tan. Young Amy was not happy at all with her Asian appearance and heritage, she was the only Chinese girl in class all of her school days until she graduated in high school (Orr, 2010). She remembers feeling frustrated and isolated, when she remarked in a Los Angeles Times interview "I felt ashamed of being different and ashamed of feeling that way," (Tan, 1989). When Tan was 15 years old, her father and he older brother Peter died within eight months period. Her mother became the only caregiver to the family during Amy's teenage years, which helped Amy to learn about her mother's former abusive husband in China, their four children (a toddler son who had died, and three daughters) and how her mother was forced to abandon her children in Shanghai . Learning that background about her mother, in addition to Amy's trip in 1987 with her mother to china, where she met her three half sisters, provided the basis for Tan's first novel, The Joy Luck Club (Evans, 2010). In A Pair of Tickets, the main character June May, like the author herself, was a Chinese born in the United States and grew up with an American background culture.