Amy Tan

In Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, a group of Chinese-American women meets regularly to play mah-jongg, a Chinese game played with small ivory tiles. The women all came to the U.S. from China years earlier, and have kept their Chinese traditions. Their old-fashioned ways embarrass the book’s heroine, the grown daughter of one of the women. Above all, she wants to be American. But as the women tell their touching and often tragic stories of their lives, the daughter begins to understand and appreciate her Chinese heritage.

Amy Tan’s Chinese given name, An-mei, means “blessing from America.”

The story is close to Tan’s own experience. Her parents come to California from China, and she grew up with many of the same conflicts faced by the young heroine of the book. Tan’s parents wanted her to have a successful live in American, but they hoped she would think of herself as Chinese. As a girl, Tan wanted only to blend into American society, but when she began to write stories in the mid-1980s, she brought her two worlds together. Her personal experiences enabled her to write movingly about the relationships between immigrant parents of their children.

The Joy Luck Club, Tan’s first novel, was a surprise best-seller in 1989 and later a successful movie. Her second book, The Kitchen God’s Wife, was also successful. And in 1995 she was back on the best-seller list with The Hundred Secret Senses, a novel about a Chinese-American woman and her Chinese half sister.

I.M. Pei

In Washington D.C., a bold structure in the shape of two connecting triangles makes a dramatic addition to the National Gallery of Art. In Boston, the green-glassed John Hancock Tower soars above the skyline. In Paris, a 70-foot-high glass pyramid serves as the controversial new entrance to the Louvre museum. These notable buildings were all designed by I.M. Pei, one of America’s leading architects.

Born in China, Ieoh Ming Pei moved to the United States in 1935. He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then he taught at Harvard University and worked for an architectural firm in New York. Pei became an American citizen in 1954 and, a year later, opened his own firm.

Pei’s first greatest success was the Mile High Center in Denver, Colorado. Since then his designs, marked by elegant simplicity, geometric patterns, and richly contrasting materials, have won him worldwide fame.

Critic Robert Hughes wrote that Pei’s design for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art “takes its place among the great museum buildings of the past hundred years.” In 1983, he was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize for having “given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms.”

In 1978, Pei returned to china to design a hotel in Beijing.