Authors Like Amy Tan

Maxine Hong Kingston

American · The Woman Warrior (1976), China Men (1980), Tripmaster Monkey (1989)

Kingston was born in Stockton, California, in 1940 to Chinese immigrant parents. The Woman Warrior, a memoir that weaves her mother’s talk-stories and Chinese legend into a California girlhood, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and China Men won the National Book Award. Frank Chin and other critics accused her of altering Chinese stories to suit white readers; she replied that minority women writers were being accused of pandering to white feminist tastes.

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Lisa See

American · On Gold Mountain (1995), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Shanghai Girls (2009)

See was born in Paris in 1955; her great-grandfather Fong See was Chinese, and On Gold Mountain tells the hundred-year history of her Chinese American family. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan follows a lifelong friendship between two women in nineteenth-century China, Shanghai Girls two sisters who leave Shanghai for Los Angeles, and Lady Tan’s Circle of Women (2023) a woman doctor in the Ming dynasty.

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Celeste Ng

American · Everything I Never Told You (2014), Little Fires Everywhere (2017)

Ng was born in Pittsburgh in 1980 to parents from Hong Kong. Everything I Never Told You opens with the death of Lydia Lee, the favourite child of a Chinese American father and a white mother in 1970s Ohio, and traces it back to the hopes her parents placed on her. Little Fires Everywhere became a television series in 2020.

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Pearl S. Buck

American · The Good Earth (1931)

Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, in 1892 to Presbyterian missionaries and taken to China as a baby; she grew up speaking English and Chinese. The Good Earth, about a peasant farmer and his wife, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and in 1938 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was refused permission to return to China after 1949 and denounced during the Cultural Revolution as a cultural imperialist.

Eileen Chang

Chinese-American · Love in a Fallen City (1943), The Golden Cangue (1943), Lust, Caution (1979)

Chang was born in Shanghai in 1920, moved to the United States in 1955 and died in Los Angeles in 1995. Her 1940s stories of Shanghai and Hong Kong families, marriages and money made her one of the most celebrated Chinese writers of the century; she translated The Golden Cangue into English herself, and Ang Lee’s film of Lust, Caution won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2007. Her novel Little Reunions was published after her death, in 2009.

Jung Chang

British-Chinese · Wild Swans (1991), Fly, Wild Swans (2025)

Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan, in 1952 and came to Britain on a scholarship in 1978. Wild Swans tells the lives of her grandmother, who had bound feet and became a warlord general’s concubine, her mother, a Communist Party official, and herself, a former Red Guard; it has sold more than ten million copies and is banned in mainland China. Her biography Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), written with Jon Halliday, was a bestseller but was criticised by some historians as distorting the record. Fly, Wild Swans, about her mother and herself, followed in 2025.

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Gish Jen

American · Typical American (1991), The Resisters (2020), Thank You, Mr. Nixon (2022)

Jen was born on Long Island in 1955 to parents who had emigrated from China in the 1940s, her mother from Shanghai and her father from Yixing. Typical American, her first novel, follows a Chinese immigrant family in pursuit of the American dream, and Mona in the Promised Land continues it with their daughter. Thank You, Mr. Nixon is a collection of linked stories about Chinese and American lives since 1972.

Louise Erdrich

American (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) · Love Medicine (1984), The Round House (2012), The Night Watchman (2020)

Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954 and is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Love Medicine, told in many voices, follows several Ojibwe families in North Dakota across decades and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Round House won the National Book Award in 2012 and The Night Watchman the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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Min Jin Lee

Korean-American · Pachinko (2017), American Hagwon (2026)

Lee was born in Seoul and moved to Queens at seven. Pachinko follows a Korean family in Japan across four generations, from 1910 to 1989, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; American Hagwon, published in September 2026, follows a family from Seoul to Sydney to Orange County.

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Frank Chin

American · The Chickencoop Chinaman (1971), Aiiieeeee! (1974, co-editor), Donald Duk (1991)

Chin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1940. The Chickencoop Chinaman was the first play by an Asian American to have a mainstream New York production, and he co-edited Aiiieeeee!, an early anthology of Asian American writing. In the essay “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake” (1991) and elsewhere he accused Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston of reinforcing stereotypes and misrepresenting Chinese stories for white readers.