Amy Ruth Tan is an American author known for the novel The Joy Luck Club, which was adapted into a film of the same name, as well as other novels, short story collections, and children's books.
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
Joan Chen is a Chinese-American actress and film director. In China, she performed in the 1979 film Little Flower and came to the attention of American audiences for her performance in the 1987 film The Last Emperor. She is also known for her roles in Twin Peaks, Red Rose White Rose, Saving Face, and The Home Song Stories, and for directing the feature film Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl.
Lana Wood is an American actress and producer. She made her film debut in The Searchers as a child actress and later achieved notability for playing Sandy Webber on the TV series Peyton Place and Plenty O'Toole in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. Her older sister was Natalie Wood.
The Joy Luck Club is a 1989 novel written by Amy Tan. It focuses on four Chinese immigrant families in San Francisco who start a club known as The Joy Luck Club, playing the Chinese game of mahjong for money while feasting on a variety of foods. The book is structured similarly to a mahjong game, with four parts divided into four sections to create sixteen chapters. The three mothers and four daughters share stories about their lives in the form of short vignettes. Each part is preceded by a parable relating to the themes within that section.
Anchee Min is a Chinese-American author who lives in San Francisco and Shanghai. Min has published two memoirs, Red Azalea and The Cooked Seed: A Memoir, and six historical novels. Her fiction emphasizes strong female characters, such as Jiang Qing, the wife of chairman Mao Zedong, and Empress Dowager Cixi, the last ruling empress of China.
The Joy Luck Club is a 1993 American drama film about the relationships between Chinese-American women and their Chinese immigrant mothers. It was directed by Wayne Wang and stars Tsai Chin, Kieu Chinh, Lisa Lu, France Nuyen, Rosalind Chao, Lauren Tom, Tamlyn Tomita, and Ming-Na Wen. The film is based on the 1989 novel of the same name by Amy Tan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ronald Bass. The film was produced by Bass, Tan, Wang, and Patrick Markey, while Oliver Stone served as an executive producer. Four older women, all Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, meet regularly to play mahjong, eat, and tell stories. Each of these women has an adult Chinese-American daughter. The film reveals the hidden pasts of the older women and their daughters, and how their lives are shaped by the clash of Chinese and American cultures as they strive to understand their family bonds and one another.
Valerie Taylor was an American author of books published in the lesbian pulp fiction genre, as well as poetry and novels after the "golden age" of lesbian pulp fiction. She also published as Nacella Young, Francine Davenport, and Velma Tate. Her publishers included Naiad Press, Banned Books, Universal, Gold Medal Books, Womanpress, Ace and Midwood-Tower.
Incest is a popular topic in English erotic fiction; there are entire collections and websites devoted solely to incest, and there exists an entire genre of pornographic pulp fiction known as "incest novels". Incest is sometimes mentioned or described in mainstream, non-erotic fiction. Connotations can be negative, positive, or neutral.
Lisa Nicole Brennan-Jobs is an American writer. She is the daughter of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Chrisann Brennan. Jobs initially denied paternity for several years, which led to a legal case and various media reports in the early days of Apple. Lisa and Steve Jobs eventually reconciled, and he accepted his paternity. Brennan-Jobs later worked as a journalist and magazine writer. An early Apple business computer, the Apple Lisa, is named after her, and she has been depicted in a number of biographies and films, including the biopics Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999), Jobs (2013), and Steve Jobs (2015). A fictionalized version of Brennan-Jobs is a major character in her aunt Mona Simpson's novel A Regular Guy.
The Kitchen God's Wife is the second novel by Chinese-American author, Amy Tan. First published in 1991, it deals extensively with Chinese-American female identity and draws on the story of her mother's life.
Lisa See is an American writer and novelist. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995), a detailed account of See's family history, and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007) and Shanghai Girls (2009), which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list. Both Shanghai Girls and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan received honorable mentions from the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature.
Girl with a Pearl Earring is a 1999 historical novel written by Tracy Chevalier. Set in 17th-century Delft, Holland, the novel was inspired by local painter Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Chevalier presents a fictional account of Vermeer, the model and the painting. The novel was adapted into a 2003 film of the same name and a 2008 play. In May 2020, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a new dramatisation of the novel.
On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family describes 100 years of author Lisa See's family history, providing a complex portrait of her family’s hard work, suffering, failures and successes as they moved from China to the United States. Speaking of the Chinese side of her family, See has said: "Things were so fractured and wild at home ... But the weekends with my grandparents became the real center for me ... It was the side of the family I identified more with. It was fun, romantic, solid".
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a 2005 novel by Lisa See set in nineteenth-century China. In her introduction to the novel, See writes that Lily, the narrator, was born on June 5, 1824—"the fifth day of the sixth month of the third year of the Daoguang Emperor's reign". The novel begins in 1903, when Lily is 80 years old. It continues on to tell the story of her life from birth, childhood, marriage, and old age. During her lifetime, Lily lives through the reigns of four emperors of the Qing dynasty: Daoguang (1820–1850); Xianfeng (1850–1861); Tongzhi (1861–1875); and Guangxu (1875–1908).
The Mitchell family is a fictional family in EastEnders. They were first introduced in February 1990, when brothers Phil and Grant Mitchell bought the local garage – the Arches. Their sister Sam was introduced later in 1990, and their mother Peggy shortly after in 1991, before being reintroduced as a regular character in 1994, with the role recast to Barbara Windsor. Since then, they have been significantly expanded to include both the immediate and extended families. Phil has been the longest running Mitchell on the show, and the family has expanded significantly in the years since, remaining a large presence on the square.
Dreams of Joy is a 2011 novel by Lisa See. It debuted as #1 in the New York Times list of best selling fiction. In this book See completes the circle she began in Shanghai Girls. The former novel ends with the suicide of Pearl's husband Sam and the shattering discovery by Joy that May is really her mother, Pearl is her aunt, and Z.G., the famous Chinese artist, is her father. Joy's guilt-driven journey to China to find her father and Pearl's loving pursuit are placed in the context of the tumult and suffering of Mao's China—especially in the context of the horrific famine caused by Mao's misguided Great Leap Forward. See's novel uses Mao's China as her background, but her story focuses on the change and growth of her main characters – Pearl, Joy, Z.G., and May. Susan Salter Reynolds suggests that “it’s a story with characters who enter a reader’s life, take up residence, and illuminate the myriad decisions and stories that make up human history.”
China Dolls is a 2014 novel by Lisa See. It depicts the largely forgotten world of Chinese American nightclubs and performers of the '30s and '40s. The book opens with a quotation attributed to Buddha: “Only three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” See organizes her narrative around these three elements – The Sun (October 1938 – August 1940; The Moon ; and The Truth. The novel briefly concludes with a reunion of many of the main characters in 1988.
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is a novel written by the contemporary Chinese author Wang Anyi. Widely considered to be one of her best works, this story follows the life and romantic encounters of a woman in a changing Shanghai, spanning roughly four decades of the twentieth century.
Incest as either a thematic element or an incidental element of the plot, can be found in numerous films and television programs.
