Amy Tan writes novels about mothers and daughters moving between two cultures, most famously The Joy Luck Club, about four Chinese immigrant families in San Francisco. Before she turned to fiction in 1985, she worked as a freelance business writer putting in about ninety hours a week, and when she sat down to write stories she lit incense and put on music to imagine herself into another world. She was born in Oakland, California, in 1952 to parents who had come from China, and grew up speaking two kinds of English, one for home and one for the world outside, later the subject of her essay Mother Tongue. She plays tambourine and sings in a band of authors called the Rock Bottom Remainders, alongside writers like Stephen King, and during the pandemic she spent so many hours watching birds in her backyard that she wrote and illustrated The Backyard Bird Chronicles.