Tan grew up in California and in Switzerland and studied English and linguistics at San Jose State University (B.A., 1973; M.A., 1974) and the University of California, Berkeley. She was a highly successful freelance business writer in 1987 when she took her Chinese immigrant mother to revisit China. There Tan, for the first time, met two of her half sisters, a journey and a meeting that inspired part of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989; film 1993). The novel relates the experiences of four Chinese mothers, their Chinese American daughters, and the struggles of the two disparate cultures and generations to relate to each other.

Her second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), was inspired by her mother's history; it concerns a Chinese mother who accepts American ways clumsily and her relationship to her thoroughly Americanized daughter. In The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), an American woman gradually learns to appreciate her Chinese half sister and the knowledge she imparts. Tan again explored the complex relationships of mothers and daughters in The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), in which a woman cares for her mother, who is afflicted with Alzheimer disease. In Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), an idiosyncratic San Francisco art dealer narrates the story of a group of tourists traveling through China and Myanmar (Burma). Tan also published the collection of essays The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (2003) and the children's stories The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994; adapted as a television series in 2001).