For Amy Tan, The Price Of Success Is A Complex Life

The price of celebrity for novelist Amy Tan is not a surprising list: a more complicated life, a certain distancing from old friends, requests that she speak out on politics - and no time to write.

What is surprising - to Tan, at least - is the fact of that celebrity in the first place. It was the product of one of the publishing industry's most amazing stories in recent years: the enormous success of Tan's first novel, ``The Joy Luck Club.''

``I never expected to get it published in the first place, so everything else has just been amazing,'' said Tan yesterday, before giving a reading last night at the Elliott Bay Book Company.

``Everything else'' includes having more than 252,000 copies in print of the original hard-cover edition published by Putnam. Since the book was released in March 1989, it has gone through 32 printings and the paperback rights were sold for more than $1.2 million - a Putnam record for a first work of fiction.

The recent release of Ballantine's $5.95 mass-market paperback edition should ensure a much wider audience - the book can now be found everywhere, from supermarket checkout lines to spin racks at the drugstore and airport. The paperback is already No. 1 on the best-seller lists of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Seattle Times.

The novel - in case you've been living in a fallout shelter for the past year - entwines the voices and stories of eight San Francisco

women: four Chinese-born women who emigrated to the United States in the late 1940s and their four American-born daughters, who - like Tan herself - often have had a foot planted uncomfortably in each culture.

The 38-year-old Tan grew up in the Bay Area and had carved out a career as a free-lance technical writer before her novel was sold. Married since 1974 to Lou DeMattei, a tax attorney she met when they were college students, Tan had a comfortable life that revolved around her husband, her widowed mother, a circle of close friends - and long hours before the personal computer, cranking out company reports, prospectuses and technical manuals.

A nice life, but a grind. Tan turned to writing fiction in the small bites of time she could work into her schedule, and in two years she produced three short pieces inspired by her Chinese-American roots and by the stories her mother had told over the years.

One story caught the eye of an agent, who asked her to outline a proposal for a novel based on the stories. While Tan was visiting China with her mother in 1987, the agent shopped the proposal around the New York publishing houses: six made offers, and Tan returned from China to the news that the book had been sold and she had a $50,000 advance. All she needed was the whole novel - which she produced in 4 1/2 months of disciplined, 9 a.m.-to-7:30 p.m. writing.

The rest is publishing history. But is Amy Tan the same - apart from the fatigue of a paperback publicity tour that began in mid-April and a personal-appearance schedule that won't abate until early August?

``I think in important ways I haven't changed,'' said Tan, ``but it's made my life very complex - I now have to deal so much with business issues and contracts. I have a regular agent, a contracts agent, a film agent - and sub-agents in each of the countries where the book has been sold.''

On a more personal level, she has found that success has altered the easy compatibility she once felt with many friends.

``It seems like I don't get to see them as much anymore,'' she said. ``And when I do see them, I find that they want to invite 10 strangers to a dinner party to meet me. I try to understand, of course, but they don't always realize that to me, that's work, that's not privacy.''

The biggest challenge, however, has been the many requests to become a spokesperson for the many issues of importance to Chinese Americans - not the least of which is today's China, post-Tiananmen Square massacre.

``I refused almost everything at first,'' said Tan. ``I thought it seemed wrong to use temporary celebrity to comment on something like that - it would only trivialize it.

``But when I talk to the real China experts, they think it's important (for me) to keep talking about it, to make people aware of it.''

There was a personal reason for Tan's reluctance to speak out: She has close relatives in China, including three half-sisters from her mother's first marriage. When that marriage ended, Tan's mother remarried and emigrated to the United States in 1948, hoping to bring the daughters later - a possibility foreclosed when the U.S. and China broke relations in 1949.

Tan's mother, now 74, finally reestablished contact with her daughters and visited them on her first return to China in 1978. And, in a situation that will seem familiar to readers of ``The Joy Luck Club,'' Tan herself met them when she and her husband accompanied her mother on another return in 1987.

``We had been communicating with them since our visit,'' said Tan, who had promised to try to help a nephew emigrate to Canada. ``But suddenly the letters got quieter, more perfunctory - and then they stopped.''

Communication has since resumed, and Tan and her mother are returning to China in October. She believes, however, that much of the post-massacre atmosphere remains.

``Last year, what we saw on TV stressed the similarity of the movement in China to American democracy - but American democracy should not have been the focus,'' said Tan. ``Much more important is the question of basic human rights, of the people's fear, of their unwillingness to challenge authority - even though many of them agreed with the students.

``American-style democracy,'' she said, ``can only be the end product of a basic recognition of human rights.''

In the meantime, Tan's many fans will be pleased to know that she has completed 250 pages of a new novel - tentatively titled ``The Kitchen God's Wife'' and scheduled for release by Putnam next spring. Her work, however, was interrupted by the current publicity tour.

``I haven't written anything on it since April,'' she admitted with a smile. ``I brought a lap-top computer with me - but it's like trying to meditate in 30 seconds.''