The same year, Tan wrote a short story, "Endgame," about a brilliant young chess champion who has a difficult relationship with her overprotective Chinese mother. Tan expanded the story into a collection, and it was sold to the prestigious publisher G.P. Putnam. Because of her huge advance — $50,000 — Tan dissolved her freelance business and completed the volume, which she named The Joy Luck Club. "I wrote it very quickly because I was afraid this chance would just slip out of my hands," she told Elaine Woo. She completed the manuscript in May 1988, and the book was published the following year. The book was greeted with almost universal acclaim. "Magical," said fellow novelist Louise Erdrich; "intensely poetic and moving," echoed Publishers Weekly. "She has written a jewel of a book," Orville Schell concluded in the New York Times (March 19, 1989).
In April 1989, The Joy Luck Club made the New York Times' bestseller list, where it remained for seven months. Tan was named a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award. She received the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for fiction and the Commonwealth Club Gold Award. Paperback rights for the novel sold for more than $1.23 million, and it has been translated into seventeen languages, including Chinese.
