WHEN Amy Tan walks into the room, she's greeted with immediate cheers and applause from a packed international audience, eager for her rock'n'roll concert.

The acclaimed author of best-selling novels such as "The Joy Luck Club" (1989) wears a long black dress and high heels, a flame-colored wig, sunglasses and a big pearl necklace - her dominatrix persona. She tells the audience (in jest) that she's sorry she is unable to wear her full regalia and bring her whip. Then she sings "These Boots Are Made For Walking" (1966) and other old hits.

Tan is joined on stage by fellow American rocker-writers Matt Groening, Sam Barry and Kathi Kamen Goldmark. They are long-time friends and members of The Rock Bottom Remainders, a nearly 20-year-old all-author rock'n'roll band that includes, from time to time, Dave Barry, Stephen King and many others. They tour and sell CDs only for charity.

The Remainders played for the first time in Shanghai at the Glamour Bar on March 16 to celebrate the 10th Shanghai International Literary Festival, which ended last weekend.

Tan, on her way to celebrate her 60th birthday with friends, stopped by the festival not only to talk about writing and rocking, but also to bring writer friends to the events.

Shanghai is special to Tan. It's where her mother was born and raised, it's where her sisters still live and it's where her grandmother - whose story inspired her latest novella "Rules for Virgins" - committed suicide after being raped and forced to become a concubine.

Tan was first invited to the festival in 2007, and she quickly became a major literary connector and supporter. Tickets for her talks are always sold out, usually a few hours after they go on sale.

At her talk, wearing short hair and long bangs and big, antique jade and silver jewelry, Tan appeared exotic to both the Western and Chinese audience.

She is neither.

Her features are clearly Chinese and so is her diminutive size, but her strong presence, her animated expressions, the dynamic tones in her English, her blunt talk - and the vaguely accented Chinese words she occasionally threw out - all made it clear that no way is she Chinese in the traditional sense.

This both-worlds persona is one reason her novels provide a fascinating and still-fresh perspective to both Western and Chinese readers.

For many Western readers, Tan's debut novel "The Joy Luck Club" was their first real window on the mythical and mysterious old China and its strange Oriental customs. The book became a best seller and remains important reading in contemporary American literature. Its Chinese mainland translation was first published in abridged form in the early 1990s and then published unabridged in 2006 and in hard copy shortly afterward.

The Chinese translations sold far less than the English originals, but Chinese readers also found that her books illuminated the lives and almost unimaginable cultural gaps between second-generation Chinese Americans and their immigrant parents. The generation gap is an issue in China as well.

Tan, who was born in Oakland, California, noted that she was celebrating her 60th birthday in the year of the water dragon, just as her birth year 1952 was a water dragon year.

References to Chinese culture and history were sprinkled throughout her talks and so were her firm denials of being Chinese or Shanghainese at all.

In fact, she said, she was not Chinese to the people who saw her on her first trip to Shanghai back in 1987, before she wrote "The Joy Luck Club."

Tan, along with her mother and her Caucasian husband, got all the stares on the Shanghai streets, and she thought they were directed at her husband.

"They were not. They were staring at me!" she said, saying she was astonished at the time.

"I certainly didn't look Chinese at all. I looked strange."

"From that trip, I discovered how American I was, and I also discovered how Chinese I was by the kind of family habits and routines that were so familiar."

At the time, she could understand a lot of Chinese and some Shanghainese, but she couldn't say much more than "Ni hao ma?" or "How are you?" in Mandarin.

During that trip, she met her two of three older half sisters, whom her mother had to leave behind when she left for the United States. Since then Tan made many trips back to the city, where she researched and discovered many more secrets about her family, especially about her grandmother and her mother.

Her grandmother was a Suzhou (Jiangsu Province) native and widow who came to Shanghai. What happened next was unclear but she was raped by a very wealthy man and forced to become one of his concubines. She was virtually imprisoned on Chongming Island. After bearing a son, she killed herself during the Chinese Lunar New Year Festival.

Some of these discoveries prompted her to write the 42-page novella "Rules for Virgins," released only in digital form a few months ago. It's her first fiction publication in six years.

The inspiration started with a photo of her grandmother, dressed very stylishly, with a high collar up to her chin and a wide hair band decorated with pearls. She is surrounded by flowers. The picture was clearly taken in a Western studio in Shanghai.

Later, Tan spotted the same style of dress and floral surroundings in a book about the 10 most famous courtesans in Shanghai in 1910.

"All the details matched," she explained.

She was not sure whether that could prove her grandmother, said to be an old-fashioned and traditional woman of few words, was once a much sought-after courtesan, but the idea certainly intrigued her. Tan explored further, looking into the past of her grandmother as well as the conditions of women at that time.

"I was fascinated by the influences of courtesans in introducing Western cultures to Shanghai. They were public figures who were in many ways envied for their knowledge of what people wanted and the illusions that they were able to create," Tan said.

"Of all the classes of women there during that time, they had the most freedom. They could choose what clothes to wear, what food to eat and what men to escort them."

In the darkly humorous "Rules for Virgins," Tan describes the luxurious and heartbreaking lives of these women from the perspective of a 33-year-old courtesan, who is long past her prime and passing on marketing strategies and manipulative business tactics to a new courtesan.

"What motivated me was the idea of the parts of these women that are really a part of all of us, and how much ego and envy play into our desires and our ability to manipulate somebody," she said.

"As a writer, I'm always fascinated by human nature. My work might only be words, but behind the words there's a lot of contemplation about human nature."

Chinese readers

Her contemplation of human nature also won her popularity among young Chinese readers, reading both the originals in English and the Chinese translations. Not so fascinated by the Chinese mythology in her fiction, Chinese readers still found their experience resonated with Tan's troubled and strained relationship with her mother.

An abridged Chinese translation of "The Joy Luck Club" was first published in 1992. A few parts were removed or rearranged - not due to censorship - mostly because translators and editors thought the explanations of Chinese culture to Western readers were not necessary. The complete book was published again by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House in 2006, along with Tan's "The Bonesetter's Daughter" (2001).

"Saving Fish from Drowning" (2005), her most recent work, is a light-hearted suspense novel much different from her previous works. It's a murder mystery and tale of cross-cultural missteps by Western antiques dealers traveling from Yunnan Province to Myanmar. It was also translated and published in China, with a lot of restructuring and editing by Chinese suspense writer Cai Jun, at the time when reediting translated novels was trendy.

"First of all, Amy Tan is a critically acclaimed author who deserves to have her works translated and published here. And her identity as a second generation Chinese American certainly add a nice layer of familiarity to the Chinese readers," Feng Tao, Chinese editor of "The Joy Luck Club" and "The Bonesetter's Daughter," told Shanghai Daily.

"And the Chinese readers have identified with the cultural and generational gaps she described in such fascinating detail. Even without the experience of immigration, young Chinese readers feel a similar experience due to rapid development and Westernization in China as they grew up."

Tan, who said she would never have considered writing anything purely Chinese, said it was great but also "weird" that her novels were even read by Chinese people.

"My mother used to tell me 'you are not Chinese at all.' And she was right. I would never have considered writing something purely Chinese, as I knew nothing about it. What I started writing about has to do with family matters, and that has got something to do with Chineseness," Tan recalled.

"I was so afraid that somebody would come to me, and say you got it all wrong, Shanghai never looked like that or women didn't talk like that. I was expecting huge criticisms."

Instead, she often got reader feedback such as, "You must have based that character on my aunt" or "That was exactly how the city looked like at the time." This was due to her mother's accurate accounts and her own imagination.

"The Western influence is very important for me. I never had a character in my book purely brought up in Chinese settings," she said.

This is also partially why Shanghai is a special place for her, as the city was and is full of Western influences.

She takes criticism quite well since she expects people to see a thousand different things in her books.

"I can't deconstruct my own works, I can't sum it up in one sentence. I leave it up to what other people say the book is," she said.

"The book, in the hands of readers, become their books. They layer their own experiences and their own thoughts onto it, and that becomes what the book means and what it is."

"The ultimate compliment," as Tan called it, about "The Joy Luck Club" came from her mother, to whom she dedicated the book. Prior to reading the book, her mother often said Tan knew nothing about her. After reading the book, she often said, "I don't have to tell you, you understand."

Grandmother, mother and daughter

The influence of her mother, who inherited influences from her own mother, is a constant in Tan's conversations and writings, whether in print or on the Internet. Strong women is a theme.

Tan visited Shanghai just a few weeks after she posted a Facebook entry fiercely criticizing US Republican Presidential candidates who hold socially conservative views. She drew nearly 1,000 likes and 200 comments. Tan expressed anger toward top candidates who are opposed to premarital sex, insurance coverage for contraception, and abortion, which is legal though access is restricted by many states.

"Fortunately, I haven't got the suicidal tendencies of my mother, but I get furious (about issues) like her and I was heavily influenced by her ideas about women, which were influenced by her mother as well," Tan said in her Shanghai talk.

"I have a sense of indignation just like them. My mother used to tell me not to depend on your husband and you have to be able to leave when you want. She also told me not to let your husband tell you what to do, and not let anyone to force you to have a baby."

Like her mother, Tan believes women have a right to abortion and is outspoken in her views on the Internet. The festival's organizer said Tan was extremely fast in e-mail replies to comments about her talks at the literary festival.

Yet, she hasn't seriously considered opening an account on Weibo, the Chinese microblog on which many Western celebrities like Bill Gates, Andy Murray and Jeremy Lin have attracted millions of fans.

"I may do it if I can find a way to tie it with my Facebook and Twitter," she said. "But it's scary because on Weibo, people find a million ways to be controversial."