Politics & Power Quote by Amy Tan

America gets cast here less as a place than as a permission slip. Tan’s line has the brisk, almost offhand confidence of a cultural myth - the idea that the self is not inherited so much as authored. The phrasing matters: “nobody says” doesn’t claim America actually delivers freedom; it claims the social script at least pretends not to police you. That little dodge is where Tan’s intelligence sits. She’s not offering patriotic propaganda. She’s pointing to a distinctive kind of American pressure: you’re “free” to reinvent yourself, and if you don’t, it can feel like your own failure.

The subtext is immigrant and intergenerational without needing to announce itself. “Circumstances somebody else gives you” can mean poverty, gender expectations, family duty, a mother’s trauma, a father’s silence - the entire package of history that arrives before you do. Tan’s fiction is crowded with characters trying to translate that package into a livable present, often negotiating between cultures that define obligation differently. In many East Asian family structures (as Tan depicts them), circumstances are relational; your life is partly a continuation of other people’s sacrifices. In the American story, circumstances are individual; the heroic move is to shed them.

Intent-wise, Tan isn’t saying circumstances don’t exist. She’s arguing that the most seductive American export is the belief that they are optional. The line works because it flatters and indicts at once: it celebrates the chance to choose, while quietly warning that “choice” can erase the debts, histories, and constraints that shaped you - and that don’t disappear just because no one is supposed to mention them.