Amy Chan is a Legend
Amy Chan spent her childhood chasing her sisters around her parents’ grocery in Vancouver’s Chinatown. She is the third and final child of two immigrant parents who fled Maoist China for Canada in search of a life that would reward their hard work. Her eldest sister Anita is a mother and a maven. Alice, also a mother, is a successful stand-up comic. While her parents minded the store, they largely raised each other. Much of the work fell on Anita.
Vancouver sits just above the 49th parallel in the Pacific temperate rainforest belt that runs from northern California through coastal British Columbia up to Alaska. Other than a few summer months it can get quite gloomy with spitting rain in the afternoon most months. So after school Amy would run around the grocery playing hide and seek with her sisters, sneaking mango gummies from their stock and hiding, sometimes for hours, long after her sisters had stopped looking.
That Alice and Anita would get bored and enjoy the reprieve from their little bug of a sister never really bothered Amy, because she is easy to please. If you give her cats, buy her flowers and surprise her with an outing, she will be happy. If you don’t, well it’s an extra hour of talky time for you, Mister!
Talky Time, for the uninitiated, is Phase 1 of Amy’s 6-phase sleep protocol which includes up to 1 hour of her yammering about whatever she wants, steam rolling over me back and forth several times, and concludes with a smattering of questions in the format: Did you ever imagine you’d have a girlfriend who [insert something she thinks is unique about herself]. That’s talky time and if I play my cards right that’ll usually tucker her out before she even gets to Phase 2.
She has a best friend, also named Alice. Sometimes Alice comes over and Amy and Alice will talk into each other’s faces for hours, sometimes up to six or eight hours of just talking straight into each other’s face holes. I’m told that this is normal behavior for women. But I’ve never seen anything like it before.
Here are some other interesting facts about Amy.
Favorite Animal: Cat (for now)
Favourite Color: Chanel
Favourite Costume: Some type of burlesque wizard. (She likes top hats. I don’t fully understand it.)
Amy and I met on Hinge in 2019. We hit it off on our first date, which included multiple stops at New York institutions like Cafe Gitane, Ludlow House, the lobby of the Public Hotel, a Pizza Polpettine from Lil’ Frankie’s and an introduction to my cats. Our fifth date was in Ibiza and by month five we were quarantining together in my one-bedroom apartment in Nolita.
All of this is to say, I was there when she finished writing Breakup Bootcamp.
I saw her shut the laptop and exhale. I saw her open it back up to edit several times over the next few months. I saw her frustration when the pandemic took her book launch away. Every press hit was a choppy Zoom call with wired earbuds. But with that book, her bootcamps, and dozens upon dozens of TV, print and podcast appearances, Amy helped millions of people heal their broken hearts, find love and build healthy lasting relationships with a methodology backed by the latest neuroscience and a little bit of spirituality.
Breakup Bootcamp turned out to be a hit, but not in that traditional first-week sales sort of hit. It’s what publishers call an “evergreen” title. They don’t get that launch-day hype but they eventually find their way onto readers’ shelves because of word-of-mouth and the broad applicability of the topic. Everyone loves. Everyone loses love. And when that time comes, Breakup Bootcamp is the single essential resource for the bruised heart. Because of this it has sold thousands of copies, been translated into a number of languages and been optioned by streamers multiple times.
Today, her sophomore title, UNSINGLE: How to Date Smarter and Create Love That Lasts, hit shelves and in my humble opinion, it is a work of staggering genius.
She began writing almost immediately after she finished Breakup Bootcamp. This despite swearing, loudly and repeatedly, that she would never write another book. All while coaching clients, organizing bootcamps and workshops and preparing not one, but two TED talks.
Titles in the self-help category are often inspiring, useful, chock full of information, but are not always a joy to read. This one is. It contains, not just the latest science on relationships, her own research on what works and what doesn’t in finding and keeping love, tools she has tested time and time again with hall-of-fame level results, case study after case study. It’s also a very personal narrative, full of introspection about the source of her own successes and failures in love. The whole is somehow greater than the sum of those parts, which is rare enough to call genius.
UNSINGLE arrives into a dating landscape that would have been unrecognizable to anyone who came of age before a smartphone. Ghosting. Breadcrumbing. Situationships. Catfishing, facetuning, bodyswapping. The manosphere and its sustained project of teaching men that women are the enemy. The quick-to-ick social media contagion that has convinced a generation that the first evidence of another person’s humanness is reason enough to leave.
Into all of this, Amy Chan walks in, probably wearing a top hat, and makes the case for why we should pursue love anyway. Open our hearts anyway. In her words, “even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.” Better still, she puts her money where her mouth is, providing the tools and techniques to master not just the skills of dating but the completely different set of skills required for maintaining a healthy relationship.
That glowy charisma and high energy that’s so intoxicating on a first date is tailor-made to distract from what might be missing and required for a healthy long-term relationship, like reliability, resilience and willingness to repair.
She didn't learn this from watching a great love story unfold at home. She learned it the hard way, like most of us. Through her own heartbreaks, her own patterns, her own wreckage. But unlike most of us, when the suffering became too great to bear, she turned her energy towards helping others.
That conviction comes from a grocery store on East Pender Street. From two people who crossed an ocean and built something patient and permanent from nothing. From a big-eyed girl hiding in the aisles long after everyone stopped looking, learning without knowing that some things are worth waiting for, worth working for, worth getting up and fighting for over and over again. That even something as complicated and unlikely as melding two lives together without losing yourself is possible. Even now. Even in this moment.
She has been learning and teaching that ever since.
Happy pub day to my teacher and partner, the love of my life, Amy Chan.
Unsingle: How to Date Smarter and Create Love That Lasts is for sale today wherever fine books are sold, including here.
