Tan sets all her novels within the circle of the Chinese American family and inside the minds and psyches of the family members. Tan takes her readers into pre-Communist Chinese society in which the aristocratic family is the visible evidence of unwritten rules that require absolute filial piety, that sanction hierarchies based on gender and class, that condone concubinage and the virtual enslavement of women within arranged marriages, and that stress above everything else the importance of saving face rather than self. The interior landscapes are connected, for in Old China lie the seeds of the conflicts that threaten to rend the fragile bonds holding the immigrant family together and only when the second generation recognizes and understands the …show more content…
This sense of careful design enhances Tan’s portrayal of traditional china with its rigidly structured hierarchies and social structures, its codified rituals, and its established protocols governing the lives of its people. By contrast, the American settings pulse with life, energy, and chaos. Whereas in China, the Joy Luck mothers had centuries of established convention dictating their behavior and America’s cultural practices are strange and unfathomable and these women who have left china specifically for the chance to start afresh in a new country far from the stultifying tradition of the old, find themselves reverting to the familiar customs of their faraway homeland. Barred for a variety of reasons from achieving the dreams of success that brought them to America, the mothers transfer their ambitions to their daughters in whom they hope to combine the best of Chinese and American culture. On those daughters, who grow up in Chinatown but attend American schools, rest the hopes of their immigrant
Chapter six examines the anti-Chinese sentiment with the emerging class antagonism and turmoil between white capitalists and workers. The unwelcomed arrival of Chinese immigrants brought along their own social organizations such as the huiguan, fongs, and tongs. These types of social organizations secured areas of employment and housing for Chinese immigrants in California. This social structure that was unknown to Anglos led them to also categorize Chinese on the same level as Indians by depicting them as lustful heathens whom were out to taint innocent white women. These images were also perpetuated onto Chinese women, thus, also sexualizing them as all prostitutes.
Living as a Chinese-American, the narrator had to take on American attributes in order to be accepted -- for example, while normal Chinese women spoke with strong and assertive voices, the narrator adopted a whisper in order to appear “American-feminine. ”(1) As a result, however, her shy demeanor caused her to be an unpopular outcast. She saw herself in another Chinese-American girl at her school, as they had certain, negative similarities. “I hated the younger sister, the quiet one.
The narrator also draws a connection between her aunt’s story and her own experience as the daughter of immigrants, demonstrating a disconnect between what she sees as traditional Chinese culture and American culture. No-Name Woman’s story is first introduced under a veil of threatening
The experiences related and recorded in the novels The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao, and Obasan by Joy Kogawa give great insight to the internal and external struggles East-Asian immigrants face in the Western World, specifically Chinese-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, and Japanese-Canadians. Although the situations have certainly improved since the mid twentieth century, many of the issues and struggles the characters in the novels face are still real and ever-expanding for over five percent of the U.S. population. To
Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club is an amazing representation of what Chinese immigrants and their families face. The broad spectrum of the mothers’ and daughters’ stories all connect back to a couple of constantly recurring patterns. These patterns are used to show that how the mothers and daughters were so differently raised affected their relationships with each other, for better and for worse. To begin with, the ever-present pattern of disconnect between the two groups of women is used to show how drastically differently they were raised.
In The Joy Luck Club, Lindo Jong encounters the biggest cultural conflict out of all the mothers. While she is still proud of her Chinese heritage, she recognises her own American characteristics after being treated as a foreigner when she returned to China. To her horror, Lindo realises that she has sacrificed much of her Chinese traits after staying in America. Lindo’s actions mirror Chinese beliefs, with the way she submits her happiness for the sake of filial obligations and how she based success on her family. In contrast, Lindo’s self-empowered attitude and competitive spirit reflect American beliefs of individualism.
Tan that despite its evident differences to Cofer’s memoir is discussing the same trials ethnic, culturally diverse people experience. On page 881, Cofer recounts her first public poetry reading where an older woman mistook the Puerto Rican author for a waitress that ignites passion to the reading, “her lowered eyes told me that she was embarrassed,” [4] at the sheer power and conviction of Cofer enforcing that she is an educated Latin woman that deserves respect for her identity. While academically Tan’s teachers would always direct her to STEM subjects as viable career options which contradict the author's passion for writing despite not being on-par with the typical standard of what’s expected of a Chinese-American girl. However, what sets both pieces apart is that Tan does this examination through her mother and her own experiences as Chinese-Americans, while Cofer’s memoir encapsulates her own struggles that intertwine with the vast Latin woman’s
Tan expresses the life experiences of Chinese immigrants to the United States and attempts to depict the relationship of a mother and daughter through her significant piece of writing ‘The Joy Club’. Therefore, all these authors somehow portrayed their early struggles and their view point towards life from their literary
Family by Pa Chin is a captivating novel that describes what life in China was like in the twentieth century. Confucianism, a big religion in China at the time, was heavily focused on filial piety. Filial piety is the relationship of obedience, in which the elders are to be respected by the younger generation (Wu, lecture notes, 2015). This religion was one of the main structures on how the society was ran. Chin represents how the younger generation was upset with how the old traditions of the Confucian system were ran and that they were ready to change it.
As seen by the mothers’ and daughters’ behavior towards each other in The Joy Luck Club, it is difficult to preserve one’s culture when one is exposed to a new environment or country. With a difference of two distinct generations between them, the four main pairs often come across cultural collisions. Other than facing the age gap, these mothers and daughters also have to deal with a language and communication barrier. Already, at the beginning of the story, Jing-Mei Woo is able to understand how the mothers of the “Joy Luck Club” are displeased with their daughter’s rejection of their Chinese culture. She speaks to herself, admitting that “they are frightened.
Throughout the entire novel, the mothers and daughters face inner struggles, family conflict, and societal collision. The divergence of cultures produces tension and miscommunication, which effectively causes the collision of American morals, beliefs, and priorities with Chinese culture which
Mother knows best. And yet so many daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club feel slighted by what the matriarchal figures in their lives have in mind for them, or rather, what they believe their mothers have in mind for them. A perfect storm of expectation, true and false, about love, about success, about being Chinese. The souring of mother-daughter relationships in The Joy Luck Club stem from unrealistic or ill conceived expectations that both parties hold for the other.
The Woman Warrior is a “memoir of a girlhood among ghosts” in which Maxine Hong Kingston recounts her experiences as a second generation immigrant. She tells the story of her childhood by intertwining Chinese talk-story and personal experience, filling in the gaps in her memory with assumptions. The Woman Warrior dismantles the archetype of the typical mother-daughter relationship by suggesting that diaspora redefines archetypes by combining conflicting societal norms. A mother’s typical role in a mother-daughter relationship is one of guidance and leadership. Parents are responsible for teaching a child right from wrong and good from evil.
In “Fish Cheeks”, the narrator Amy Tan displays that she used to be insecure and ashamed of her Chinese heritage and how
Chinese identity is defined by a past of injured and scars, this is up to now the most evident message lingering behind whatever narrative style post-Tiananmen has produced. The experience of loneliness that all the protagonists suffer cannot be read as personal experience or the vicissitudes of a family saga but as a national allegory and the matrix of China as whole. There is a deep feeling of desolation for a plot that, save few occasions, offers details of a life of humiliation and hardship, describes inevitable loss, condemns its heroes to a bitter and solitary ending. Our guess is that the anti-Confucianism and anti-intellectualism of the past decades have emptied China of any residual of humanism, the roots-seeking experience acknowledges that the roots are dry, the reality they have to face is chaotic but turning back is no help for its chaos again. Tradition eroded, role models come loose, fathers are cruel and mothers are missing, life remains unfulfilled stuck between man’s aspiration and the existential need to survive, and those characters discovered themselves alienated from their family, their village, the whole community and the sense of history, frozen between life and death.