Amy Tan's Essay 'Fish Cheeks'

The author Amy Tan, in her text she deals with living in the American society more than the other author because she gives the reader a clear idea of what she is going through at the moment. In the story “Fish Cheeks” by Amy Tan, it says “What would Robert think of our shabby Chinese Christmas? What would he think of our noisy Chinese relatives who lacked poor proper American manners?” Tan

When Asian came to America— a place where full of unfamiliar faces, speak different language, have different belief and culture, how would they respond and adapt to these changes? This essay investigates on Asian American experience in terms of culture, racial discrimination, culture assimilation and collision, and lost of identity through diverse motions in four Asian American poems- “Eating Alone”, “Eating Together”, and “Persimmons” by Li-Young Lee, and “The Lost Sister” by Cathy Song. From the motions or movement in the poems, we can further look into their life and feeling of being an Asian American. In “Eating Alone” and “Eating Together”, speaker would like to express his yearning towards his death father and convey the hierarchy of

For instance, her famous novel ‘The Joy Luck Club’ depicts the Chinese mother and her American daughter relationship where they go through various circumstances trying to understand each other including the evolvement that comes in their relationships as the daughters know more about their mother’s life stories. Secondly, Tan considers the theme of identity in terms of Chinese immigrants and their life experiences as an immigrant in the United States. She reveals how the children born to the immigrants strive in an environment which is a mixture of American and Chinese influence. Moreover, Tan is found to have explored identity issues through her fictive creations and tackled the issue of authorial identity (Becnel, 2010). Similarly, romantic love is another subject included in the literary artworks of Amy Tan which considers the relationships and romance an important aspect of human’s life. She is found to have given equal consideration to romantic love as she discusses about the mother daughter relationship (Becnel,

In the poem “A Story” by Li- Young Lee, the audience is introduced to the intricate relationship between the father and the son. There is an obvious internal conflict ongoing within the father’s thoughts; the father desperately wants to tell his son a story but cannot come up with one. The author highlights the altering views held by the father and the son through the use of shifting points of view and the intended structure. These two devices adeptly establish the poem’s profundity and intensity of emotions; moreover, it brings light to a common battle that evolving filial relations face against time; as innocence eventuates into maturity, parents inevitably feel helpless and nostalgic.

Throughout generations cultural traditions have been passed down, alongside these traditions came language. The language of ancestors, which soon began to be molded by the tongue of newer generations, was inherited. Though language is an everlasting changing part of the world, it is a representation of one’s identity, not only in a cultural way but from an environmental standpoint as well. One’s identity is revealed through language from an environmental point of view because the world that one is surrounded with can cause them to have their own definitions of words, an accent, etc. With newer generations, comes newer forms of languages. Although these new generation 's’ way of speaking has come from elsewhere, there is a kind of shame that comes from this. Shame, because their ancestors spoke

She shares the struggles of being a Chinese-American woman by telling the readers her story as well as other girls who went through the same thing. Their inability to speak or at lease to speak properly has a lot to do with the Chinese culture. They are taught from a young age that they live in a patriarchal society and they have to submit to it whether they like it or not. The pressure and expectations that are set upon their shoulders may have caused them to become voiceless, it may have caused them to realized that even if they had a voice, they would never be able to use it. Not only were the readers able to get a look into Chinese society but also into typical Chinese families. Families that found girls a burden upon their shoulders, who found feeding cowbirds better than feeding them, who only raise them to one day sell them off to an unknown man. These are the values, traditions, and cultures that Kingston brings forth with her stories, these are the reasons, one realizes, that make all these women voiceless. Not only does she bring to attention how many women and girls are voiceless but also why they are that

Everyday people are judging and being judged by others with unique criteria that we, as inhabitants of Earth deem necessary checkmarks to be met to afford and be afforded tokens of civility. In Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “The Myth of the Latin Woman” the memoir is brimming with personal accounts of fetishiztation and discrimination the author experiences as a Latin woman that have vast influence on her life. Throughout the text Cofer conveys the significance of how deep the status “exotic” to describe Latina women is held inside the minds of people which the author alludes to on page 879, “I thought you Latin girls were supposed to mature early,” [1] after being given a sudden, non-consensual kiss at a dance by her date. The author expresses the cultural dissonance between

Fish Cheeks, by Amy Tan is a story of love, culture, being different, and accepting one's differences. A young Amy falls in love with the son of a white minister and is shocked when she finds out that her mother invited the ministers family over for christmas dinner. Amy is very embarrassed because of her asian heritage, and some of the asian customs her family embraces. She explains that her mother went out of her way to prepare many traditional asian dishes that most people would find quite odd.

Culture differences, the differences of culture that has been created due to immigration, can create many tensions between generations in a household. The short story “The Jade Peony” manifests culture shock through two incidents. The first incident is depicted when Jung, Kiam, Liang were talking to their dad and telling him how grandma’s unacceptable disgusting behavior was causing them to get insulted by their friends. “The problem for the rest of the family was in the fact that Grandma looked for these treasures wandering the back alleys” “All our friends are laughing at us!”. Their father replied to this by telling to stop this but in the back of his head he thought “how could he dare tell the Grand Old One, his aging mother, that what

There 's a subtle wonderfulness to this story. It 's such a relatable story that involves day to day recounts of activities, Kimberly and her mother 's struggles and strives, financially and culturally. Especially from Aunt Paula. Once she said: “You can release your heart, older sister” (148). And another conversation is that “I am too smart to cheat….It is under me” (157).Even though Kim’s mother suffered loneliness ..she is such a bold character to suffer and sacrifice though she got hardships and rejection from Aunt Paula. . “You may need to change your dreams. My little heart, listen. But sometimes our fate is different from the one we imagined for ourselves. (56)”Once Ma told to Kim. Jean Kwok talk about Girl in Translation and earned a new found respect for her work. Kwok

Two kinds, a short story by Amy Tan, explores the relationship between an immigrant mother and her first generation daughter. The mother, who has faith in the American dream, values the belief that to be happy, you have to be famous and change yourself; Ni Kan, the daughter, yearns for a personality of her own. Tan characterize these women as foils to each other. As a result of them being foils, they’re relationship is strained and they never have a close bond until Ni Kan grows older. Tan uses these characters to show that with each generation the American dream is changed. Amy Tan demonstrates that different generations of people have different views on the American dream through Ni Kan ‘s mother dream of fame and fortune for her child, and Ni Kan’s dream of finding an identity. Tan believes the cause of the barrier between mother and daughter is due to their foiled dreams.

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.

“Communication is the key to a successful relationship, attentiveness, and consistency. Without it, there is no relationship,” (Bleau). The Joy Luck Club is a novel written by Amy Tan. Set in the twentieth century, this novel depicts the life of four Chinese immigrant women escaping their past and their American-grown daughters. The novel reveals the mothers’ hardship-filled past and motivations alongside with the daughters’ inner conflicts and struggles. 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

Asian American Cathy Song drew closer to her Korean-Chinese ancestry, and was able to describe in a clear image of the two women she represent, one being the industrial American women and the other one being the Chinese caretaker. Cathy Song was born and raised in Hawaii making her an American by birth right. This fact did not keep her from engulfing her Korean-Chinese heritage. In the poem “Lost Sister”, Song isolates a young girl who struggles to find who she truly is in China, because of all the restrictions. The young girl wants to go to America to seek a needed fulfilment. The analysis of the young girl in “Lost Sister” is no doubt an effort to link Cathy Song’s two worlds together. Cathy Song wanted acceptance of her culture, using it as a release and that freedom is within.

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.