Sui Sin Far’s work I found most appealing because of her parents background and how being mixed effected her and her siblings up bringing. Past reading materials have covered different races and culture, but this week is the first we’re seeing children from two different races. Sui Sin Far was treated like a science project growing up, even grown adults took a second look at her and her siblings because her parents different races. It’s one thing to be curious, but extremely disrespectful and hurtful to treat someone in way that makes them feel anything but human because of others curiosity. Being from two different cultural backgrounds Sui Sin Far received backlash from both sides of her history. Both white and Chinese considered her impure,
Major cultural theme: The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, by Eric Liu is about trying to find out who you are.
The book I chose to read for our lit circle unit was “I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter” by Erika L. Sanchez. The story is an interesting read from start to finish full of twists and turns in the storyline. The main conflicts in the story are between Ama, Julia's mom, and Julia herself who always seem to be butting heads because they are coping with grief in different ways. Julia also has a major internal conflict with herself because she is self-conscious about her appearance around others and she at first blames herself for Olga’s death. The main theme of the book is the value of secrecy which can be seen once the story starts to unfold and the secrets that were once hidden rise to the surface.
What effects do different cultures take on mothers (Chinese) and daughters (American) throughout the book? The book “The Joy Luck Club” takes on an interesting way to present it’s plot to readers. It consists of the telling of the stories of four Chinese mothers (before they immigrated to the United States) in the first four chapters. Following this is the stories of these mother’s daughters (again, in four chapters).
“The Other Family” by Himani Bannerji, can teach people a life lesson about appreciating the culture they come from and that they should stay true to who they are regardless of what others think is right. In “The Other Family” when the little girl came home from school, she showed her mom a picture she drew of their family. When the mom saw the picture, she was very disappointed because the picture showed a white family, not theirs. The little girl said she drew a white family because all the books she read showed only white families. “I drew it from a book…all our books have this same picture of the family.”
Artemisia Gentileschi was born on July 8, 1593 in Rome, Italy. She was born to Prudentia Moore and Orazio Gentileschi, who was a painter himself. Artemisia was introduced to art by her father in his workshop where she worked alongside him. Her father taught her how to draw, mix colors, and paint; which is why their paintings look very similar and makes it hard to distinguish between their art. They were both painters during the Baroque period, and Orazio was friends with the revolutionary Baroque painter Caravaggio.
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.
Countless numbers of immigrants came over to the United States many generations ago, in order to pursue the “American Dream”. Mary C. Waters specializes in studying immigration and ethnic trends, and wanted to research how connected American citizens of foreign descent were to their ethnicity. In Waters’ writing, she talks about how she interviewed many third-generation Americans of European descent in order to determine how closely tied they were to their ancestors’ ethnicity in the late 20th century. Out of the two theories of integration, being the pluralist theory and the assimilationist theory, Waters takes a new middle-ground standpoint on something she calls “new ethnicity”. Waters concludes that with passing generations, American immigrants
The main theme throughout the graphic novel American Born Chinese by author Gene Yang is stereotyping and accepting who you are. Throughout the book you see three different characters that struggle with being discriminated for being who they are or how they were raised. Jin is constantly being thrown stereotypes at him by his classmates. The Monkey King is being discriminated against from other gods for who he is. Chin Kee is a literal representation of an Asian stereotype.
Point of View on Culture Among many literatures about Asian and Chinese culture “Saving Sourdi” by May-Lee Chai is one. This short story is about a young girl, Nea, and her sister, Sourdi, and what happens when Sourdi grows up when Nea does not want her to. Their family are Chinese and they moved to America.
Sibert Medal Honor Book (2015), Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award (2015), IRA Notable Books for a Global Society (2015), NCTE Orbis Pictus Honor Book (2015), Pura Belpré Award Honor Book (2015), SLJ Best Books for Nonfiction (2015), Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2014 for Picture Books; Center for the Study of Multicultural Children’s Literature Best Multicultural Books of 2014, New York Public Library 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing for Nonfiction (2014), Cybils Awards Finalist Nonfiction for Elementary & Middle Grades
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
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.
The standard way of thinking about the topic of race or ethnicity has it that it is physical appearance or descent. To understand the perspective of race in society we must first understand the distinction between race and ethnicity. One implication of ethnicity is that it is a cultural part of people’s lives a sense of common culture, ancestry and community. In fact, race is more than this, it is physical differences that categorize, not to be confused with identify, individuals. At the same time ethnic and race differences is learned.
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.
Amy Tan is a Chinese-American author who was born on February 19, 1952, in Oakland, California. In Tan’s early life she had many struggles because her parents desired for her “to hold onto Chinese traditions and her own longings to become more Americanized” (Encyclopedia). While she wanted to become a writer when she was still young, her parents wanted her to become a neurosurgeon. When she got older and went to college she majored in English then started her career in the 1970’s. She was a technical writer and then started writing fiction stories.