Amy Tan 's third novel, The Hundred Secret Senses and her next work, The Bonesetter 's Daughter, also weave mysterious ghost stories with women 's life experiences. In both novels, ghosts represent the haunting past and the cultural memory of the immigrant sisters and mothers, waiting to be remembered and then exorcised. The Hundred Secret Senses starts with the claim that "My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes" (3), a key sentence of this novel. The narrator Olivia, is half Chinese and half Caucasian. Kwan, her half sister from China, talks about ghosts all the time, especially the story of the loyal maid, the warlord, and the unfortunate lovers, Miss Banner and half-breed Johnson. According to the Olivia, Kwan thinks Olivia is actually …show more content…
For instance, after seven-year- old Olivia told her mother about Kwan 's seeing the ghosts, Kwan was sent to the mental hospital. The doctors diagnosed her Chinese ghosts as the sign of a serious mental disorder and gave her electroshock treatments. She is later released but asserts, "They do this to me, hah, still I don 't change. See? I stay strong" (15). In order to consolidate its supreme authority, the dominant discourse may suppress different values or ways of thinking. But her ghost story is like inerasable cultural memory that needs retelling and recollecting. Kathleen Brogan rightly observes that "Ghosts in contemporary American ethnic literature function similarly: to recreate ethnic identity through an imaginative recuperation of the past and to press this new version of the past into the service of the present" (4). Brogan further points out that "through acts of narrative revision-which are very often presented as acts of translation, linguistic or cultural-the cycle of doom is broken and the past digested" (11). It is through Kwan 's translation that the past finds its link to the present, the Chinese life to the American life and, finally, the hundred senses reveal the secret. Playing the role of surrogate mother, Kwan looks after her half sister, Olivia, and at the same time learns to speak …show more content…
These ghosts seem harmless and eager to communicate. Tan brings out the mysterious and spiritual aspects of life in her writing according to her own interests. Avoiding the trap of self-orientalizing, and the inscrutable, mystical Chinese stereotype, Tan creates an episode which shows that Simon believes in the appearance of the ghost of his former girlfriend, Elza. It provides a good example of how to break the binary opposition of the superstitious Chinese and the rational American. Kwan explains to Olivia that she can communicate with the dead because she uses her hundred secret senses, "secret sense not really secret. We just call secret because everyone has, only forgotten.... Memory, seeing, hearing, feeling, all come together, then you know something true in you heart"
Living with the memories of such a horrific event like the Holocaust is challenging enough, but having to write and relive this tragedy once more is almost too much to ask. But we must, as staying silent is even worse. The horrific event that included the mass murder of 6 million Jews and other "undesirables," such as Gypsies and homosexuals, known as the Holocaust, left few survivors, but many of those that made it out were silent for a long time. Why relive the past if it is so horrible that one does not even want to think about it? Once some survivors decided to talk about the Holocaust and their experiences, another problem arose.
Jakobs PTSD really shows in the way that he sees the ghost of his sister Bella. He can recall certain specific details about her, which portray how he struggles in letting her go. Its the fear of the unknown of what happened to Bella that Jakob struggles with. She was taken away
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.
There are many motifs that can be analyzed in ghost literature and folklore, though one that is ever present throughout the beginning of the telling of ghost stories is the motif of the suicide ghost. This ghost manifests after the untimely demise of an individual who takes their own life. This motif is intriguing, because of its complex nature and the fact that this motif persists through time, as it is seen in early ghost stories to the most recent accounts of ghosts. The suicide victim is often seen as returning as a ghost, because of the idea that these victims have unfinished business and internal turmoil. The suicide ghost motif persists because of the fascination of the premature death, along with the idea of understanding the internal
The short story, “Haunting Olivia,” by Karen Russell, portrays two boys looking for their sister, Olivia, who died at sea. The boys stay with their grandmother on an island for the summer, and each night they sneak away to a boat graveyard to search for the girl. Guilt and grief consume the narrator, Timothy, and his brother, Wallow, as they search for a way to rescue their dead sister. Tim holds onto the idea that Olivia can continue to exist as a spirit. The narrator uses echo to create the effect of Olivia’s ghost.
It came to dominate my understanding of the discussion on the social and historical scene and to restrict my ability to participate in that discussion.(444) If we go back and use the reference again of the electronic tool we can see the struggle of being at home and communicating with her family and having an influence of capitalistic viewpoints and living the life of a capitalist, then immediately having to communicate in a different language at school and being surrounded by socialistic views and living the life of a socialist. Her thoughts were constantly flip-flopping and this became very frustrating for her. If we bring all these struggles into one main purpose, Min-Zhan Lu’s mother falls into silence two months before her death and Min-Zhan Lu attempts to “fill up that silence with words that I have since come to by reflecting on my earlier experience as a student in China.(437) The struggles that she faced growing up in China as a student and her past experiences have really helped her overcome life obstacles and develop her as a better reader and writer.
She was talking about how could she send spirits, even though she is not a witch, that she only knew they would die because she took care
Besides that, Lipsha really regrets and feels so sorry because he blessed the turkey heart by himself with holy water. When they come back to home after Grandpa’s funeral, they think Grandpa is always by their side and he stays at home with them. James Ruppert said “The return of Nector Kashpaw’s ghost is even more mediational. Nector’s sudden death leaves him without a chance to say good-bye to the two women he loves. Lipsha and Marie know that when ghosts return they have a “certain uneasy reason to come back”.”
Although he draws out a story where a Chinese boy turns against his own language and culture for the sake of fitting in, the moral of the comic is that the past will always be a part of you no matter what. The two texts give the readers examples of what makes the past, so rich and how our roots are truly forever bound to us. The authors, both hope to have their audience realize that wanting to fit into one’s generation is fine, but knowing one’s roots and accepting them as your own as you are doing so, is even
In Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, two cultures clash with each other in the struggle to save Lia Lee, a Hmong child refugee with severe epilepsy. Although Lee and her family live in the United States, and thus receive medical care from Westerners, her family believes that Lee’s condition is sacred and special. The following miscommunications, both culturally and lingually, between the American doctors and the Lee family leave Lia Lee in comatose at the end of the book. However, Lia Lee could have been saved if the Lee’s had a better understanding of the American doctors’ intentions, and the American doctors understood the Hmong culture. Essentially, the tragedy of Lia Lee can be attributed to the clash of American and Hmong cultures at both the surface and sub-surface level.
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
But what do ghosts have to do with refugees? Viet Than Nguyen explains this through his writing when the narrator’s brothers ghost visited her and said, “You died too”. “You just don’t know it” (Nguyen 17). This brings attention to the obligation the ‘black-eyed women’ present as an embodiment of ghosts, and how the narrator interprets such thing. The refugees may have died internally during the process of finding asylum, but have proven otherwise that they are still living externally.
When one looks to Ever Scarier: On The Turn of the Screw by Brad Leithouser one thing is made clear: “If the ghosts are mere illusions, then she is suffering a bout of insanity, in which her “revelations” about the children’s unearthly communications, and her perception of them as allied to unspeakable evil, must reflect her deeply suppressed aggressions and hostility.” This could speak on behalf of her aggression for things not going the rosy way she had intended them to. Miles wasn’t the good boy she had hoped he would be, with his being expelled from school and odd personality. Flora tried to suck up to the governess, then, in the governess’ delusioned mind, turned her nose up toward her by “communicating” with the deceased Ms. Jessel.
In Duong Thu Huong’s Paradise of the Blind, Hang has been placed on a path of self-sacrifice and duty by her family. Her life unfolds in stages- childhood, young adulthood, and her eventual role as an exported worker in Russia. With each of these shifts in her life comes a shift in setting and a shift in her emotional state. Hang’s changing emotional state depicts her “coming of age” and her growth as a character. Setting is important to creation of shift in the novel, and is often described in detail.
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.