...It is known that a mother would do anything within her power to protect her child. It is exceptionally difficult when the mother is what the child needs protection from.In the exerpt “The Violin” by Amy Chua and “Jing-Mei Woo: Two Kinds” by Amy Tan both portray mother-daughter relationships “the chinese way”. In “The Violin”, by Amy Chua, also from the point of view of Amy Chua, she is stressing to perfect her daughter’s every move.”I’m not thinking anything,”’ I said indignantly. Actually, I’d been thinking that Lulu’s right elbow was too high, that her dynamics were all wrong, and that she needed to shape her phases better (Chua 47-48).” Amy Chua was presented on the fact that she could not perfect Lulu and Lulu would have to figure it out...
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...language should be speaking because language has fatal consequences. I agree with Baldwin, there is a time and place for everything. I also agree that language can be dangerous, even fatal. In James Baldwin’s essay, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” Baldwin confronts the topic of “Black Language.” Baldwin states, “Language incontestably, reveals the speaker” (Baldwin, 648). The language one speaks can say a lot about a person. People may speak the same language, but it is always going to be different based off where the speaker comes from, what type of person the speaker is, what the speaker does as their career, and what the speaker has experienced in their life. Baldwin states that his argument has “nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language” (648). Language is key to communication; it allows people to exude their perspective on things. In Amy Tan’s essay, “Mother Tongue,” Tan emphasizes that we speak different languages unconsciously and that we are categorized by the way we speak. I agree with Tan, we speak different languages without being aware at times and this...
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...Home Language In the lecture of Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue” is described as the way in which language develops from location in which we are raised, and unconsciously we adapt our language with each group we socialize with in our lives. Tan describes herself as someone who is “fascinated by language in daily life. There was a specific moment in the text that Tan realizes that she is using different “Englishes” in different social contexts. Tan was giving a speech about her life, writing, and her book "The Joy Luck Club," to a group of scholarly people, but her mother was also present. It was at this time that she realized that her expressions were more academic, using more formal English, a language she had never used with her mother. Along with the lecture, she relates several examples of how her mother’s “Englishes” influenced her throughout her life, and how sometimes it was a barrier to communication. It was for this reason that Amy Tan decided to write a book where the reading level is easy and understandable--for those who like her mother had difficulty with complex English grammar. In many ways, Tan’s mother’s immigration experience was molded by her grasp of the English language. At times, new immigrants are pre-judged due to their language abilities, which can make life even more difficult. As a new immigrant to the US I can relate to many of Tan’s mother’s experiences. Amy Tan gives as an example when she was talking to her mother about furniture, she uses short expressions...
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...FYS-102-DL2A: First Year Seminar Adjunct Professor Camille A. Kramer March 23, 2014 Abstract “The Mother Tongue” which was written in 1990 is a touching story of acceptance and appreciation written by Amy Tan, who is most famous for her novel “The Joy Luck Club”. I read over the story several times, and in doing so I realized what language, and interpretation of that language really is. This inspiring writing piece shows that it’s not just a mere combination of words and grammatical phrases thrown together to form sentences and even paragraphs, it’s really about conveying a message with passion and emotion. A message that might inspire an idea, an image or a resolution to a problem. Tan’s essay shows me that the language a person learns at home is not necessarily the normal language of the society. Despite the limitations her Mother’s broken English placed on her as a child, Tan has become a successful writer. This to me, is truly incredible and breaks the language barrier. The Mother Tongue Amy Tan is someone who has always been fascinated by language. In the beginning of her narrative essay “The Mother Tongue, which was published in 1990 she states that “I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of time thinking about the power of language. – the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or the simple truth.” She goes on to describe the various forms of English she was raised on, and how they influenced...
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...The passage “Fish Cheeks” written by Amy Tan is a short based on Amy Tan’s personal experience as a typical Asian girl growing up in an American culture. Amy’s only wishes that her and her family were more American so that she could fit the modern American world. She has a huge crush on a boy named Robert, who is the minister’s son and she gets terrified when she finds out Roberts family gets invited her to a traditional Chinese Christmas Eve dinner. Just when Amy thought it couldn’t get any worse, her fears became true, her mother brought out the steamed fish, eyeballs with everything still intact, her father then added to her discomfort by poking its cheeks and announcing that it was her favorite dish on Christmas. After everyone had gone, Amy’s mother had implied that she could looked like an “American girl on the outside but must remain a Chinese girl on the inside”. The author uses details to reveal that an embarrassing experience is about to change how she felt about her family’s heritage making her realize that her feelings of “shame” were based on other people’s reactions more than her own feelings. The author’s main purpose for writing “Fish Cheeks” was to show her description of her embarrassment throughout the short story. This is definitely something that everyone can completely relate to. This is greatly expressed when she describes her family’s manners at the dinner table. I felt her humiliation; I also have had people come over to my house who I’ve wanted to...
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...My Time in Israel In the essay “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, Tan claims that the idea that we speak different languages and that we are judged by the way we communicate with each other. She is really amazed by the way other people speak so she decides to use that in her work. When she walks down the street she observes all the different types of English. When she was a child she spoke two different types of English. She spoke proper English and broken English depending on who she was around. When she was in school she had to speak proper English because that is where it felt right. When she is at home she speaks broken English because her mom does not speak very much English. Her mother was sometimes judged when she went out in public and had to speak to people. When she had to talk to people they would ignore what she had said or they would pretend that they did not know what she had said. When tan was a child her mother would make her speak to people so there would be no confusion while they were talking. Tan believed that the language spoken at home affects how the children will speak in the future....
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...the chapter “A Pair of Tickets,” is about Jing Mei, a grown woman who has just flown to China to fulfill her mother’s greatest wish, to see her first born daughters who live in China. Unexpectedly, Jing Mei’s mom had been struck by a cerebral aneurysm and had died from it. Jing Mei is seeing her sisters for the first time ever, and she is nervous. Who wouldn’t be nervous seeing to daughters that you’ve never seen before in your life, and telling them that their mother is dead? Even though the plot seems really dark and it builds a lot of negative suspense, because of Jing Mei’s nervousness, this scene in the story is rather happy and forgiving in many ways. It offers many kinds of bright words and lines like “as my sisters look at me proudly,” “the three of us embracing,” and “bright colors of the three images.” At first I thought the sisters would have been crestfallen to hear of their mother’s fate, and ultimately blame the bad news on Jing Mei. Instead, they treat Jing Mei as if they’ve known her their entire life. The tone in this passage is extremely happy and reading it itself can easily bring tears to one’s face. Amy Tan structures this passage brilliantly, with the carefully chosen words and just how she makes everything bright...
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...than in their own countries. However, others will treat im-migrants differently because they speak with the broken English. For example, if they go to companies find a job, boss can’t understand what immigrants talk about with the broken Eng-lish and will not hire them, which is unfair for the immigrant. The author Amy Tan reflects this phenomenon by writing an article called “Mother Tongue”. The author Tan effectively builds the credibility between herself and the audience by tel-ling her own personal experience. For instance, she can switch the English between her hus-band and her mother, she speaks the more informal English language to her mother because ensure that her mother can easily understand with...
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...Two Kinds The story “Two Kinds” is written by Amy Tan. The story comes from a collection of short stories called “The Joy Luck Club” with was published the year 1989. The text questions whether a mother should press her child to be something big or whether the child should do the things it wants to do. The story takes place in the United States of America in the 1950s. The perspective in the story is seen from a first person narrator. The family is working class because they cannot afford a piano but they have a TV that not a thing everyone had in the 1950s. The narrator of the text is a girl named Ni Kan. She is nine years old in the start of the text. Her family comes from China but she lives in the USA with her mother and stepfather. In the start of the text Ni Kan´s relationship to her mother is fine because she agrees with her mother. She wants to be famous like her mother wants her to be. She tries a lot of different things like being ballerina girl or an actor. And at the night the mother asks a lot of question to Ni Kan. But one day Ni Kan, has had enough of it and do not want to do those things anymore and thus defy her mother's will. Form that day on the relationship to her mother gets bad. The relationship becomes even worse because Ni Kan still don’t wants to do the stuff her mother wants so her mother force her to play the piano and one day she had to play a concert. The concert when really badly and her mother was very disappointed over Ni Kan. The next...
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...clothing and cuisine. When I moved here from Florida, I was very uneasy because I wasn’t sure how I was going to be treated when I arrived. I remember thinking that Maryland was in the north and it was always cold there. My perception of Maryland was ice skating, snowboarding, and snowball fights all of the time. I didn’t think I would be able to handle that after living in sunny Florida my whole life. I was very nervous and cautious of my new surroundings. In A Pair of Tickets by Amy Tan, Jing-mei visits her mother's homeland of China to meet her twin half-sisters for the first time and to find her Chinese identity. Jing-mei was also nervous and cautious about her trip to China because she had never been there before and only knew of it from her mother’s stories. Jing-mei was also nervous about meeting her twin half-sisters. Jing-mei and her father travel to China to carry out Jing-mei’s mothers’ final wish of having all of her daughters meet each other. While fleeing from one town in China that was about to be taken over by Japanese, Jing-mei’s mother, Suyuan, had to leave her twin baby girls on the side of the road. She traveled on foot from the town while carrying her twin baby girls and as many belongings as she could. Before deciding on setting her girls down, she had discarded all of her food and other belongings. She was very sick with dysentery, pains and fever. She had no more strength. There was no one that she could get a ride from. She believed that she would...
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... Animalization and Return to Nature A Ecological Reading of The Hundred Secret Senses I Introduction Amy Tan, born in 1952, is acclaimed for her lyrically written tales of sensibility and conflicts in Chinese-American mother-daughter relationship, in which generational and cultural divergence is highlighted. Themes of loss and reconciliation, hope and failure, friendship and familial conflict, added with mystic oriental flavor and healing power, have made Tan’s writing emblematic and well-received. Following the publication of The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), Amy Tan’s third novel The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) again enjoys a high popularity and evokes strong responses from both readers and critics. Despite the fact that The Hundred Secret Senses still exhibits Tan’s trademarks of “a strong sense of place, a many-layered narrative, family secrets, generational conflict, Chinese lore and history”, unlike the previous two that are generally praised, this novel gets mixed opinions. Most reviewers receive the characterization of Kwan as “the most original and best one” among Tan’s works (Huntley 113). Some other critics, Michiko Katukani et al, criticize Kwan’s over-imaginary, sensational and superstitious beliefs in ghosts, reincarnation and fantasies (qtd. in Chen 120). Frank Chin asserts that Tan has made both Kwan and Changmian appear inferior for the purpose of "perpetuating and...
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...A Glimpse of Amy Tan As one of the first Asian American cultural writers of her time, Amy Tan is also one of the most significant contemporary writers of Literature today. Amy Tan brings to life the struggles of dual cultural identity, generational clashes due to age and cultural gaps minority woman face in society. Many of her stories are based upon real obstacles her, her Mother and Grandmother had in their lives as young woman, facing not only the minority issues but the sexiest stigma’s of their times. Born in Oakland, California in 1952, Amy Tan was born to immigrants that had left lives and family behind in China. As a teenager, Amy was faced with the tragic death of her Father and a few months later her Brother. Shortly after their deaths Daisy, Amy’s mother, decided “to cleanse the evil influence of their "diseased house". (Mote) And moved her family to New York, Washington, Florida and finally to Europe. At first they lived in the Netherlands and eventually settling in Monteux, Switzerland where Tan completed high school. Being considered an outsider by her peers, and the continuous feeling of anger and loss she felt from losing her brother and father, she began hanging out with a crowd of drug-dealing hippies and at sixteen was arrested. Her relationship with her Mother became increasingly strained and after a close encounter of almost eloping with a mental patient, Amy and her family returned to United States where her mother enrolled her in a small Baptist...
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...Culture consistently informs the way one views others and the word, two examples of this are "Two Kinds" and "By Any Other Name". The first example that displays how culture informs the way one views others and the world is in Amy Tan's Novel Excerpt, "Two Kinds". Across the novel Tan writes about a child trying to fit into a new culture. In the novel it says, "We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple"(Tan, 18). The excerpt shows that Tan's mother tried to make her fit into American culture. Her mother does this by forcing Tan to be a prodigy of Shirley Temple. The second example that displays how culture informs the way one views other and the world is in Santha...
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...California are described in detail in the stories, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” by Bret Harte and “The Joy Luck Club,” by Amy Tan, and the poem, “The Purse Seine,” by Robinson Jeffers. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” by Bret Harte is set approximately halfway between the mining camps of Poker Flat and Sandy Bar, located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, during the California Gold Rush in November 1850. The main characters are the Duchess, a prostitute; John Oakhurst, a gambler; Mother Shipton, a madam (who owns the prostitute Duchess); Tom Simson, a very innocent young man; Uncle Billy, a thief and drunk; and Piney Woods, who is Tom Simson’s bride-to-be. The best description of the original camp site is “a wooded amphitheatre, surrounded on three sides by precipitous cliffs of naked granite, sloped gently toward the crest of another precipice that overlooked the valley” (Perkins and Perkins, 2009, p. 1179). This shows how rugged and steep the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California are. The inhabitants of Poker Flat hope to improve the town by banishing a group of undesirables: expert gambler John Oakhurst; a prostitute known as Duchess; her madam, Mother Shipton; and Uncle Billy, the town drunkard and a suspected thief. Leaving Poker Flat, the group heads toward the next community, Sandy Bar, which is located on the other side of a mountain pass. About halfway into the journey, the group decides to stop and camp for the night. Later, Tom Simson, riding from Sandy Bar with...
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...In the short story In The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan shows us how Jing-Mei develops, interacts with other characters, and advances throughout the course of the text. Out of the four families Jing-Mei learned valuable lessons from her mother. Her and her mother experienced many thing from her mother leaving her baby sisters, to her trying to become a prodigy, from her learning things that would help her later, and meeting her sisters even though her mother was not able to. The main character Jing-Mei learns important lesson and gradually changes from being confused like she just thought she couldn’t be nothing better than the way she already was so she didn’t try very hard to developing into trying and doing things that would help her like...
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