People long to be part of what is accepted, to be considered “normal”, even if it means rejecting who they really are on the inside because of their cultural differences. In the short story “Fish Cheeks,” the author Amy Tan describes a personal experience of being embarrassed in front of her crush Robert by her own family. Tan describes her teenage struggle to reconcile her feelings toward mainstream and Chinese cultures revealing her difficulty in establishing her identity as an American.he author as a teenager looks up to the mainstream American culture because she considers her own Chinese ways inferior,and so she desires to be like them or other American girls. Tan marvels at Robert’s American features and associates him with “Mary in the …show more content…
Tan prays for a “blond haired boy…and a slim new American nose” due to the fact that it is stereotypical in America. She is not happy with her Asian looks and wants to be white because she views the stereotypical American look as ideal. Moreover, the author is ashamed with of the behavior of her Chinese relatives because they “lacked proper American manners.” Tan implies that manners from other cultures are improper and that the only correct manners are American manners. Amy sees the food as “appalling mounds” littering the kitchen although it is her favorite. Picturing the scene through Robert’s eyes, she is horrified with what she notices. Furthermore, she expresses that the food is worthless and she wants to get rid of it, along with all things Chinese. The author looks down upon her own Chinese culture and wishes to not to be a part of it because she regards it as lower in status than American culture.Amy Tan displays her strong desire to hide her identity. She longs to be the same as Americans on the outside because she cannot accept that she is different. Finally as an adult, Tan learns to be both American and Chinese; she overcomes the internalized racial bias by accepting who she is. The only way to conquer a personal struggle is to learn to recognize who you are
Using the detail,“Dinner threw me deeper into despair,” conveys the painful feelings caused by her family at dinner (Paragraph 5). This detail indicates that Tan was continuingly losing hope that the night would get better. Tan reveals these agonizing feelings to make the reader feel compunctious. In making the reader feel sorry for her, Tan knows she can continue to misreport details in the passage without being questioned. The detail,“What would he think of our noisy Chinese relatives who lacked proper American manners,” emblematizes the dishonor Tan feels towards her relatives and cultural background (Paragraph 2). This detail implies that due to Tan’s attraction to Robert, she will detract her feelings of others to better her relationship with Robert. Tan used this detail to reveal that if Tan cannot better her relationship with Robert, she will become despondent. As a result of distorting details, the passage illustrates Tan’s dishonorable feelings towards her cultural
In the story, "Fish Cheeks" it talks about how Amy Tan's Chinese family invites an American boy's family over for dinner. Amy Tan wants to impress him and thinks that he wont like the food her mother made even though it is her favorite food. She can tell that he doesn't like the food and she is embarased. So, Amy wants to fit in.
First, the story ¨Fish Cheeks¨ shows a story of how a girl named Amy “finds herself” through a holiday dinner. Amy has a crush on Robert, a 14 year old
In her adolescent years, Tan was around many influences from Chinese and American cultures. She wrote many pieces about “trying to assimilate into the mainstream, American world as a child, often at the expense of her Chinese heritage” (University of Minnesota). When Tan was entering young adulthood, her father and brother became ill, and eventually both died of brain tumors. It was during this difficult time that she learned of her mother’s secretive marriage to a different man in China and that she had three half-sisters from that marriage. “a situation not unlike June’s in The Joy Luck Club, her first novel” (University Of Minnesota). Tan’s mother then made the decision to relocate her living children to Switzerland, it was there that Amy finished her schooling and received her high school diploma, “but by this time mother and daughter were in constant conflict. Mother and daughter did not speak for six months after Amy Tan left the Baptist colleg...
In the first place, mother-daughter relations between Chinese mothers and ABC daughters are not easy ones in Tan's novels. They are always problematic. Mothers want to bring up their children according to the Chinese ways, whereas daughters want to live their own life according to the "American Way of Life", despising Chinese habits and traditions, sometimes to the extent of being ashamed of their origins. Amy Tan herself confessed that, as a child, she used to put "a clothespin on her nose hoping to make it pert, to change its Asian shape."
Amy Tan used symbolism to reveal the cultures and how it interacted with the conflict of the story. One example was she used the game of chess as more than just a game. She illustrated it as a game of life and a way of her adaptation into her new American culture. This was demonstrated when Waverly’s mother read the rules of chess but did not understand them. Mrs. Lindo said, “Every time people come out from foreign country, must know rules… They say, don’t know why, you find out yourself” (502). This quote demonstrated the culture gap in the family, because the mother grew up with Chinese beliefs. Symbolically, when they received the American game of chess for Christmas they were excited and
The short story, “Fish Cheeks” written by Amy Tan and the chapter, “Champions of the World” written by Maya Angelou are both about children who come from distinct cultures, but both children don't feel included in American culture and belief. Amy Tan and Maya Angelou, both consider the differences between the American culture and their own culture. The two short stories are similar because the authors, Amy Tan and Maya Angelou are at the age where they want to fit in with the Americans and do not want to be different in anyway. In the short story, “Fish Cheeks”, Amy Tan wishes for “a slim new American nose” and her mother realizes that she wants to be like an American girl on the outside. So she received a miniskirt as an early Christmas gift.
One’s ability to craft their own identity often starts out with determining their inner set of ideologies and values. New York Times bestselling author, Amy Tan, is one of many great examples who was able to mirror her own values into her bestselling novel, The Kitchen God’s Wife. Known for incorporating mother-daughter relationships into her stories, Tan uses her novel to allow readers an inside look into her personal set of beliefs and values. The story follows a Chinese immigrant living in America, Winnie, who tries to reconnect with her “Americanized” daughter by reciting her story of the struggles she faced while living in Shanghai. While writing the novel, Tan was able to incorporate her own values of creativity, integration into both Chinese and American culture, and independence which were influenced by her parents and her surroundings. Therefore, Amy Tan’s ability to shadow her socially influenced values of creativity, integration, and independence in her critically acclaimed novel The Kitchen God’s Wife demonstrated the identity crisis that her characters go through when being tied up in a knot of two distinct cultures and opinions within society.
Amy Tan, in ?Mother Tongue,? Does an excellent job at fully explaining her self through many different ways. It?s not hard to see the compassion and love she has for her mother and for her work. I do feel that her mother could have improved the situation of parents and children switching rolls, but she did the best she could, especially given the circumstances she was under. All in all, Amy just really wanted to be respected by her critics and given the chance to prove who she is. Her time came, and she successfully accomplished her goals. The only person who really means something to her is her mother, and her mother?s reaction to her first finished work will always stay with her, ?so easy to read? (39).
Chinese New Year is the most significant and longest Chinese festival celebrated in Chinese communities worldwide (Chinese New Year 1). Chinese New Year is significant to the Chinese as the fourth of July is to United States Americans. In the short story Fish Cheeks by Amy Tan the main character celebrates Christmas: “What would Robert think of our shabby Chinese Christmas” (Tan 184). The American holiday, the fourth of July will be compared to the Chinese Christmas New Year. Why the holidays are important to each culture and the traditional activities will be evaluated and compared to Amy Tan’s short story Fish Cheeks.
The first paragraph is used to describe Robert’s appearance in a way that one can easily picture how he looks like. It is easy to picture the blond hair, the very slim American nose and the very white nature of Robert. Tan goes ahead to describe how noisy his relatives are and how she was scared they would embarrass her in front of Robert of Christmas day. She was scared that being Chinese would be embarrassing in front of the minster’s American family. She was also afraid that the Chinese food that her mother served would not be as good as the American food the minister’s family was used to. In one of the paragraphs, Tan vividly describes all the food that her mother was preparing for Christmas. This description is so vivid that one can easily get a picture of how messy the kitchen was. The narration of how dinner went is also very dramatic and demonstrates how her Chinese family differed from the American family. From the narration, it is clear that there was a discord between the way of eating between the American family and Tan’s Chinese relatives. When Tan’s father offered her the fish cheeks, the embarrassment is evident from the description given by Tan (Tan 117). The embarrassing nature of the dinner continues to be described when Tan’s father belched out loudly as a sign of being satisfied. While in the Chinese culture this was thought to be a polite
Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” is a story about a Chinese American girl, Jing-mei, who struggles to find her own sense of identity when her Chinese immigrant mother dreams for her to be a prodigy. As an immigrant who suffered several tragic losses while coming from China, Jing-mei’s mother forms this idealized vision of America as the Land of opportunity, the first sentence in of the story introduces this, “My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America” (Tan 222). According to Ira Mark Milne, Jing-mei’s mother’s hopes for her daughter’s future stemmed from her own tragic past, like Tan’s mother who was also forced to flee from China and leave her children and husband behind. However,
The purpose of Amy Tan’s essay was to show that even though she was ashamed when she was a child, she has now embraced and is proud of her Chinese heritage. For example, “She handed me an early gift. It was a miniskirt in beige tweed. ‘But inside you must always be Chinese. You must be proud you are different. Your only shame is to have shame’”(Tan 8-10). The miniskirt symbolizes the American culture and how Tan wanted to be American. The quote shows that by her mother giving her the miniskirt, she is telling Amy Tan that she can be American on the outside by the clothes she wears but will always be Chinese on the inside. Her mother tells her she should embrace her differences instead of being ashamed. In contrast, Angelou’s purpose is to give an inside look at African Americans’ struggles during the late 1930s. During the 1930s, there was racism, segregation and violent attacks against African Americans by whites in the United States, especially in the south. Angelou describes the abuse of African Americans with, “My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Blackman hanging on a tree” (Angelou 16-17). She describes the struggles that African Americans faced and how they cling to Joe Louis as a representation of the African American population as he fights against the white contender. The two essays, both have unique purposes that were conveyed by Tan and
Amy Tan is a Chinese-American writer who is the author of several works such as The Joy Luck Club, The Valley of Amazement, and “Fish Cheeks”. In the memoir “Fish Cheeks” she reflects on her struggle to accept her culture as a young girl, specifically recounting a Christmas dinner with her crush at the time “Robert” and his family, and the emotions she felt during. The story highlights how you should be accepting of your culture and embrace it; rather than try to hide it or be ashamed. Through several language techniques such as word choice, Tan highlights shame and other negative emotions she felt before and during the dinner.
However, the themes and struggles presented in her fiction as well as her characters represent the experiences of many Asian-American writers and individuals experience and do address their need to construct an identity that includes both Asian and American cultural ideals. Tan's mothers and daughters experience and strive to attain what Asian- Americans such as myself work hard to achieve. Rather than simply presenting situations involving cultural tension. Amy Tan, through oral and mythical connections to the Chinese and American cultures, gives readers a glimpse into an Asian-American mythology, a culture comprised of two separate, often opposing ideals. This is not to say that anyone not of Asian descent can enjoy her fiction. Rather, the mythical element of Tan's novels allows anyone of any culture to connect to her characters, to notice real-life situations in her novels and see how the characters resolve cultural and familial conflicts. In The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife, Amy Tan uses stories from her own history and myth to explore the voices of mothers and daughters of Chinese ancestry. Each woman tells a story indicative of the uniqueness of her voice. In Tan’s fiction, the daughters’ sense of self is intricately linked to an ability to speak and be heard by their mothers. Similarly, the mothers experience growth as they broaden communication lines with their daughters. Until Tan’s women connect as mothers and daughters, they experience strong feelings of isolation, a sense of disenfranchisement and fragmentation. These feelings often are a result of male domination. Tan has made an effective attempt to portray the Chinese mythology and in the next part we will address Tan’s devise of using language through her characters and the conflicts related to distinct languages. She also gives subtle