Amy Tan's narratives serve as Asian American mythology because each story represents a typical conflict which many Asian Americans experience the conflict of living in one society and being influenced by it while the expectations of another society intrude with cultural demands and obligations. Also, these stories depict how Asian Americans daughters, can overcome this cultural conflict by accepting both their Asian and American heritage. Across cultures, human beings have always exhibited, and attempted to fulfill, a need for mythologies which reflect their ideologies and traditions. Moreover, mythology represents the need to establish identity through answering questions that have no obvious answers. The individuals who look into myths for …show more content…
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
There are many times in which a reader will interpret a piece of literature in a way that was completely unintended by the author. In her article, “In the Canon, for All the Wrong Reasons”, Amy Tan discusses people telling her the meaning behind her own stories, her experiences with criticism, and how this has affected her approach to writing moving forward. While this may seem ironic, considering the topic, I have my own interpretations of this article. Firstly, Amy Tan addresses how people will often tell her what her own work means and the symbolism in her writing.
Within Tan’s writing comparisons there lies a powerful teaching about changes occurring to different people throughout times, how those people cope differently within those times, and the importance of time, by identifying with the impacts created from events and influences carried by every character. As a result, this defines the evolution of the changes the characters experience over the course. Again Culture Learning describes that “A new type of person whose orientation and view of the world profoundly transcends his or her indigenous culture is developing from the complex of social, political, economic, and educational interactions of our time (41).” Furthermore, it has been quoted that “Time shows all things”, Amy Tan used time as scope to show the reader what most fail to realize. She analyzes the positive and negative aspects of the Chinese and American cultural identities that exist, as well as revealing said lasting effects from generation to generation. "After the gold was removed from my body I felt lighter, more free. They say this is what happens if you lack metal. You begin to think as an independent person (63)." Upon realization of the effects of cultural influence, Tan establishes creditability to both her own experiences and the overall message of “The Joy Luck Club”, in order to educate and enlighten the reader on the bigger
The author demonstrates a personal example of how communication became a barrier because of the way Tan had to assist when her mother would speak. Tan would often have to relay the meaning of her mother’s message, because her mother’s “broken English” was difficult for others to comprehend. When Amy was younger, she remembers having to act as her mother on the phone, so that people on the other end would treat her mother with the respect she deserved. On one occasion, when her mother went to the doctor to get her CAT scan results on a benign brain tumor, her mother claimed that “the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing” (Tan, 544 ). It was not until Tan had talked to the doctor that the medical staff seemed to care about any of her mother’s complications. Tan seems to come to the conclusion that a language barrier affects both sides. Not only does it affect Tan, but it also appears to affect the people around her. For instance, this happens when Tan changes her major from the stereotypical “Asian’s become doctors” to an English teacher. She eventually learns to write fiction and other writings that she was constantly told she would never be successful at.
Traditions, heritage and culture are three of the most important aspects of Chinese culture. Passed down from mother to daughter, these traditions are expected to carry on for years to come. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, daughters Waverly, Lena, Rose and June thoughts about their culture are congested by Americanization while on their quests towards self-actualization. Each daughter struggles to find balance between Chinese heritage and American values through marriage and professional careers.
Growing up in California, Tan continued to embrace the typical values of Americans. She had taken on American values as her own identity, completely ignoring most of her Chinese heritage. In fact, young Amy Tan would answer her mother’s Chinese questions in English (Miller 1162). Teenage Amy Tan lost both her father and sixteen-year-old brother to brain tumors. Soon after that, she learned that she had two half-sisters in China from her mother’s first marriage (“Amy Tan Biography”). In 1987, Tan made a trip to China to meet those very same ...
Amy Tan's Literary Works “My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. Your could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down.
The second and third sections are about the daughters' lives, and the vignettes in each section trace their personality growth and development. Through the eyes of the daughters, we can also see the continuation of the mothers' stories, how they learned to cope in America. In these sections, Amy Tan explores the difficulties in growing up as a Chinese-American and the problems assimilating into modern society. The Chinese-American daughters try their best to become "Americanized," at the same time casting off their heritage while their mothers watch on, dismayed. Social pressures to become like everyone else, and not to be different are what motivate the daughters to resent their nationality. This was a greater problem for Chinese-American daughters that grew up in the 50's, when it was not well accepted to be of an "ethnic" background.
Amy Tan is a Chinese-American author. She had become Americanized, according to her mother, who still held traditional Chinese values. They fought sometimes, just as the women and daughters of The Joy Luck Club, over who was right and who was wrong regarding many problems they encountered. Tan most likely modeled The Joy Luck Club after her relationship with her mother. She even dedicated the novel “To my mother and the memory of her mother. You asked me once what I wo...
In the Joy Luck Club, the author Amy Tan, focuses on mother-daughter relationships. She examines the lives of four women who emigrated from China, and the lives of four of their American-born daughters. The mothers: Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-Ying St. Clair had all experienced some life-changing horror before coming to America, and this has forever tainted their perspective on how they want their children raised. The four daughters: Waverly, Lena, Rose, and Jing-Mei are all Americans. Even though they absorb some of the traditions of Chinese culture they are raised in America and American ideals and values. This inability to communicate and the clash between cultures create rifts between mothers and daughters.
Throughout Asian American literature there is a struggle between Asian women and their Asian American daughters. This is the case in The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan and also in the short story "Waiting for Mr. Kim," written by Carol Roh-Spaulding. These two stories are very different, however they are similar in that they portray Asian women trying to get their American daughters to respect their Asian heritage. There are certain behaviors that Asian women are expected to have, and the mothers feel that their daughters should use these behaviors.
Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club, displays life lessons mothers pass down to their daughters through the character An-mei, while Janice Mirikitani mirrors the morales presented in Tan’s novel through her own work, “For a Daughter Who Leaves”. The Joy Luck Club follows a series of mothers and their daughters and how they perceive and react to the cultural gap between them. An-mei’s story follows her through her life in China and her new life in America. In China, she witnesses the abuse her mother goes through and eventually her mother’s suicide. She does not want her daughter, Rose, to repeat the same mistakes her mother and herself made, so she tries to teach Rose how to live a happy and full life without regrets.
amy tan, a gifted writer, had the chance to change those images, to dispel the public's misconceptions and to forge a new asian american identity. instead, she copped out on her obligations, meekly reinforcing every conceivable stereotype.
As the great French writer Voltaire once said, “Writing is the painting of the voice” (Voltaire). By stating this, he insightfully implies that writing can be interpreted and presented in numerous ways that are unique to each individual author. Representing this idea in a purely individual way, writer Amy Tan presented her stories of family and relationships from the rarely demonstrated Chinese-American perspective. Instead of making her stories immediately applicable to a fully white audience, she stayed true to her own story and majorly influenced American literature on the whole. Through her writing, Amy Tan challenged America’s stereotypes of Asian people by examining common relationships between mother and daughter.
When analyzing the Joy Luck club it is important to consider the life of the author. It is apparent after studying both The Joy Luck Club and Amy Tan that there are some incredible similarities among the two, particularly the story of mother Suyuan-Woo and her daughter Jing-Mei Woo. Suyuan is a main character and plays an extremely important role in the novel even though she passed away. She created the Joy Luck club years ago and is the main reason why this tight kit family exists today. Suyuan decided to create the Joy Luck club during a ve...
In Amy Tan's novels, The Joy Luck Club, and A Hundred Secret Senses, she describes relationships between mothers and daughters reflecting on her own parents experiences in life.