Every fingerprint is distinct, microscopically, though they may all look alike at first, but everyone is a unique entity with differing purposes. Rich, poor, young, old, outsiders are a diverse group of people who seem to lack any similarities at first, until one digs deeper into their core traits.Bride is about finding one’s identity, the narrative essay “Go Carolina” by David Sedaris is about the author’s experiences in therapy, and the article “Chinese Mothers are Superior” by Amy Chua is about why she thinks her way of raising children is best, all of which contain characters who are very different in terms of personality and background, yet are all outsiders. Outsiders always posses certain qualities that isolate them from others such …show more content…
Almost instantly when a person interacts with another they judge each other and may form an opinion on the person, without any actual conversation flowing between them. The reason outsiders never fit in anywhere is usually because in those ten seconds they reveal a quirk that others are immediately wary of, or note mentally. Similarly in the short narrative, “Go Carolina,” about a young boy’s struggle with hiding his true self to fit in and to endure speech therapy, the boy - named David mentions how it seems like all the people in therapy were outsiders, and how it seemed they all had trouble with speech because of their outsider statuses. An excerpt from the narrative is, “None of the speech therapy students were girls. They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains.” (Sedaris 9). There are some who blend in with the crowd, and some who are picked on for a quirkiness in them that draws them apart while feeling like an outsider. To add to, society is like a hungry lion waiting to pounce on the next innocent who dares disrupt the perfect disaster. A victim of the lion may be Amy Chua who writes with brashness and complete honesty, “For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more than Westerners, who seem perfectly content with …show more content…
A bully teases their target for the sole reason of getting a reaction out of them, but if that is denied from them their whole ruse is up, frustrating to no end. Correspondingly, when one is trying to succeed in the world, the unsettling fact of figuring out that someone may be harmful to the splendid life planned out, and is ruining order leads to resentment. Relevantly, hardships threw themselves at Ruth from The Color of Water hardly giving her time to recover from one before another appeared. Nonetheless a way Ruth coped as seen in the excerpt, “she had absolutely no interest in a world that seemed incredibly agitated by our presence,” (McBride 100). Ruth stood tall and kept moving without paying attention to comments meant to break her, as she would not let a world out to destroy her ideals pierce through her thick skin. Moreover, intelligence is a power which instigates foolhardiness in those aiming to extirpate others. David; a dynamic character from “Go Carolina” states, “in order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous.” Throughout the narrative David hints at his homosexuality which causes a rift between him and others, but other than the people with David in speech therapy, no one realized David’s secret, which resulted from his cleverness in showing people what they expected to see. David’s intelligence was a power he used to conceal
where the author wants to become proficient in speaking French. He studies language instructions only to end up being embarrassed by the teacher. This results to him being more culturally confused. David Sedaris finds humor in situations that are humiliating.
Thru-out the centuries, regardless of race or age, there has been dilemmas that identify a family’s thru union. In “Hangzhou” (1925), author Lang Samantha Chang illustrates the story of a Japanese family whose mother is trapped in her believes. While Alice Walker in her story of “Everyday Use” (1944) presents the readers with an African American family whose dilemma is mainly rotating around Dee’s ego, the narrator’s daughter. Although differing ethnicity, both families commonly share the attachment of a legacy, a tradition and the adaptation to a new generation. In desperation of surviving as a united family there are changes that they must submit to.
Imagine feeling and looking different from all those around you. Imagine if you weren’t understood the same way as the majority. In the book “American Born Chinese”, two characters, Jin and Monkey King who went through the same situations, but in different societies. The Monkey King insight into the impact of society on Jin as they both face social exclusion through experiencing internalized racism. Further as Monkey King transforms into another character, Chin-Kee, which Jin sees as an embarrassing Chinese culture.
“The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen, China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain. And I think, my mother was right. I am becoming Chinese. (179). In the story A Pair of Tickets by Amy Tan, the protagonist character, Jing-mei, finds herself in several difficult situations due to how her social and cultural upbringing has shaped her. She finds herself pulled between her Chinese DNA and her American background. While she was raised being told that she was Chinese and “it’s in her blood”, she does not identify as such, because she grew up in America and only sees herself as an American. After her mother’s passing,
Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish” tells the story of a sixty-eight-year-old Chinese immigrant and her struggle to accept other cultures different from her own. The protagonist has been living in the United States for a while but she is still critical of other cultures and ethnicities, such as her son-in-law’s Irish family and the American values in which her daughter insists on applying while raising the protagonist’s granddaughter. The main character finds it very hard to accept the American way of disciplining and decides to implement her own measures when babysitting her granddaughter Sophie. When the main character’s daughter finds out that she has been spanking Sophie she asks her mother to move out of the house and breaks any further contact between them by not taking Sophie to visit her grandmother in her new place. The central idea of the story is that being an outsider depends on one’s perspective and that perspective determines how one’s life will be.
Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker expresses prominent themes of language and racial identity. Chang-Rae Lee focuses on the struggles that Asian Americans have to face and endure in American society. He illustrates and shows readers throughout the novel of what it really means to be native of America; that true nativity of a person does not simply entail the fact that they are from a certain place, but rather, the fluency of a language verifies one’s defense of where they are native. What is meant by possessing nativity of America would be one’s citizenship and legality of the country. Native Speaker suggests that if one looks different or has the slightest indication that one should have an accent, they will be viewed not as a native of America, but instead as an alien, outsider, and the like. Therefore, Asian Americans and other immigrants feel the need to mask their true identity and imitate the native language as an attempt to fit into the mold that makes up what people would define how a native of America is like. Throughout the novel, Henry Park attempts to mask his Korean accent in hopes to blend in as an American native. Chang-Rae Lee suggests that a person who appears to have an accent is automatically marked as someone who is not native to America. Language directly reveals where a person is native of and people can immediately identify one as an alien, immigrant, or simply, one who is not American. Asian Americans as well as other immigrants feel the need to try and hide their cultural identity in order to be deemed as a native of America in the eyes of others. Since one’s language gives away the place where one is native to, immigrants feel the need to attempt to mask their accents in hopes that they sound fluent ...
What this tells us, or rather the challenges faced by South Asian Americans through the lens of Americans is that they are barbaric, living in close quarters, with more than the “normal” number of individuals in a room or even a building. Another interaction with Erica was when they were both in the ocean and Erica comments “I don’t think,” she said finally, “I’ve ever met someone our age as polite as you” (Hamid 25). What this tells us, or rather the challenges faced by South Asian Americans is that they have to be extra nice and polite in order to compensate for their “barbaric and backwardness” view that Americans tend to associate with these group of people. And of which has been heightened following the aftermath of 9/11. Another interaction with Erica was when she invited Changez over her parent’s apartment for the very first time and during a conversation with Erica’s father, he asked Changez how things were back home, to which he had replied back as “quite good, thank you” (Hamid 54). Erica’s father response to this:
Amy Tan’s ,“Mother Tongue” and Maxine Kingston’s essay, “No Name Woman” represent a balance in cultures when obtaining an identity in American culture. As first generation Chinese-Americans both Tan and Kingston faced many obstacles. Obstacles in language and appearance while balancing two cultures. Overcoming these obstacles that were faced and preserving heritage both women gained an identity as a successful American.
In the short story, "Two Kinds" by Amy Tan, a Chinese mother and daughter are at odds with each other. The mother pushes her daughter to become a prodigy, while the daughter (like most children with immigrant parents) seeks to find herself in a world that demands her Americanization. This is the theme of the story, conflicting values. In a society that values individuality, the daughter sought to be an individual, while her mother demanded she do what was suggested. This is a conflict within itself. The daughter must deal with an internal and external conflict. Internally, she struggles to find herself. Externally, she struggles with the burden of failing to meet her mother’s expectations. Being a first-generation Asian American, I have faced the same issues that the daughter has been through in the story.
In Maya Angelou’s Champion of the World and Amy Tan’s Fish Cheeks both convey their struggles with identity. Both authors are from minority cultures, and describe the same harsh pressures from the dominant culture. They share situations of being outcasts, coming from different racial backgrounds and trying to triumph over these obstacles. Tan and Angelou speak about the differences between their childhood selves and white Americans. Tan talks about the anxiety of a teenage girl who feels embarrassed about her Chinese culture, and who wants to fit in with American society. Angelou’s explains the racial tension and hostility between African and white Americans.
This is evident in the persistence of elderly characters, such as Grandmother Poh-Poh, who instigate the old Chinese culture to avoid the younger children from following different traditions. As well, the Chinese Canadians look to the Vancouver heritage community known as Chinatown to maintain their identity using on their historical past, beliefs, and traditions. The novel uniquely “encodes stories about their origins, its inhabitants, and the broader society in which they are set,” (S. Source 1) to teach for future generations. In conclusion, this influential novel discusses the ability for many characters to sustain one sole
Oftentimes the children of immigrants to the United States lose the sense of cultural background in which their parents had tried so desperately to instill within them. According to Walter Shear, “It is an unseen terror that runs through both the distinct social spectrum experienced by the mothers in China and the lack of such social definition in the daughters’ lives.” This “unseen terror” is portrayed in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club as four Chinese women and their American-born daughters struggle to understand one another’s culture and values. The second-generation women in The Joy Luck Club prove to lose their sense of Chinese values, becoming Americanized.
In Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical piece “Silence”, she describes her inability to speak English when she was in grade school. Kindergarten was the birthplace of her silence because she was a Chinese girl attending an American school. She was very embarrassed of her inability, and when moments came up where she had to speak, “self-disgust” filled her day because of that squeaky voice she possessed (422). Kingston notes that she never talked to anyone at school for her first year of silence, except for one or two other Chinese kids in her class. Maxine’s sister, who was even worse than she was, stayed almost completely silent for three years. Both went to the same school and were in the same second grade class because Maxine had flunked kindergarten.
In essence, he was shunned” (Hongo 4) by the white people who could not believe that he would attack their superior American ways. According to writers such as Frank Chin and the rest of the “Aiiieeeee!” group, the Americans have dictated Asian culture and created a perception as “nice and quiet” (Chin 1972, 18), “mama’s boys and crybabies” without “a man in all [the] males.” (Chin 1972, 24). This has become the belief of the preceding generations of Asian Americans and therefore manifested these stereotypes. Those authors who contest these “American made” stereotypes are said to betray the American culture and white power around them, and to be “rocking the boat” in a seemingly decent living situation.
In her short story "Two Kinds," Amy Tan utilizes the daughter's point of view to share a mother's attempts to control her daughter's hopes and dreams, providing a further understanding of how their relationship sours. The daughter has grown into a young woman and is telling the story of her coming of age in a family that had emigrated from China. In particular, she tells that her mother's attempted parental guidance was dominated by foolish hopes and dreams. This double perspective allows both the naivety of a young girl trying to identify herself and the hindsight and judgment of a mature woman.