“Mom, do you remember brother Jian Ming?” I asked as I was looking at the family photo we have up on the wall in the living room. It was a full family picture with all my uncles, aunts, cousins, and other family members on my father’s side of the family. I wondered why we never took a family photo for my mother’s side of the family; the side of family that brother Jian Ming belonged to. “Yeah, what about him?” Mom took a deep breath and replied back as she was preparing our dinner. She acted as if she did not want to bring him up. “Why is it that we never hear about him anymore?What happened to him?” I was too young to remember what happened to brother Jian Ming. “A lot happened. Why are you asking?” My mom frowned upon my curiosity. “I …show more content…
After he got married, his life went straight downhill.” Mom said indifferently and shook her head. “The group of friends that he had completely crashed his life. The day after he got married, he and his friends were celebrating in his store. His friend took out some marijuana and tempted him into trying some. An hour later, the police came and caught brother Jian Ming and his friends doing drugs. The police held their guns against them and told them to bend down with their hands behind their head. ‘Whose drugs are these?’ the police asked aggressively. The crowd was silent. ‘Who?!’ the policed yelled again.‘They are mine, officer.’ Brother Jian Ming did not have to take the blame all for himself but he was blinded by what he defined as faithful friendship. He was then handcuffed and brought the police station. The police put him on trial a week later. Besides the drug case, brother Jian Ming was also charged for stealing money.” It was not clear to me why he was charged for that crime because I had always known him as the righteous brother. However, the question did not bother me much as mother went on with the …show more content…
I have money right here in my hand, we have money!’” Perhaps my aunt was just trying to defend brother Jian Ming but her method was definitely a foolish one. “Your aunt’s action obviously irritated the policers and that was what was recorded down as your aunt’s testimony. Perhaps it really was the case that your brother Jian Ming valued his friendship with all his heart, so he beared the responsibility for all of them. However, the cost for this loyal brotherhood was twenty years in jail. Who knows what he was thinking?” Mother sneered again and went back to cooking. “Wait, how did the police know that they were doing drugs there? They were in his private store.” I went straight to the blind spot of the story. “And what about his wife?” I
The uncle, on the other hand, does not care how he uses his money. As long as it helps himself in some way then he is happy. He sells his harvest as soon as it is ripe and then always ends up running out of money before the end of winter. The uncle farms on barren land that has no nutrients left in it. Since he is always gambling his money away, he cannot afford to buy new land and receive some kind of decent crop from his investment. The Uncle is so selfish that he threatens to tell the village if Wang Lung does not give him money and food. In the Chinese culture this would be considered dishonorable if Wang would not help his family. It is their duty to help if their family, even if that means that Wang would have less than everybody else. The uncle spends his money on expensive delicacies for his wife who is overweight as it is. He could save the money and use it in the winter when they are in need the most.
In her book, The House of Lim, author Margery Wolf observes the Lims, a large Chinese family living in a small village in Taiwan in the early 1960s (Wolf iv). She utilizes her book to portray the Lim family through multiple generations. She provides audiences with a firsthand account of the family life and structure within this specific region and offers information on various customs that the Lims and other families participate in. She particularly mentions and explains the marriage customs that are the norm within the society. Through Wolf’s ethnography it can be argued that parents should not dec5pide whom their children marry. This argument is obvious through the decline in marriage to simpua, or little girls taken in and raised as future daughter-in-laws, and the influence parents have over their children (Freedman xi).
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 ...
Kingston’s mother told her this story as a warning; to avoid being a disgraceful and disloyal woman like her aunt. Kingston, however, does not view her aunt as a promiscuous woman, but rather a victim or a martyr. “Imagining her free with sex doesn’t fit”, she claimed. Kingston imagines her aunt as a woman who abandoned the traditions set forth by China’s extremely patriarchal society. She saw her and someone who did what so many Chinese women shou...
Perhaps moments later my mother finally whispered to me that he was my Uncle Eddy, her brother. My face lit up as I remembered stories my mom had told me of her childhood spent with her sometimes annoying big brother. I ran over and gave this strange man a big hug. The Asian woman, it happened, was his wife. I was a little shy around the both of them as I hadn’t really ever seen them in person before that I remembered. I remember my uncle introducing his wife, Jullianne, to my grandmother. She smiled very big as she rea...
People in the Chinese culture have honor in their family. Their family wanted other people to think of them as amazing. Each family wants to be superior to each other. Family names were a status symbol in China. Father told Adeline to get good grades and make the family proud multiple times. Honor was also shown when Adeline refuses to take the tram fare from Niang. Adeline said, “I simply couldn’t force myself to go to Niang and admit that I (and therefore Ye Ye) had erred in the past” (Yen Mah 40). Adeline stood up to Niang and refused to apologize to her. She knew that she didn’t do anything wrong and shouldn’t have to apologize. Niang wanted her to apologize for taking tram fare from Ye Ye and Aunt Baba. Adeline showed honor and didn’t let Niang tell her what to do.
Maxine, being of the first generation of her family to be born in America, only knows about China from what she hears in her mother’s “talk-stories.” These stories are told to act as lessons on how the Chinese people were and should be, and are often vary critical. In “No Name Woman,” the tale of Maxine’s aunt who was shunned from her family for having an affair shows how careful young women must be when growing up in Chinese culture. “My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devoted pages to her…” (17). Maxine feels remorse and can relate to her aunt because she too feels a sense of alienation from her traditional Chinese and seemingly narrow-minded heritage.
I am touched by An-mei’s mother’s perseverance and determination to go to her dying mother. An-mei’s aunt “quickly looked away”, “did not call her by name” and “offer her tea”, which is the Chinese traditional way of treating visitors. Even the servant looked down on her as she “hurried away with a displeased look”. Despite the aunt’s protest, “Too late, too late”, it “did not stop my mother”. In spite of the humiliation and disrespect given by the aunt and servant, An-mei’s mother did not leave as she tolerated all this for the sake of Popo, her own mother.
Family became an important aspect in Mah’s life. In the Chinese culture family is typically a vital part of the way of life. Mah may have been ashamed the way her first marriage ended and did not want the same with this man she met named Leon. Leon is a Chinese immigrant and family is his priority. Mah and Leon marry and have two girls, Ona and Nina. They form a family like connection more than ever before. Leon was a fairly stable man and loved his family. Mah and Leon were b...
Within the book The Joy Luck Club, in the chapter “The Joy Luck Club,” Auntie Ying and Jing-Mei Woo are having a conversation. In this conversation Auntie Ying tells Jing-Mei, “Your mother was a very strong woman… She knew they were alive, and before she died she wanted to find her daughters in China” (pg.39). In this sentence it shows the determination of Jing-Mei’s mother to get out of China and the sacrifice she had to make to leave her two daughters in order for her to produce a better life for her and her kin in a new country.
When he found out that the pictures of beautiful women in the tea house were real prostitutes, “his desire overcame him” (178). After seeing one regularly, he took her as a second wife. When one is rich, he does not depend on loyalty within the family for survival. Families do not need to support each other to a great extent. When Wang Lung’s daughter complained about getting her feet bound, she told him that “my mother said I was not to weep aloud because… you might say to leave me as I am and then my husband would not love me even as you do not love her” (249).
Kingston uses the story of her aunt to show the gender roles in China. Women had to take and respect gender roles that they were given. Women roles they had to follow were getting married, obey men, be a mother, and provide food. Women had to get married. Kingston states, “When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband…she would be the first wife, an advantage secure now” (623). This quote shows how women had to get married, which is a role women in China had to follow. Moreover, marriage is a very important step in women lives. The marriage of a couple in the village where Kingston’s aunt lived was very important because any thing an individual would do would affect the village and create social disorder. Men dominated women physically and mentally. In paragraph eighteen, “they both gav...
“Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strengths to establish realities”(5). In the book “The Woman Warrior,” Maxine Kingston is most interested in finding out about Chinese culture and history and relating them to her emerging American sense of self. One of the main ways she does so is listening to her mother’s talk-stories about the family’s Chinese past and applying them to her life.
Lindo Jong provides the reader with a summary of her difficulty in passing along the Chinese culture to her daughter: “I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix? I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it's no lasting shame . . . You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your head . . . In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you. . . . but I couldn't teach her about Chinese character . . . How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best”(Tan 289).
” Her mother is so critical of rich because he was not only Chinese but also younger than Waverly. It’s really hard to adapt another culture, that’s what happened with Rich when he came for a dinner at Lindo’s house. He was doing mistakes again and again even when he didn’t know it was a mistake. “He had brought a bottle of French wine, something he did not know my parents could not appreciate”.