Storytelling has been used as a focal point of Chinese culture for thousands of years. Before there was writing people would transfer information through the art of speaking, thus storytelling has become the foundation of many cultures. Without storytelling we would have no idea about history. Oral communication is subjective, because of the way people remember stories, and retell them to others. In both The Bonesetter’s Daughter and The Kitchen God’s Wife, Amy Tan describes the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters through their storytelling. In The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Ruth’s relationship with her mother suffers because she knows very little about her mother’s history. As people grow up they often grow apart from their parents, …show more content…
Having lost her mother at a young age, Winnie had a rough childhood. She never knew what it was like to have a real mother, which always made her feel as though she was missing something. Because of her loss, Winnie promises to herself to always be there for her children. However, when her husband becomes a threat, she has to let her babies die, feeling that, “in [her] heart, [she] was being kind” (312). Being that Winnie is a victim to her husband’s rape, she has no choice but to abort the unwanted children. As Winnie continues to tell her story to Pearl, she feels more comfortable to share the uncomfortable truth about her life. While Winnie tells the truth, Pearl is forced to hear about the pain her mother went through in her first marriage. Winnie leaves out no details as she explains the worst night of her marriage when, her husband “cursed and called [her] all kinds of bad names, the same ones he had used throughout [their] marriage: ‘Whore! Fox devil! Traitor!’ Whiskey smells poured out of his mouth. [Winnie] did not protest. But [she] also did not act afraid. [She] let these insults roll over [her]” (307). Although Winnie wants to preserve the innocence of her daughter she feels it is crucial for Pearl to know the terrible life she had in China. Telling her story makes Winnie feel stronger because she is finally able to tell Pearl the truth. Being truthful is one of the most important …show more content…
For people to feel comfortable sharing secrets they have to have a strong understanding for one another, which is why it is hard for Winnie to share with Pearl the truth about her father. After sharing immense details about her history, Winnie tells Pearl that Wen Fu, the evil man who tormented Winnie’s life, is her father. Although Pearl has just heard such horrific news she says, “[She] was giddy. Here [her] mother had told [her] the tragedy of her life. Here [Pearl] had just been told that Wen Fu might well be the other half of [her] genetic makeup. Yet [Pearl and Winnie] were laughing” (400). Usually mothers and daughters are born with a strong connection, but in this case Winnie and Pearl have to build it. Winnie’s ability to share her story with her daughter helps their relationship grow immensely. Now that Pearl has built the trust with her mother she is ready to share her secret about having multiple sclerosis. Unfortunately her mother is not as calm to hear bad news as she had been. Winnie is furious, “Wen Fu gave you this disease!’ She cried. ‘He caused this to happen”’(401). Winnie irrationally blames her ex-husband for Pearl’s illness. Pearl is able to understand why Winnie is overreacting to hearing the bad news because she knows her mother’s story. Had Winnie not told her daughter all her secrets; she would not have been able to explain why she is so upset over the
Growing up, Ruth had a rough childhood growing up in a very strict jewish household. Her family was poor, her mother was physically handicapped, her father was verbally and physically abusive, and she faced prejudice and discrimination from her neighbors and classmates because she
Analyzing “How to Read Literature like a Professor” is easy, but on the other hand, to analyze “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” is a consuming task. The difficulty doesn’t lie in the grammar or the structure, but in employing the skills employed by Foster’s book. An unskilled reader would assume that Amy Tan’s novel: The Bonesetter’s Daughter, is just another novel written for entertainment purposes. To an untrained reader, there seems to be no author’s intent to use literary devices that would contextualize the deeper meaning that is usually found in fiction, mythology, and folklore. Instead the novel would seem nothing more than entertainment, but for a reader that isn’t just reading but also searching through the text for the literary devices
The book the “The Bonesetter's Daughter” is by author Amy Tan. The book genre is fiction. The setting of the book takes place in two different eras. One is modern and the other decades before. The book takes place during the Civil War era, which took place during the 1840s in China. The main characters are Ruth, her mother Luling, Art, Ruth’s her husband, Kaijing, Luiling’s husband, and Precious Auntie. The story is about how a mother and daughter never had the best communication of their relationship, they always had trouble getting along. Later as she got older her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. As she's going through these obstacles she found her mother's
I feel sorry for An-mei as her mind has been greatly influenced by her grandmother. She observed her mother and “saw that she had a long white neck”, “just like the goose that had laid me” (one of her grandmother’s stories). She knew she “was the girl whose belly held a colourless winter melon”. “ Popo told me not to speak her name”, thus An-mei “stood there, mute”, not daring to address her mother. This is pitiful of An-mei as she does not deserve this treatment from her grandmother, making her confused and hesitant towards her mother. I have pity for An-mei as she “did not look for fear my head would burst and my brains would dribble out of my ears”, scared as she laid in her mother’s arms.
The first problem Ruth faces is how to support her family. Accused of not paying enough attention to her son, Ruth snaps at Mama shouting, “I feed my son, Lena!” (1880). This encounter with Mama displays an uptight, stressed side of Ruth, who balances a job, a son, her husband, and keeping the expected baby a secret. With so much preoccupying her mind, Ruth still tries to make money while feeling ill telling Mama, “I have to go. We need the money,” (1881). Money becomes a topic of great interest in the Younger family causing everyone to worry entirely too much about it. Ruth puts her family before herself caring about their conditions and the money they make over her own health. The next struggle Ruth encounters is deciding what option is best for her family and possible new baby. After finding out about the pregnancy, Ruth assures her family “she”, the doctor, confirmed everything is fine (1888). The slip up reveals that Ruth is considering getting an abortion. Furthermore, pushing her own conflict aside, Ruth still supports her family’s dreams, encouraging Mama to “open it”, meaning the check, for Mama’s own benefit and use toward a better lifestyle (1893). Ruth solves her own conflict by deciding to keep the baby and motivate her family in whatever way possible in the new challenges to
The chapter starts off with Ying-Ying visiting Lena and her husband in their new home, which she thinks is overpriced and poorly built. Ying-Ying is able to see just how unhappy her daughter is in her marriage. Ying-Ying also went through a miserable marriage so she is able to relate to the kind of suffering that her daughter is going through. At her aunts wedding, when she was sixteen, Ying-Ying saw a man and knew that he would become her husband. He tried to attract Ying-Ying by cutting a watermelon down the middle with a knife. Soon enough, Ying-Ying married him. When he found out that she was going to be having a baby, he left her. Ying-Ying was so upset that she killed the baby before it was even born. Later in her life, while working in a shop, she met Clifford St. Clair. It was obvious that Clifford liked her but she didn’t feel the same way, but when the news came that her first husband has dead, it left an empty hole in her heart. To fill that hole she married Clifford and moved to America with him where she soon gave birth to...
Set almost 20 years ago, in the middle of 1998 San Francisco, The Bonesetter's Daughter, authored by Amy Tan, follows the tragic, but lovely story of three generations of women in the Liu family. The author paints the picture of a turn-of-the-century Chinese woman, Precious Auntie, her daughter Liu LuLing who lived in the middle of World War II, and further, LuLing's daughter, Ruth, who was raised in a bustling 1970's San Francisco. Throughout the book, the characters share many of the same thoughts and qualities as each other, as well as show stark contrasts. Upon inspecting Precious Auntie and LuLing as a mother-daughter pair, as well as LuLing and Ruth as a mother-daughter pair, the three are found to be dependent upon each other,
The conflict happening in The Bonesetter’s Daughter is revolved around all of the mistakes that have arised from the past, not letting them sleep because they are too fearful to even close their eyes because they fear they will make the same mistake again causing them to pressure their children into not making the same mistake resulting in extreme and horrendous conflict. The conflict is crucial to the whole story because it shows character development, feelings, and how it sculpts the characters as a whole. The way Ruth talks to her mother (LuLing) by exclaiming “I really don’t care” (Tan 158-159) and “I hate her” when her mother asks “ You want I die?” shows
The journey of Ruth Hall is having a family that would push her around to be more “ladylike.” She basically does what her family would tell her to do, which is not what Ruth Hall wanted. But to make her family happy, she ended up doing what her family told her to do in the first place. Her life is also tragic in her own way. It may not be like Linda Brent’s story of suffering through slavery. Ruth Hall’s story is more like suffering through the criticism of women. Hall’s life seemed to be okay at first since she has gotten married and had her first child. It was then that her life started to spiral with the death of her first daughter, then the death of her husband. Due to her husband passing away, her family and her in-law’s family believes she is no longer a capable woman to take care of her two children without a man in the house.
Ruth, whose dreams are the same as Mama’s, get deferred when the family are forced into there small apartment and there lack of money. Since she has no money she can not help her family as much as she would like to.
Therefore, the young boy is validating his loyalty to his father even though morally he knows his father burned down the barn. In the same manner, the mother shows similar traits of her devotion to her husband over all things bad the husband has done. The clock inlaid with the mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o’clock of a dead and forgotten day and time, which had been his mother’s dowry (Faulkner, 1980, p. 2). Yet, she remains by his side in similar fashion, despite how all Abner’s immoral deeds distress the family. One could argue that she is fearful and that is why she will not leave his side, but Abner inflicts fear into the entire family, which in turns demands loyalty on the bases of fear in its
On March 13, 1933, Joan Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Celia Amster and Nathan Bader (Salokar & Volcansek, 1996). Ruth had an older sister, Marilyn, but she passed away at the age of six from meningitis; Ruth was one year old at the time. Cecilia, Ruth’s mother, stayed home and took care of Ruth while she grew up. Cecilia made sure that Ruth worked diligently in school and taught her the value of hard work. Cecilia was diagnosed with cancer while Ruth was in high school and the day before her daughter’s graduation she passed away (Salokar & Volcansek, 1996). One of the greatest influences on Ruth’s life was her mother and the values she instilled in her from a young age. Two of the greatest lessons that Ruth learned from her mother was to be independent and to be a lady, and by that she meant not to respond in anger but to remain calm in si...
Even when Ruth grows up, her mother still threatens her “never ceased to grab her by the throat” (Tan, 2001, p. 111). Parallel to how mother’s shape their daughters, LuLing still has a huge influence on Ruth’s identity formation. Enduring her mother’s erratic behavior makes Ruth a reserved person who usually opts to keep her feelings to herself. In addition, Ruth’s relationship with Art deteriorates due to her over- accommodating, causing Art to take Ruth for granted.
Storytelling is a powerful tool to teach both children and adults important lessons about humanity, life, culture, and traditions. Martha Hamilton and Mitch Weiss, professional storytellers, explain the power of storytelling as a teaching tool this way, “Storytelling is the oldest form of education. People around the world have always told tales as a way of passing down their cultural beliefs, traditions, and history to future generations” (1). Throughout human history, oral stories have been a universal way in which humans pass down their history, beliefs, and even morals. According to Donna Eder and Regina Holyan, in their book Life Lessons through Storytelling, “Stories were the first way in which humans relayed their history, their knowledge,
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance (par. 3). Most women shattered and are devastated with the news of their husband’s death. Mrs. Mallard’s reaction was unlikely different than what was expected by her sister Josephine. In most situations, the first stage is denial. Most women after hearing the new of their husband’s death do not believe anything like that even happen. In Mrs. Mallard’s situation, she did not even misbelieve the news or even question her sister. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms (par. 3). The tears