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An Intercultural Marriage is a fusion of two souls involving numerous cultures and backgrounds .When two cultures combine together, there may be significant challenges they have to face. A culture may differ from one to another due to behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, religions, customs, and all other products of human work and thought. Culture is a system of shared beliefs and values around the world. The story, The Joy Luck Club, focuses around the lives of Chinese mother and Chinese-American daughter. The story takes place when Waverly concocted a way for Rich to meet mother. The mother and daughter hold very different principles, where the mother is still very traditional to her Chinese upbringings the daughter is much more “American”. …show more content…
She is having totally different thoughts from her mother and especially about Rich. “So what do you think of rich? I finally asked, holding my breath. She tossed the eggplant in the hot oil and it made a loud, angry hissing sound. So many spots on his face, she said.” 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”. Some of the families don’t drink wine and Waverly’s family was one of them. “When I offered rich a for,.. Chunk fell on his crisp white shirt and then slid into his crotch”. He was trying to impress her parents by eating with a chopstick but it went all wrong because he don’t know how to eat food like Chinese people. Waverly is humiliated, and realizes that there will never be a good time to tell her mother that she is marrying
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 Fish Cheeks a girl named Amy had a crush on an american boy named Robert, she was afraid that if Robert found out about her chinese culture then he would not like her back. When she found out that he was invited over for dinner Amy was devastated “When I found out that my parents had invited
Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club uses much characterization. Each character is portrayed in different yet similar ways. When she was raised, she would do whatever she could to please other people. She even “gave up her life for her parents promise” (49), I the story The Red Candle we get to see how Tan portrays Lindo Jong and how she is brought to life.
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan consists of characters who encounter antagonistic forces in the story. For instance, Lena St. Clair, the daughter of a Chinese mother, and an American father, experiences issues regarding racial discrimination, danger in new environment, and family issues throughout her story. Firstly, Lena comes to face with racial discrimination. During her story, “The Voice from the Wall,” she mentions a drunk Chinese man who runs into her and her mother, Ying-Ying St. Clair, on the street.
Many women find that their mothers have the greatest influence on their lives and the way their strengths and weaknesses come together. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the lives of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters are followed through vignettes about their upbringings and interactions. One of the mothers, An-Mei Hsu, grows up away from her mother who has become the 4th wife of a rich man; An-Mei is forced to live with her grandmother once her mother is banned from the house, but eventually reunites and goes to live in the man’s house with her mother. Her daughter, Rose, has married an American man, Ted, but their marriage begins to end as he files for divorce; Rose becomes depressed and unsure what to do, despite her mother’s advice. An-Mei has strengths and weaknesses that shape her own courageous actions, and ultimately have an influence on her daughter.
Deception binds the characters of the Joy Luck Club together. In the Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan depicts deception at almost every turn in the novel. Mothers often help their daughters through deceptive comments; husbands hide secrets from their wives through deceptive acts. Even best friends deceive each other as they struggle for one reason or another. Throughout the story, deception is an irreplaceable tool for parenting; for attempting to keep marriages together, or maintaining friendships. From time to time, it grows out of control from a benign lecture to a life changing scam.
The adults, although they felt awkward at first, respect each other’s culture. When Amy’s dad had finished his meal, he “belched loudly, thanking [her] mother for her fine cooking,” and although the minister was uncomfortable at first, he “managed to muster up a quiet burp.” The author’s use of imagery displays two people with contrasting cultures respecting each other’s heritage. Robert and Amy’s actions portray them as anxious and insecure, but the adults display a lively and jovial mood. During the dinner Amy’s relatives “murmured with pleasure” amongst themselves while Robert and his family are silent. Amy feels her relatives are being rowdy, but in reality they are expressing their happiness through conversations with one another. Tan’s use of the word “pleasure” implies that they are enjoying themselves and “murmured” has a connotation of being quiet, so Amy perceives the dinner as worse than it really is. Amy’s mother senses Amy’s unease, and knowingly tells her she understands that Amy “wants to be the same as American girls on the outside, but inside you must always be Chinese.” Tan’s use of dialogue expresses Amy’s struggle to find her identity and it displays her mother as
America was not everything the mothers had expected for their daughters. The mothers always wanted to give their daughters the feather to tell of their hardships, but they never could. They wanted to wait until the day that they could speak perfect American English. However, they never learned to speak their language, which prevented them from communicating with their daughters. All the mothers in The Joy Luck Club had so much hope for their daughters in America, but instead their lives ended up mirroring their mother’s life in China. All the relationships had many hardships because of miscommunication from their different cultures. As they grew older the children realized that their ...
The American-born daughters do not fathom the amount of pain that their mothers had experienced so they do not realize that their problems could be much worse. The daughters relate to their mothers in that they are all facing their greatest problems. No matter how trivial or significant problems may seem, to one it may be the worst they have experienced and to another it could be less worse than what they have experienced. The immigrant mothers grew up with much more pain than their daughters, therefore they have a thicker skin and are less ignorant. Since the daughters have grown up “swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow,” (Tan, 17) they experience pain from seemingly insignificant problems in comparison to their mother’s hardships. The mother’s good intentions and struggles are unrecognized by their daughters. Tan writes about this misfortune through describing an old Chinese woman immigrating to America in the beginning of the novel: “But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leaving the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind” (Tan, 17). This immigrant’s story represents the four Chinese-American immigrants and how their hopes and dreams were hit with reality when they came to America. For example, Lindo describes how America has certain secret rules that you must discover. "This American rules...Every time people come out from foreign country, must know rules. You not know, judge say, Too bad, go back. They not telling you why so you can use their way go forward. They say, Don’t know why, you find out yourself. But they knowing all the time. Better you take it, find out why yourself" (Tan, 94). Lindo obviously believes in
The Joy Luck Club is an emotional tale about four women who saw life as they had seen it back in China. Because the Chinese were very stereotypic, women were treated as second class citizens and were often abused. Through sad and painful experiences, these four women had tried to raise their daughters to live the American dream by giving them love and support, such things which were not available to them when they were young. These women revealed their individual accounts in narrative form as they relived it in their memories. These flashbacks transport us to the minds of these women and we see the events occur through their eyes. There were many conflicts and misunderstandings between the two generations due to their differences in upbringing and childhood. In the end, however, these conflicts would bring mother and daughter together to form a bond that would last forever.
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.
The Joy Luck Club, is a film that shows a powerful portrayal of four Chinese women and the lives of their children in America. The film presents the conflicting cultures between the United States and China, and how men treat women throughout their lives. People living in the United States usually take for granted their roles as a male or female. The culture of each country shapes the treatment one receives based on the sex of the individual. Gender roles shape this movie and allows people, specifically the United States, to see how gender are so crutcial in othe countries.
The Chinese mothers, so concentrated on the cultures of their own, don't want to realize what is going on around them. They don't want to accept the fact that their daughters are growing up in a culture so different from their own. Lindo Jong, says to her daughter, Waverly- "I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents' promise. This means nothing to you because to you, promises mean nothing. A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, a traffic jam, if she wants to watch a favorite movie on T.V., she no longer has a promise."(Tan 42) Ying Ying St.Clair remarks- "...because I remained quiet for so long, now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid."(Tan 64)
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).
The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan is a piece of literature that displays the power of femininity. Through the past couple of centuries the role that women play in society has drastically changed. Women in various societies have experienced turmoil due to being discriminated against and looked down upon often. Women were viewed upon as being the house caregiver and leaving majority of the other jobs in society to men. Women have moved up the social ladder, politics, jobs, and in households. Femininity is shown throughout The Joy Luck Club. These women each have their own life experiences and stories but through it all they remained strong. Rules and regulations for women in China were very restrictive. Women had to live up to the ideal model of being obedient, hard working, bearing children, hide her unhappiness, and to not complain about anything. In China the women had little worth and were only seen as valuable to their immediate family members. Most of the mothers left China for the reason of improving their daughter’s lives in America. The novel demonstrates various characteristics of how women are represented. The theme of women is demonstrated through the hardships experienced, ethics and self-worth.