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Selling-Out the Asian-American Community in The Joy Luck Club
i wish i could join in the universal praise for amy tan and her best-selling novel "the joy luck club." i wish i could find the latest chinese-american literary dish as appetizing as the rest of the american public does. but i can't. before amy tan entered the scene, public images of asian america had not developed since the middle of the century. the asian american male did not exist except as a barbaric japanese or vietcong soldier. the asian american female remained the adolescent suzy wong pipe dream, toyed with for a while and then deserted.
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.
if you believe tan's first novel "the joy luck club," asian amerca is some mystical oddity, conforming to the mascot-culture view of the white thirtysomething women who predominated at tan's reading. san francisco chinatown is filled with hysterical chinese women playing secret mah jong games. china itself is a dreamlik landscape, filled with secrets and traditions, all exuding a delicate, storybook aura.
chinese mothers are all one-dimensional, superstitious and ignorant. their chinese phrases are delightful italics with quaint meanings. of course, what chinese comedy would be complete without a couple of garbled english words? when tan was late for her berkeley reading, her white husband directed the audience to mimic her mother's amusing syntax: "why so late?" rimshot.
amy tan's heroines are the white mother-in-law's dream come true. these china dolls talk and have strong feminine sympathies. as one of tan's heroines admits, "i used to push my eyes on the sides to make them rounder." futile self-denial, but, oh, isn't it cute?
tan's heroines gain identity by separating themselves from and looking down on their culture. when the heroine in "the kitchen god's wife" hears about her grand auntie's "spirit money," she sneers are her aunt's attempt to "bribe her way along to chinese-heaven" immediately suggests a negative contrast to the "truer" western heaven.
the same dichotomy is used with men as well. asian american men are inadequate -- they're either bothersome brothers or unsuccessful lovers who lead to "apathetic boredom."
love with a white male, however, is different.
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.
While these essays are similar because they focus on the native languages used in America and the struggles of being a Chinese American in America, they differ in both their attitudes toward their mothers and personal reflections of being Chinese American. An individual’s background is where one comes from and how he or she was raised. Tan is a Chinese American. She has a traditional Chinese mother who speaks “broken” English. Tan states that, “It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than ‘broken’, as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed[. . . ]”
Chinese-American authors Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston pioneered Asian-American literature. They condemn each other’s work for differences in cultural interpretation and dispute their own and each other’s prescribed gender roles given by both Chinese and American society. Chin and Kingston have differing views on their Chinese culture; in addition to their conflict on culture they criticize the others work declaring it to be a misrepresentation of each other’s heritage.
During World War I, congress would authorize two controversial pieces of legislation: the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition act of 1918. The Espionage Act was ratified in order to “suppress the spread of alleged disloyalty and to maintain the public image of remarkable national unity behind the war effort” (James and Wells, 71). The act inhibited the freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and some of which seems the antithesis of the First Amendment of the Constitution. Most of the Espionage Act would be in effect only during times of war, but two of the provisions stayed in effect during times of peace.
Interestingly, the other dominant media depiction of Asian women, to a certain extent, is the opposite of the China doll/geisha girl stereotype. The dragon lady stereotype often features cunning, powerful, icy, merciless yet sexually aggressive Asian female characters. This line of stereotyping is said to originate from the fear of the inscrutable East and from Yellow Peril (Biswas, Kim, Lei, &Yang, 2008; Prasso, 2005). The history of competition for jobs in the frontier rationalizes people in the U.S. to distort the representations of Asians as evil, profit- seeking aliens feeding on the innocent White, which gives rise to the negative stereotype of the dragon lady.
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.
Xu, Ben. “Memory and the Ethnic Self; Reading Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club” in Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures. 261-77.
Many people go through life unsure of their background. This is the case of June Woo in Amy Tan’s novel, Joy Luck Club. At the beginning of her life, June Woo fought her Chinese culture and heritage; however, as an adult, she went on a journey to find it. In Amy Tan’s novel, Joy Luck Club, a major theme is “Self-Awareness” because June Woo finds her culture throughout the book.
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.
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.
Asian American Literature Asian Americans seem to be fighting an unwinnable battle when it comes to the content of their writing. Writers are criticized by whites for speaking out against discrimination, and by their fellow Asian Americans for contributing to the stereotypes through their silence. I believe that Asian Americans should include politics in their writing as they so choose, but should not feel obligated to do so, as Frank Chin suggests. For those Asian Americans who make known their discontent with the injustice and discrimination that they feel, in the white culture, this translates to attacking American superiority and initiating insecurities. For Mura, a writer who dared to question why an Asian American was not allowed to audition for an Asian American role, his punishment was “the ostracism and demonization that ensued”.
The complexitities of any mother-daughter relationship go much deeper then just their physical features that resemble one another. In Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, the stories of eight Chinese women are told. Together this group of women forms four sets of mother and daughter pairs. The trials and triumphs, similarities and differences, of each relationship with their daughter are described, exposing the inner makings of four perfectly matched pairs. Three generations of the Hsu family illustrate how both characteristics and values get passed on through generations, even with the obstacles of different cultures and language.
Tan was born to a pair of Chinese immigrants. Her mother understood English extremely well, but the English she spoke was “broken.”(36) Many people not familiar with her way of speaking found it very difficult to understand her. As a result of this, Tan would have to pretend to be her mother, and she called people up to yell at them while her mother stood behind her and prompted her. This caused Tan to be ashamed of her mother throughout her youth, but as she grew, she realized that the language she shares with her mother is a “language of intimacy” (36) that she even uses when speaking with her husband.
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).
It was no secret to the reader of the play that Iago possessed a hatred for Othello. In fact, in act one of the plays the reader s...