Search for Identity in Joy Luck Club
Each person reaches a point in their life when they begin to search for their own, unique identity. In her novel, Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan follows Jing Mei on her search for her Chinese identity – an identity long neglected.
Four Chinese mothers have migrated to America. Each hope for their daughter’s success and pray that they will not experience the hardships faced in China. One mother, Suyuan, imparts her knowledge on her daughter through stories. The American culture influences her daughter, Jing Mei, to such a degree that it is hard for Jing Mei to understand her mother's culture and life lessons. Yet it is not until Jing Mei realizes that the key to understanding who her mother was and who she is lies in understanding her mother's life.
Jing Mei spends her American life trying to pull away from her Chinese heritage, and therefore also ends up pulling away from her mother. Jing Mei does not understand the culture and does not feel it is necessary to her life. When she grows up it is not "fashionable" to be called by your Chinese name (Tan 26). She doesn't use, understand, or remember the Chinese expressions her mother did, claiming she "can never remember things [she] didn't understand in the first place" (Tan 6). Jing Mei "begs" her mother "to buy [her] a transistor radio", but her mother refuses when she remembers something from her past, asking her daughter "Why do you think you are missing something you never had?" (Tan 13) Instead of viewing the situation from her mother's Chinese-influenced side, Jing Mei takes the juvenile American approach and "sulks in silence for an hour" (Tan 13). By ignoring her mom and her mom's advice, Jing Mei is also ignoring...
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...Jing Mei realizes the part of her that is Chinese is her family. She must embrace the memory of her dead mother to grasp that part of her identity.
Works Cited and Consulted:
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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.
June-May fulfills her mother’s name and life goal, her long-cherished wish. She finally meets her twin sisters and in an essence fulfills and reunites her mother with her daughter through her. For when they are all together they are one; they are their mother. It is here that June-May fulfills the family portion of her Chinese culture of family. In addition, she fully embraces herself as Chinese. She realizes that family is made out of love and that family is the key to being Chinese. “And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.” (Tan 159). Finally, her mother’s life burden is lifted and June-May’s doubts of being Chinese are set aside or as she says “After all these years, it can finally be let go,” (Tan 159).
As the daughter mature, they begin to feel that their identities are incomplete and become interested in their Chinese heritage. One of Jing-mei’s greatest fears about her trip to China is not that others will recognize her as American, but that she herself will fail to recognize any Chinese elements within herself. Waverly speaks wishfully about blending in too well in China now that it’s in fashion, Waverly likes to think that being Chinese is part of her identity, and doesn’t appreciate it when her mom points out how American Waverly.
Admittedly, many psychologists define attachment as an enduring affectionate bond that one person forms between himself and another person throughout life. Since Mary Ainsworth provided the most famous research: strange situation, offering explanations how each individual differences in attachment. However, in this Adult Attachment Style questionnaire that I took, I found many factors relevant to attachment as it was defined in the textbook. For example, in the textbook, it defines attachment based on Ainsworth research, the strange situation by observing attachment forms between mother and infants. Which they are described in four attachment styles: securely attached, insecure avoidant, insecure resistant, and insecure disorganized. The questions on the questionnaire were based on those areas to determine my style of attachment.
The 1600’s were a time of expansion in the new world. Unfortunately the development of this area led slavery to be the main source of labor. As history teaches us slavery was used extensively in the new world. The main areas of concern of this paper are how slavery in the Caribbean carried over its practice in the American South. The slave system was implemented in the Caribbean on a larger scale before the South implemented their system. The slave plantations of the Caribbean served as a learning platform for the slavery system in the south. The development of Caribbean slave laws, slave revolts, transfer of information on this practice to the South and the South’s implementation of these slave laws, and the slave issues in check.
Cassidy, J., & Shaver, P.R. (1999). Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications. New York: The Guilford Press.
As she gets off the train, Jing-mei starts to describe her surroundings once again. For example, she describes Guangzhou as “The landscape has become gray, filled with low flat cement buildings, old factories, and then tracks and more tracks filled with trains like ours passing by in the opposite direction. I see platforms crowded with people wearing drab Western clothes, with spots of bright colors: little children wearing pink and yellow, red and peach” (266). The colors mentioned go along with how Jing-mei described her mother wearing clothes that do not go well together. The colors are bright, much brighter than the colors she saw on the train. It could mean that she is getting closer to her mother by seeing her in other people in China. However, Jing-mei has not fully embraced her roots, which is understandable since that side of her has only just awoken. Again, Jing-mei is questioning herself when she and her father are going through customs. For example, she describes the long lines as “getting on a number 30 Stockton bus in San Francisco” (266). Immediately after making that connection, Jing-mei reminds herself “I am in China. I remind myself. And somehow the crowds don’t bother me. It feels right” (266). Jing-mei is allowing herself to drift away to what is comfortable. Reminding herself that she is in China, she begins to feel at peace and that it feels
In analyzing these two stories, it is first notable to mention how differing their experiences truly are. Sammy is a late adolescent store clerk who, in his first job, is discontent with the normal workings of society and the bureaucratic nature of the store at which he works. He feels oppressed by the very fabric and nature of aging, out-of date rules, and, at the end of this story, climaxes with exposing his true feelings and quits his jobs in a display of nonconformity and rebellion. Jing-Mei, on the other hand, is a younger Asian American whose life and every waking moment is guided by the pressures of her mother, whose idealistic word-view aids in trying to mold her into something decent by both the double standards Asian society and their newly acquired American culture. In contrasting these two perspectives, we see that while ...
Amy Tan is a Chinese-American author. She had become Americanized, according to her mother, who still held traditional Chinese values. They fought sometimes, just as the women and daughters of The Joy Luck Club, over who was right and who was wrong regarding many problems they encountered. Tan most likely modeled The Joy Luck Club after her relationship with her mother. She even dedicated the novel “To my mother and the memory of her mother. You asked me once what I wo...
Every society and culture has different ways of interpreting and defining occurrences by the way their own culture or society functions. “A society’s culture, consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members”(Geertz 242). The rituals, customs, ethics and morals that are attributed to the cultures have caused these differences. To understand how the people of one culture interpret a situation or event, one must evaluate the attributes that a culture has. The criteria that an event is based on changes as one culture applies their own ideas to the given situation. Heroism and violation are two concepts that are easily misinterpreted depending on culture’s ideals. Since cultures have different attributes it is impossible for two cultures to exist and share a view of a situation or event.
Understanding the Chinese culture was confusing for Kingston. “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese , how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” (Kingston 223). Kingston questions her tradition and she doesn’t seem very sure what it is. She questions whether what her mother did by...
“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.
Kobak, R., & Madsen, S. (2008). Disruptions in Attachment Bonds: Implications for theory, research and clinical intervention. In J. Cassidy & P.R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of Attachment: Theory, research and clinical applications (2nd Edition).
that person’s sense of trust and level of intimacy, and collected from self-report data. Self disclosure is reflected in actual behavior and can be measured through observation of a person’s situations such as the initial stage of a group. Attachment research has shown that secure attachment contributes to subjective well-being, high self-esteem, high self-efficacy, self-control, and well-adjusted interpersonal behavior. Insecure attachment seems to be organized around two basic dimensions: avoidance and anxiety-ambivalence. Avoidant adults tend to be uncomfortable about and have difficulties being close to and trusting others; anxious-ambivalent adults want closeness to others, worry that others do not love or want to be with them, and sometimes scare others away with their intense need for closeness.
In telecommunication signaling within a network or between networks, synchronous signals are those that occur at the same clock rate when all clocks are based on a single reference clock. Synchronous communication requires that each end of an exchange of communication respond in turn without initiating a new communication.