A Warrior’s Triumph The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston presents the story of a girl trapped between the cultures of her surrounding environment and that which her mother and family have forced upon her. Knowing only the Chinese way of life, this girl’s mother attempts to familiarize her daughter, whom is also the narrator, with the history of their family. The mother shares this heritage through the use of stories in hopes the narrator will be prepared for her ultimate return to China, which is a life completely foreign to her own. Through these stories and the strong influence of the surrounding American culture, the narrator’s life and imagination spin off in a new direction. She is confronted by many obstacles, which cause problems with not only her mother, but also with her attempt to discover her personal identity.
Throughout The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan inserts various conflicts betweens mothers and daughters. Most of these relationships, already very fragile, become distanced through heritage, history and expectations. These differences cause reoccurring clashes between two specific mother-daughter bonds. The first relationship exists between Waverly Jong and her mother, Lindo. Lindo tries to instill Chinese qualities in her daughter while Waverly refuses to recognize her heritage and concentrates on American culture.
For instance, is her book ‘The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts’, The Chapter “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” was about her experience in school and the other chapter was “No Name Woman” which was about her aunt. In Chinese culture everything a person does should satisfy people. People were extremely critical that it can affects one’s life. Kingston relates her stories to her life to show how cruel the Chinese culture is. Based on Kingston’s culture, she wrote many books about it.
Although Kingston is to never speak of the aunt and pretend... ... middle of paper ... ...ry brazen act for a Chinese woman, but influenced by her Chinese upbringing, she was still reticent about her actions. The narrator's struggle to make sense of the story through her Americanized perspective also helps to reveal a great deal about traditional Chinese culture, the aunt and mother's traditional viewpoints allow us to better explore and understand the Americanized view of the daughter. What she discovers is that the Chinese women back in the Old Country, like their male counterparts, had to sacrifice their individuality, personal goals, desires, and loves in order to more fully harmonize with the community. This is a problem for Kingston because she was raised in a nation that emphasized individualism and assertiveness. As a result, she is caught in a struggle to find meaning in her cultural roots as a Chinese woman and in her American upbringing.
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.
History, Culture and Identity of Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a novel that deals with many controversial issues. These issues unfold in her stories about four Chinese mothers and their American raised daughters. The novel begins with the mothers talking about their own childhood’s and the relationship that they had with their mothers. Then it focuses on the daughters and how they were raised, then to the daughters current lives, and finally back to the mothers who finish their stories. Tan uses these mother-daughter relationships to describe conflicts of history, culture, and identity and how each of these themes are intertwined with one another through the mothers and daughters.
Tan said, “On her journey she cooed to the swan: “In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch” (Tan 3). This shows that women in China simply were treated subpar Comparing an individuals worth to a belch simply is unfair for t... ... middle of paper ... ...ime. Majority of the women in the novel overcame the tough traditions of women treatment in ancient Chinese culture. The ancient Chinese culture believed that women should fall under patriarchy and strict ethics.
I think she says this because she didn’t understand her aunt’s ways. I don’t think that she was actually haunted; I think that she was just really confused. In Kingston’s book, the myths, talk-stories, and memoirs she puts together help her to understand her own life on her own terms. Whether she is trying to understand the Chinese culture that her mother teaches her or to understand the American culture she is growing up in, the stories are her way of accepting the life that she is born with. Kingston uses the negative influence on her life from her mother to help her understand what her mother expects and an insight into the Chinese traditions.
In every society there are certain gender roles that men and women meet either because they are forced or because it is tradition. Mulan and Brave both show two very different teenage girls who are being forced into gender roles. Mulan seems to want to comply with her gender role within the Chinese society; however, Merida makes her point clear about not wanting to accept her gender role within the medieval Scottish society. Mulan is story about a young Chinese girl, Mulan, who runs off to join the army in place of her father and then brings honor to her family without following the traditional gender role she was almost forced into. Similarly, Brave is the story of a Scottish girl, Merida, who is forced into her traditional gender role.
Each community often develops a system of control to maintain social order. Some communities instill this order by legal codes, and other communities use moral or social codes to keep their communities in check. In the autobiographical essay "No Name Woman," by Maxine Kingston, Kingston's aunt disrupts her tight knit community by having an illegitimate child as a result of an affair. Her traditional Chinese community ran by superstition finds it necessary to punish her and brand her a nameless face to ensure the village's stability. Any means of unsettling this stability would disrupt the social order and threaten the community, and would not be tolerated.