Each mother and daughter tell her own story. The book is divided into four main sections; the stories are told from the viewpoints of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese American daughters. The only exception is Suyuan Woo, who, having recently died, speaks not for herself but through her daughter, Jing-mei. The daughter tells her mother’s stories as she takes her mother’s place at the mahjong table and on the fateful trip to China. The novel traces the psychological development of the American daughter and her final acceptance of the Chinese mother and what the Chinese mother stands for.
Her mother became a polygamist in China and therefore disgraced herself. She never knew her mother well except from the few times she saw her and the stories her grandma told of her. In this An-mei learns about sacrifice from her mother. This story is like the parable because her mother transforms herself into something totally different. The Red Candle is about a Chinese girl named Lindo whose parents chose a husband for her when she was only two years old.
This is the first time that Kingston explicitly tells which additions to the story are her own. Not only is she referencing the story at hand, but she is also alluding to her life. While her mother very much colored her childhood, Kingston will be dictating the direction of the rest of her life. Kingston tells the story of Ts’ai Yen, a poetess captured and made to live with barbarians. Towards the end of the tale, Kingston tells of a song Ts’ai Yen sings: “Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger…her children did not laugh, but eventually sang along” (209).
“Where you are is not who you are. That’s a quote from her mom that Ursula Burns CEO of Xerox Corp remembers and lives by day to day. My essay is on Ursula Burns, who started off as an intern at Xerox Corp that eventually rose through the ranks to become the first African American female CEO of a Fortune 500 company. In this essay, I will discuss her career, her business leadership and her many other business strategies. During a talk at the annual awards conference, Burns talked about how her mother, who raised Ursula single, in one of the worst New York City Public Housing Projects, loved to give advice.
The final stage is the return, in which the person regains what has been lost and passes a boon on to someone else. In Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, four Chinese mothers undergo the journey to become a hero. One of these mothers is Suyuan Woo. She is thrust into the journey when she loses her twin babies on a roadside. Her fulfillment is when she raises another daughter, June, in America, while still never giving up on finding the lost babies.
Beautiful Return In the essay entitled “Homeward Bound,” Janet Wu writes of her long lost grandmother. Her grandmother was unknown to her and her family until a letter was received with the news of her father’s family’s survival during the Japanese invasion and the Communist revolution. To her father’s surprise, his brother and mother were alive living in China. Wu and her grandmother lived diverse lives and were worlds apart including the tradition of feet binding and the language differences. The first difference between Wu and her grandmother is the feet binding.
Courtney Carson Dr. Barker English 1302-21101 25 September 2011 Discovering The Dual Identity Many people struggle with accepting who they really are. For example, June May in Amy Tan’s “A Pair of Tickets” struggles with accepting the fact that she is Chinese. In this short story June May takes a trip to China with her father, Canning Woo, to see her father’s aunt and to meet her two half sisters for the first time. However, what she doesn’t know is that she will discover something about herself along the way. In “A Pair of Tickets” Tan’s use of the setting is important to the development of June May’s character.
“Two Kinds” is a story about a girl and her family, who moved to the Americas. Jing-mei went through different prodigies or prodigy attempts, trying to please her family. Both of the stories had the same cultural backgrounds. Mulan is a story located back in Ancient China (Mulan); “Two Kinds” is about a family who lived in China and then moved to San Francisco in 1949 (Tan, 124). Much of the Chinese values moved with them to America.
I chose to read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. This novel is about a woman named Lily who is haunted by memories if who she once was. I noticed that she alludes to Chinese culture a lot. She tells a story of two girls, Lily and Snow Flower, who come from different classes and their friendship throughout their lives. Lily is a 7 year old girl living in Hunan, China (very rural) during the 19th century.
Chinese Cinderella is an autobiography, it is a story written by a woman in her fifties about her own childhood. The story is set against a background of life in Japanese occupied China and the civil war between communists and nationalists which followed Japan’s defeat at the end of the Second World War. There are some fascinating insights into the old way of life such as the binding of Grandmother Nai Nai’s feet which had been the custom in China for over a thousand years. But this is mainly an account of the relentless neglect and loathing which Yen Jun-Ling during her excruciating childhood, and the way she choose to cope with it. her account is delivered with the insight of a mature woman: In spite of my writing and academic record, my classmates probably suspected there was something pathetic about me.