Introduction: - Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays, Junot Diaz’ Drown, and Maxine Hong Kingstons’ The Woman Warrior all demonstrate different intersections of race, class and gender. Each novel provides a unique perspective of growing up in American society. In Play it as it Lays, Didon dictates a story of Maria Wyeth, a Caucasian wealthy actress, struggling with depression. Contrastly, Diaz’ introduces Junior, a Domincan male, who spent his childhood living in a third world country, and struggles with poverty even after moving to the States. Finally, Kingston shares her hardships of adjusting into the role of a Chinese-American woman in her memoir, The Woman Warrior.
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).
In the beginning of “The struggle to be an All American girl”, Elizabeth Wong started out with describing Chinese school in her living town and wrote about her and her brother’s experience of changing their culture from Chinese to American since they were children. They went to the Chinese school because her mother pretention to keep their cultural estate even though they hated it. At the school, they learned not only Chinese but politeness as well. The school in her memory smelled like “mothballs or dirty closet”, and the principal was look like a “maniacal child killer”. She also described her learning Chinese like the most boring thing in the word by using some words as: “kowtow”, “chant”, “sing-san-ho” and ideographs letters.
Much of the Chinese values moved with them to America. In the movie Mulan, all the parents want for their daughter, Mulan, is to bring honor to the family. But Mulan is not your typical Chinese girl; she has her own opinions, and can’t hide who she really is. (Mulan) In the story “Two Kinds”, Jing-mei’s mother and father want her to be a prodigy in order to make a life for herself. At first Jing-mei liked the idea, but after all of her attempts and fails she wanted to live a normal American life.
Chinatowns were formed for many of the same reasons as other areas of large cities like the Irish areas in Boston and the little Italy section of North Beach. The immigrants were not accepted readily by Americans and needed a place to stay together with others who shared the same beliefs and traditions; it is there the story begins. Jade Snow Wong is the fifth Chinese Daughter in the Wong’s family. In the first act of the book, she briefly describes what her childhood was like growing up in the Chinatown of California in the early 1900s. She vividly details out the importance of each holiday and each traditions she has to follow as a child growing up in a Chinese family, the Chinese traditions were rather strict than the recent modern generations such as mine.
This is exemplified “when [Maxine’s] second grade class did a play” and were “left behind in the classroom” as “her voice[] [was] too soft or nonexistent.” By linking “too soft” with “nonexistent”, it serves to suggest that Maxine’s inaudible voice results in the erasure of her presence in class. Furthermore, the imagery that is created by the teacher “lea[ving] [her] in the classroom” illustrates abandonment and that Maxine’s presence is forgotten. This further reinforces the idea that without a voice to establish herself in the institution, Maxine faces the risk of erasure in the American society. Also as a child, her silence is “thickest –
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.
Amy Tan explores the idea of variable language in her short essay Mother Tongue. Tan is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She grows up watching her parents, especially her mother, struggle with learning the English language. While her mother does gain skill in speaking the English language, she never masters language in the sense that we expect of someone who lives in an English speaking country. As a child, Tan is embarrassed by her mother’s difficulty in language and eventually she sees growing up the child of an Asian immigrant home as the reason she struggled in school to excel in reading and writing.
Mother vs. Daughter In Amy Tan's “Two Kinds” two characters, a mother and a daughter, reveal many negative traits. The mother is a Chinese-American woman who has lost her twin baby girls and her first husband back in China. Jing-Mei is daughter with the mother's second husband in America where the mother thinks she has found a new beginning. Jing-Mei's mother believes that in America, “You can be the best anything”(194).
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.