This essay, mainly focusing on Suyuan Woo and her daughter June, is aiming to further analyze the causes and manifestations of this complicated mother-daughter relationship. The relationship is by no means conflicting and it is not hard to understand. First of all, the conflict is due to the daughters’ attitudes towards their Chineseness, which can be normally understood as the Chinese character and traditional culture, in all, it can be understood as the temperament of a Chinese. Different from their mothers, the daughter generation is born and raised in America, what they have experienced is enculturation, and they are trying to get rid of their Chineseness and every influence of the mother generation. Far from knowing Chinese culture and without the awareness to know, the mother generation is alien and ridiculous to them.
When she travels to China, she discovers the Chinese essence within herself, thus realizing a deep connection to her mother that she had always ignored. She also brings Suyuan’s story to her long-lost twin daughters, and, once reunited with her half-sisters, gains an even more profound understanding of who her mother was.For the most part, Jing-mei’s fears echo those of her peers, the other daughters of the Joy Luck Club members. They have always identified with Americans but are beginning to regret having neglected their Chinese heritage. Her fears also speak to a reciprocal fear shared by the mothers, who wonder whether, by giving their daughters American opportunities and self-sufficiency, they have alienated them from their Chinese heritage.Jing-mei is representative in other ways as well. She believes that her mother’s constant criticism bespeaks a lack of affection, when in fact her mother’s severity and high expectations are expressions of love and faith in her daughter.
This book had me intrigued, no enthralled, in Kingston’s ability to capture the viewpoint of not just any person’s life, but her own. Kingston gives new meaning to the saying, “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” The five stories that make up this masterpiece touch different parts and lives of the Chinese culture. The first being the untold story of the “No Name Woman.” Kingston learns of her aunt, who may as well never existed, who betrayed her family and brought dishonor to their name. Accused of adultery, she is driven out of the village and commits suicide because of the disgrace she has brought. Brave Orchid, Kingston’s mother, sets this as an example of what not to be in life.
As she attempts to interpret and understand the cultural codes that have shaped her life, Kingston introduces the reader to the fate of transgressive women in traditional China, elucidates women’s situation in her extended family, and epitomizes the contradictions in the cultural messages with which a young Chinese American woman must grapple. Storytelling becomes the means through which mother passes on to her daughter all the complexities and uncertainties of mother’s and daughter’s identity as women in a patriarchal culture. Remembering her mother’s interpretations as they resonate with the memories of her past, the daughter, as she too passes them on to posterity, ponders around these memories, critiques them, making them her own. The role of memory in The Woman Warrior surfaces from the very first sentence of the
Katie Tava July 25, 2012 “The Struggle to Be an All-American” Part 1: Summary In “The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl,” Elizabeth Wong writes about her transformation from being a Chinese girl in to an American girl, as she moved to the U.S. Wong went to a Chinese school at the same time she attended American school because Wong’s mother wanted her and her brother to maintain the Chinese language as part of their heritage. Wong became embarrassed by her Chinese culture while studying in America. She said Chinese was, “ quick, it was loud, it was unbeautiful…. Chinese sounded pedestrian” (98). The desire to become American had become her dream.
Taylor Hooker Ms. Burks English 10 Honors Tuesday, February 15, 2011 The Joy Luck Club: The Theme of Anti-Americanism In Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the portrayal of the evolution of four mother-daughter relationships and the cultural gap between American and Chinese culture as a result of the assimilation into American life supports many critics’ assumptions of the novel being written with anti-American sentiments. Throughout the novel, mother-daughter relationships, current or flashbacks in time, create a comparative model of life for the mothers of June Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. By comparing their childhood of being raised in China, with the current lives their daughters lead from being raised in America, Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair see faults in the American way-of-life. This cultural separateness has literally created a gap in all four relationships. Throughout the novel, both the mother’s and the daughter’s views on Chinese culture change, but the manner in which this topic is handled proves once more the negative views of America portrayed in the novel.
Velez2 Jennifer Velez Comp107 Miss Atzeni 3/22/2012 The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl By Elizabeth Wong In Elizabeth Wong’s writing on how she struggled to be an “All-American” girl, she expresses the strict religion and culture brought on by her single-parent raising mother, when all she only wanted was to fit in with American culture. While Elizabeth and her brother wanted to play childhood games, such as ghost hunt, with their friends their mother was stern on the importance of learning the language of their heritage. She would walk them seven long blocks to Chinese school, no matter how often they pleaded with her to not attend. Elizabeth wasn’t fond of the smell of the school or that the learning was restricted. She felt that American school would be a better fit for her.
Finding One’s Voice in The Woman Warrior In The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, the unnamed narrator describes her experiences growing up as a first generation Chinese-American, recalling significant events throughout her childhood as well as various “talk-stories” told to her by her mother. The narrator struggles to reconcile her Chinese heritage with American culture, torn between the two worlds, but not entirely able to identify with either. Throughout her childhood, she must also deal with the extreme sexism of Chinese traditions and the conflicting stereotypes of what it means to be a woman in Chinese culture and what it is to be “American-feminine.” Her journey to finding her own voice is in many ways hindered by her own mother, who expects her to follow Chinese traditions but never helps her understand them, instead only punishing her when she does something wrong. Brave Orchid’s Chinese folk tales and stories of her experiences in China often enforce negative stereotypes of Chinese women. They both inspire the narrator and torment her, filling her childhood with the ghosts of a country that she has never even visited.
In her novel Kingston has challenged the traditional way in which to write an autobiography. "Kingston reconciles the Chinese collective identity and the American individuality through reinventing the autobiography: she creates herself through (re)creating the stories of others." This book is most commonly classed as non- fiction though it is infused with fantasy and imagination. She is trying to recreate her mothers talk stories which doesn't help the idea of it being a non-fiction novel as it has too many unreliable, imagined, variable and undocumented components. It is also not written in a linear timeline and if we look at the way in which it was written it becomes clear the Kingston is in fact unclear on many facts and has a tendency to either guess or make up what may have happened.
The family cursed the aunt; she became a “ghost” as if she was never born. It was forbidden to mention her name. Although this story was intended to be a mother’s lesson for a daughter about how not to humiliate her family, Kingston took liberty to fill the story’s gaps herself fantasizing about what it was like to live in China in previous generations. This essay introduces us to such themes as silence, the place of women in traditional Chinese society, and the difficulties that a Chinese- American faces growing up. One of the most powerful themes in the story that especially resonates with me is gender inequality.