Visual Arts and Poetry The Girl Powdering Her Neck by Cathy Song Portrait by Kitagawa Utamaro The poem Girl Powdering Her Neck was written by Hawaiian native Cathy Song. Cathy Song’s first piece of work The Picture Bride won her the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 1983. Song’s father was Korean American and her mother Chinese American. Her interest in writing began very young, when she would journal her families’ experiences. Her first work was actually about her father and mother, her mother was a picture bride.
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. When she became ten years old, Wong “had better things to learn”, she started to study American culture, learn science subjects and read American literature. Her regard that was better than Chinese culture. She considered Chinese was “source of embarrassment”, that sounds “pedestrian”, “chaotic” and “frenzied” and that’s the reason she tried to separate herself from the family members when she “nearby American super marker outside the Chinatown”. Moreover, her brother exasperated her Chinese learning by mocking it with a pidgin speech.
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.
First of all, the American family structure compared to Adeline’s family structure have some similarities. First, Adeline’s father and Aunt Baba want Adeline to have a good education, so Aunt Baba and her can live together when she gets a good career. Her father said, “You will go to England with Third Brother this summer and you will go to medical school” (193). Adeline wanted to be a writer, but her father said you will starve and not make any money. Next, most American and Adeline’s Chinese family have a mom and a dad.
ENGL110 Tian Jin 3/20/2012 Response Essay #5 I read an article written by Jung Chang called “Bound Feet”, and this article is about an old tradition of women in China nearly thousands years ago. Author use his grandmother as a real life example. Her feet are petite, about five feet three inches, with a slender figure and sloping shoulders. People in the past gave a name which is “three-inch golden lilies” (san-tsun-gin-lian) to the feet that were his grandmother’s size. People in the past thought women’s feet size was the most important thing, so if a woman has large sized feet, she would be considered as a shame to her and her husband’s family.
However, Jane Austen, one of the premier authors of her time, made absolutely no reference in her novels either to the historical events of the literary movement taking place in the world around her. Instead, she wrote about what she knew: women and the conditions in which they lived. Due to the narrow scope of her works, Austen was able to show the standards of eighteenth and nineteenth century society, standards which "impose some order and control on a situation that in fact gave scope for great suffering and disastrous marriages, a situation in which women had no status except as a daughter and a wife, and where, if she were deprived of her belief that marriage was both a worthy ambition and her salvation, she would be deprived of life" (Calder 19). Both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility dealt with the standards of the times and the issues concerning women, including the pressures of society to marry, female dependency on men, and lack of
Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797 to intelligent parents. When Mary Shelley was 16 years old she decided to elope with a man named Percy Shelley who was a romantic poet. After a few years death had began to storm into her life, first she had a few miscarriages. Her only living child had also died and so did her half sister, and lastly Percy's first wife had died to suicide. When she went to vacation at Lord Byron's house, she and her colleagues would talk about different scientific things and the possiblitiy of reanimating the dead.
It was probably too painful of a memory. Charles J. Shields writes: Nelle (Harper) regarded her unhappy mother with sympathetic but confused feelings. When it came time to write To Kill a Mockingbird, Nelle wiped the slate clean of the conflict between herself and her mother. Since she could not be her mother’s daughter, so to speak, in the novel, the fictional Finch family has no mother. Or, rather, it did have, but “Our mother died when I was two,” says Scout, “so I never felt her Absence”.
During the 19th century, among the Brontë sisters, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was considered the best from all their work but later on the critics declared Wuthering Heights to be superior in work. The novel has inspired the world of art and numerous adaptations of the book have been made. The novel has several movie and T.V series adaptations that have been successful both commercially and among the critics. It has also inspired several creative adaptations such as operas, musicals and theatrical adaptations. Even though Wuthering Heights is her only published work, Emily Brontë is one of the most recognized writer, her work i.e.
Qi Hao Mr. Griffin English III 10th September, 2013 The reflection of The Buddha in the Attic The Buddha in the Attic is a book talks about the early Japanese women who were married to American and their life in this foreign country. The author of this book just like a poet, she used a lot of parallelism makes her article like a poem. Nevertheless, the attractiveness of this book not only shows in author’s writing skill but also appears on revealing the state of losing people’s traditional conscience and culture during that very time in this new-born powerful country, America. America, the Garden of Eden, these Japanese women dreamed about everyday before they really arrived in this land. They dreamed their husband was wealthy and gentle; thereby they carried their husbands’ pictures wherever they were in the boat1.