- Silence is encouraged in their culture, allowing Kingston to develop into a shy, awkward girl with trouble adjusting. - Talk stories, throughout every chapter, are used to teach Kingston aspects of Chinese culture, and life lessons. However, she finds it difficult to use this knowledge in her American life. Instead, she remains haunted by the ghosts and experiences anxiety in her transition. - Traditions: struggle to depict what is real, and what is
Bradstreet’s use of metaphor allows her to relate the complex relationships of being a parent to being an author. When the narrator calls her creation her “ ill-formed offspring of [her] feeble brain” she draws parallels between how parents can feel about their children when frustrated (line 1). The narrator refers to her work as a “ rambling brat” to show how difficult it is to accept something she has created (7). The narrator seems to feel this difficulty not only as an author but also as a mother. As a frustrated parent feels the narrator once again uses the metaphor of a child to describe how an author feels when their work does not turn out how they wanted.
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).
The poem begins with the perspective of the sister in China as she describes the tradition of her people and the adaptations they have made. After some brief background into the Chinese culture, Song moves to focus on the relationship between the speaker and her sister. “And the daughters were grateful: They never left home. To move freely was a luxury stolen from them at birth” (Song); Song uses these lines to describe the realities that come with living in China and the idea that one may never actually leave to discover America. In the first part of the poem Song conveys that the life lived in China is not a glorious one.
In Alice’s case, her characteristics and values have been drastically influenced by what her family has been through in the past. An example of the influence of past lives on the behaviors of family members is the relationship between Alice’s mother and her grandmother. There is great conflict between the two of them during Alice’s childhood because her grandmother has such high expectations of Alice’s mother that she finds difficult to fulfill. Alice’s grandmother is an old fashioned Chinese woman, who believes that the wife of the house must bring honor to her family by perfecting all domestic duties. Juggling four children, cooking, cleaning and adjusting to a new society puts pressure on Alice’s mother.
Conflict in Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” Amy Tan’s, “Two Kinds”, is a short story of a Chinese immigrant mother’s conflict with her daughter Jing-Mei. In this story, Jing-Mei tells of how she resisted her mother’s overbearing efforts to inspire her to reach her fullest potential twenty years ago. Jing Mei’s mother only wanted her daughter to be a prodigy in some way. So she dominated and controlled her daughter’s life. When these traits did not surface, Jing-Mei began to realize she did not have these traits and started to feel internally inferior.
The joy luck club by Amy Tan Analysis of the book The bond between a mother and daughter is very strong. It goes deeper than words can reach and continues beyond the grave. During life, however, it may not be at all comfortable; there may be battles and misunderstandings, impatience and anger. And if your mother was born in pre-Revolutionary China, and you were born in San Francisco in 1950, a child of two differing cultures, how do you explain your problems to her? How will she understand your feelings?
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.
ENGL 110 Essay 1 Final Draft Yi Zhang Cultural and Generation Conflict “Two kinds” is a story about the conflict between a Chinese-American girl Jing Mei and her mother. They immigrated from China to the United State and when Jing Mei was a little girl, her mother tried to discover Jing Mei’s prodigy. At first Jing Mei is also curious about being a prodigy but finally she lose interest in it. The author Amy Tan develops her theme of cultural and generation conflict through the choice of an appropriate setting, the use of strong character development, and strong plot development including exposition, conflict, climax, and resolution. The setting of the story establishes an appropriate background for the characters’ traits and leads to the exposition between two characters.
Parents are often show frustration at not being there and being able to help their children in addition to not getting to see them as much as the teachers do. Parents may be reluctant to express their concerns because of cultural beliefs related to the authoritative position of the teacher. Parents may also be unsure of how to express their concerns to the teachers. Research shows that parents provide a passionate feeling that is highly personalized and comes with a history and a future. During a power struggle between a parent and a child, you will see emotions seldom seen by two people.