It is evident that Tan’s mother is considered by the society as inferior because of her broken English. Even her daughter was first ashamed of her due to the fact that she cannot speak good English that is understood by many people in the society. However, the significance of “Mother Tongue” in our lives is the overriding theme in the article. From the beginning, Tan struggles with her two different worlds. Being born in China but living in America, she seems ashamed of her roots and that is why she is embarrassed when her mother speaks broken English (Tan 142-146).
She had no confidence in her mother growing up, and saw her as a “limit” and an “embarrassment”. Later in Tan’s life, she found several surveys which led her to realize that she was not alone; there were other Asian-Americans who may have shared the same struggles as her. Tan creates a symbolic diction through the use of words like “broken”, “limited”, and “fractured”. She is very repetitive with her use of these words, although she explains how she hated when people described her mother’s english that way. Although Tan knows that the way her and her mother converse is not grammatically correct, she has grown to love it.
Juggling four children, cooking, cleaning and adjusting to a new society puts pressure on Alice’s mother. Since both mother and grandmother are such strong personalities, arguments between the two of them are not uncommon. They both attempt to entice information about one another out of young, unsuspecting Alice, so that they have something to use against each other during future conflicts. Alice describes their ways of deceit as, “Constantly sighing and lying and dying – that is what being a Chinese woman means, and I want nothing to do with it.” (-Part 1, page
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).
Her mother brags to her Aunt Lindo about how good Jing-Mei is at playing the piano. She wants to show how smart and talented she believes that her daughter is. Jing-Mei purposefully defies that by not investing into the lessons and learning to play properly. After her disastrous performance at the piano recital, the narrator describes the look on Jing-Mei’s mother’s face. “I saw my mother’s face, her stricken face.” This shows the disappointment that her mother felt.
With people tormenting her about her cousins who were teen moms, or her father who made a fool of his drunken self in public, the poor girl felt like nothing more than dirt, and she wanted to be thought of as flawless and beautiful. Edith dreamed of being a celebrity, she wished to be a perfect girl, and to live in a perfect world "in which only married women had babies, and in which men and women stayed married forever." The shacks in which Eddie grew up were less than desirable, and supposedly thought of as contemptible, by people of a higher social class. When Edith moved to the boarding house, with set meal times, she was quite ashamed to think of how people living in the shacks didn't have meal times, they simply found any food they could and ate by themselves when they were hungry. The potato-chip plant that Eddie worked at
By showing up late and forgetting the date of the lottery, it seems as though Mrs. Hutchinson is unconcerned with the lottery and the reader gets the false impression that this event is not such a huge ordeal. In fact, Tess doesn’t even express any problems with the lottery until her family is chosen. Ironically, when she is the one picked to get sacrificed she screams, “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right” (Jackson 393). By initially conforming to a negative aspect of society without question then deciding to speak out when her own well being is in jeopardy, Tess displays a hypocritical and selfish character
After the incident of her mother taken away from her she drastically became a whole another person. At her new foster home Antonia wasn't as nice as she once was. Antonia was rather rude to her foster parents Tillie and Luis. She was open minded and caring before but once she was brought into the new foster family it was as if she had lost these character traits. She still showed love to her mother and brothers but she still boxed out the foster parents who have treating her as a princess.
When Oates starts the story by introducing Connie without a last name, Oates created a character with a clear independent identity, while at the same time rebelling against the patriarchy. Furthermore, Connie’s family environment oppressed her, which led to her reverse psychology. She disdained her mother and complained to her friend, “She makes me want to throw up
Daniel Poleshchuk 10/3/12 E1FC Assignment: Writing About Literature Final Draft In “Rules of the Game,” by Amy Tan, Waverly’s mother is more of an adversary than an ally. Waverly’s mother acts as an adversary to Waverly because she doesn’t allow her daughter to embrace American culture. Waverly has been raised in America and has been living here for a long time, experiencing the ways of the country; her mother, however, has little respect to the American way of life and work ethic and depicts this when she says, “Chinese people do many things…Not lazy like American people” (3). Her condescending outburst makes it clear that she does not intend for Waverly to be at all like American children, who are