- 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
Daughter of Han If you were born in China before the twentieth century you would know Confucian gender values and ideology. The upper-class e women were taught through studying the Confucian texts and they knew what was required to move up in class. The lower class was most women did not know how to find loupe holes in Confucian values, so they followed the rules very strictly. It was a lot easier for men to follow the gender rules. It was harder for women because lower class women had to leave the inner quarters because they need to feed there family’s.
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
To make her point clear she uses a lot of pathos and a lot of examples from experiences with herself and her two daughters, Louisa and Sofia. At the beginning when she tells the stories about her daughters trying to fight back you think ’what a terrible mother’, but she uses this feeling to support the view the readers have on the Chinese mothers as being mean to their kids so that afterwards she can tell how it turned out good and therefor the way she raises her kids is the best. Amy Chua has a high ethos because she is a professor at Yale which is a very respected job, and as a parent it makes her more reliable because she tells the reader that her parents treated her the same way that she treats her daughters, and as we can see she has been very successful. Also she uses loghos: ”In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70 % of the Western mothers said either that ”stressing academic success is not good for children” or that ”parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun”. By contrast,
In Edith Eaton read she writes about how Pan, a Chinese girl, born in a foreign society all her life still manages to respect her native culture and puts it before anything or anyone. Eaton shows that no matter how much you value a person, your religion or culture will always mean more to a person since it defines who you are as a person. The same applies to the short story written by Pauline Johnson “The Red girls’ Reasoning”. In this narrative Johnson tells a story about a young Indian girl, Christie, who is married to a White man named Charlie. In this narrative the readers see that Charlie considers his culture and nationality much more superior to his wife’s but Christie values both the cultures equally because they represent the two individuals.
Ailin is a very strong representation of a heroine, she saw the need to break Chinese tradition that was carried on for many centuries, she did this for the for the moral and physical good, she supported and understood the revolution because it would bring change and she never gave up when things got tough. When Ailin broke tradition for the moral and physical good by not giving into society’s rules and regulations, she was then unable to preform the functions of an upper class Chinese woman. These women had small, delicate bound feet by having bones broken and fractured they were unable to do work and manual labor, because of this they stayed at home and rarely went out. Since Ailin forbid herself from getting this done she was free, to walk, run and play with the boys. In doing so she became more independent and stronger on her own.
The plot, the characters, the relationships - all show women in a positive light. The only women who are really portrayed as evil or corrupt are left back in China or ignored. The mother figures are shown as caring albeit misunderstood leaders who channel their inner strength in times of need. Almost all of the mothers had previous marriages and escaped them. Their daughters find their inner strength and overcome their own obstacles as well, with nothing but themselves and their mother’s anecdotes to get them through it all.
Liliana C. Melo Professor Janet Storti English 101.5767 Paper No. 3, Draft No. 1 October 26, 2006 Footbinding … The Path towards Beauty and Pain "If you love your daughter, bind her feet; if you love your son, let him study," - Old Chinese Saying - Throughout time women have deformed, mutilated, bounded, changed, manipulated, damaged, and altered their bodies not only to survive in the society, but also to satisfy the men sexually. Footbinding was just one of the many ways in which Chinese women participated in and became bound to patriarchy. Chinese footbinding was implemented in the Chinese cultural values and traditions and wasn’t just about alluring a man with the “Golden Lotus.” The little girls of wealthy Chinese families had their feet bent double, sometimes with bones broken, and bound that way making them barely able to walk so the pain was lovely.
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. However, even though all of her childhood activities were just briefly touched, one can still tell that the pain Jade had to endure started at a very early stage of her life. It is only normal for all to believe that a person should have an innocent, joyful and worry free childhood no matter what, because this will help to shape the majority of one’s personality, beliefs and many other traits; in Jade’s case, this form of “early education”
[She] and each parent had been separate individuals before Lily came. Now all four melted together like gumdrops left on a windowsill” (5). At first one would think that Lily is the sufferer for her sister dislikes her and there is nothing she can do about it, but when one rereads the story again and again, Sophie is depicted as the victim. Sophie is unable to express her true feelings about her sister to her parents making them unable to help her. Sophie is kept in silence by her parent’s image of her, so she can't really express any of her thoughts that differ from theirs.