Tradition and Change in The Kitchen God's Wife and The Joy Luck Club
Throughout the novels The Kitchen God's Wife and The Joy Luck Club, author Amy Tan conveys the message of tradition and change. Each novel contains sections about mothers talking and relating their stories to their daughters. The daughters in The Joy Luck Club hear stories about loss and happiness, and joy and hate. Each of the four mothers tell these stories to their daughters as lessons, or offerings for their futures. They tell the stories to show how lucky their daughters have been, yet how their lives will never be the same as their own lives have been. They try to help their daughters on some level with these stories. Yet they comprehend the fact that they could never understand their mothers. The main character, Pearl, in The Kitchen God's Wife talks about her life and her mother. Pearl, and her mother Winnie, the other half of the mother/daughter pair attend a funeral as Pearl narrates. They then go to Winnie's home, as Winnie dotes on Pearl and her two daughters. Pearl's heart breaks as she notices all the small intricacies of her mother, and all the little things that her mother does to illustrate her love. As Pearl and her family drive away from her mother's house, Winnie begins to narrate, to her daughter about her life, her hardships, and her loves. Through these two novels, the five mother/daughter pairs and the perception of mother to daughter, the theme of mother daughter relationships is distinctly portrayed.
Pearl views her mother in many different ways. Often, through her mother's movements, or appearance, she will view her mother as fragile, yet strong and knowing, "...I imagine my mother's parchment like skin, furious...
... middle of paper ...
...ire. "Amy Tan." The Bloomsbury Guide to Womens Literature. Pg1065 Great Britian: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1992.
Cheng, Scarlet. "Amy Tan Redux." Belles Letters. Fall, 1991, pp 15, 19.(on GaleNet)
Davidson, Cathy N. and Linda Wagner-Matlin. "Amy Tan." The Oxford Companion to Womens Writing in the United States. Pg 869. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Graham, Judith. "Amy Tan." Current Biography Yearbook. pg559 New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1992.
See, Carolyn. "Drowning in America, Starving for China." in Los Angeles Times Book Review. March 12, 1989, pp1, 11.(on GaleNet)
Shear, Walter. "Generational Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club." in <>Critique. Volume 34, No3, Spring 1993 pp 193-99.(on GaleNet)
Willard, Nancy. "Tiger Spirits." in The Women's Review of Books. Vol.6, Nos. 10-11, July 1989, pg12.(on GaleNet)
Davidson, Cathy N. and Linda Wagner-Martin. The Oxford Companion to Womenâs Writing In The United States. New York: Oxford United Press, 1995.
Kort, Carol. A to Z of American Women Writers. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007. Print.
Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. Literature and the Writing Process. Elizabeth McMahan, Susan X. Day, and Robert Funk. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice, 2002.
In the first Meditation, Descartes states that our experience of the world cannot provide an assured foundation on which all knowledge can be based. Throughout life we often learn that what we have been taught are usually prejudices and a product of our environment or culture. This should make an individual question whether all things we think are obvious, might in fact be completely incorrect. This is the foundation for Descartes doubt, and the creation of his method of doubt. Descartes suggests that we use a method that will limit errors by tracing what we know back to a solid foundation of indubitable beliefs.
The Joy Luck Club is a representation of the persistent tensions and powerful bonds between mother and daughter in a Chinese American society. The book illustrates the hardships both the mother and daughters go through in order to please the other. Also, it shows the troubles the daughters face when growing up in two cultures. This book reveals that most of the time mothers really do know best.
Whereas for Nora is trapped in her own predicament and circumstances. She has no power or equality in society, or even in her own marriage and household. She has a financial obligation, the back loan she did behind her husband’s back. To obtain the loan she had forged her father’s signature on the IOU. Nora claims that she can’t claim her own life or live her own life so long as she remains married to her husband. She goes on to say how she feels all her life she’s been played with like a
"I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worst possible thing" (Amy Tan 121). Throughout The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan tells stories of how mothers use the misfortunes in their lives, to try to teach their daughters about life. Many of the mothers had bad experiences in their pasts and do not want to see their daughters live through the same types of problems. They try to make their daughters' lives as easy and problem free as possible. However, the daughters do not see this as an act of love, but rather as an act of control. In the end, the daughters realize that their mothers tried to use their experiences to teach them not to give up hope, and to look at the good of an experience rather than the bad.
Stein, Karen F. "Amy Tan." Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition (2001): 1-3. Literary Reference Center Plus. EBSCO. Web. 13 Apr. 2011.
Tan shifts tones throughout the paper but ends with a straightforward tone saying “there are still plenty of other books on the shelf. Choose what you like” (Tan 4), she explains that as a reader an individual has the right to form their own opinion of her writing but if they do not like it they do not have to read it because she writes for her own pleasure and no one else’s. All of the women took separate approaches to dealing with their issues but all of these resolutions allowed them to see the positive side of the
Shear, Walter. Generational Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club. An excerpt from Critique, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Spring 1993). 1993. Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation.
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,” from Kaiser Permanente, is a good quote to tell us the important of mental, physical, and social well-being for our health. If a person doesn’t have all of three conditions, he/she doesn’t have a healthy body and healthy life. Tuyen, my aunt’s brother in law, is an example. He needed to work twelve hours per day without day off and health care to take care of his family. Therefore, he often feel tired, stressed and depressed about his job over twenty years. One day of five years ago, Tuyen got a terrible sick and became mental retardation after that. So, he looked like a baby boy and couldn’t make money for the family
Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club In the Joy Luck Club, the author Amy Tan, focuses on mother-daughter relationships. She examines the lives of four women who emigrated from China, and the lives of four of their American-born daughters. The mothers: Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-Ying St. Clair had all experienced some life-changing horror before coming to America, and this has forever tainted their perspective on how they want their children raised.
Throughout Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the reader can see the difficulites in the mother-daughter relationships. The mothers came to America from China hoping to give their daughters better lives than what they had. In China, women were “to be obedient, to honor one’s parents, one’s husband, and to try to please him and his family,” (Chinese-American Women in American Culture). They were not expected to have their own will and to make their own way through life. These mothers did not want this for their children so they thought that in America “nobody [would] say her worth [was] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch…nobody [would] look down on her…” (3). To represent everything that was hoped for in their daughters, the mothers wanted them to have a “swan- a creature that became more than what was hoped for,” (3). This swan was all of the mothers’ good intentions. However, when they got to America, the swan was taken away and all she had left was one feather.
The mother-daughter relationship is often complex and confusing. Amy Tan explores this relationship with novel The Joy Luck Club narrated by four daughters and three mothers: Jing-mei Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Lena St. Clair, Waverly Jong, An-mei Jordan, Ying-Ying St. Clair, and Lindo Jong. June narrates in her late mother's place. The mothers talk about their difficult pasts in China and how they have been changed. The trauma from their past causes their daughters not to be able to connect to . The women are finally able to connect to each other. The women are forced to learn from the past, overcome adversity, and learn to understand one another.
As stated by Bartol and Bartol “Juvenile delinquency is an imprecise, nebulous, social, clinical, and legal label for a wide variety of law- and norm-violating behavior” (2011, Pg 139). The juvenile delinquency term has come to imply disgrace in today's correctional institution. Our government is up hold to procedures and expected to come with a solution to solving the delinquent problem. An underage offender can be labeled a delinquent for breaking any number of laws, ranging from robbery to running away from home, and especially being involved in school violence. The following situations faced by correction officials when dealing with juvenile delinquents will be examined. Three main areas (child development, punishments, and deterrence tactics) will be briefly analyzed to give adequate explanation of the issue.