Chinese Mothers and their American Daughters in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club
““No choice! No choice!” She doesn’t know. If she doesn’t speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn?t try, she can lose her chance forever.
I know this because I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people?s misery, to eat my own bitterness.
And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.” (Tan 241)
In desperation, mother An-Mei Hsu describes her frustration over her own mother-daughter relationship in Amy Tan?s The JoyLuck Club. Four Chinese born mothers and their four American born daughters tell stories from their own point of view about their relationships with one another: mother-mother, mother-daughter, and daughter-daughter. The way these stories weave in and out of the past and present, and how these women?s lives unfolded tell much of what women are taught to think of themselves, and how it shapes their lives. How a mother hopes to give her daughter strength, respect for herself, and a bond between mother and daughter, as told by the mothers, is reflected back by how each daughter processes what she perceives her mothers? lessons to be.
All of the mothers came to America to escape the horrors of war. They hoped for the prosperity and ease that living in the United States would afford them. With them they brought the sacred teachings of Taoism and Confucianism. Peter Tavernise defines these ancient traditions in "Fasting of the Heart: Mother-Tradition and Sacred Systems in Amy Tan?s The Joy Luck Club." Jing-mei describes her limited understanding of these concepts as, ?The elements were from my mother?s own version of organic chemistry.? (Tan 19) Tavernise states, ?Just as in the Confucian ritual system, very little of the mother-tradition in the text is told explicitly from mother to daughter: ritual actions are supposed to be observed, absorbed, read, and understood in order to be transformed, preserved and handed down in turn.
Gloria Anzaldúa writes of a Utopic frame of mind, the borderlands created in and lived in by the new mestiza. She describes the preexisting natures of the Anglos, Mexicanos, and Chicanos as seen around the southwest U.S. / Mexican border, indicative of the nations at large. She also probes the borders of language, sexuality, psychology and spirituality. Anzaldúa presents this information in various identifiable ways including the autobiography, historical/informative essay, and poetry. What is unique to Anzaldúa is her ability to weave a ‘perfect’ kind of compromised state of mind that melds together the preexisting cultures while simultaneously formulating a fusion of genres that stretches previously constructed borders, proving both problematic and a step in the right extremely ideal direction.
The 1980s saw great political and military action throughout the world. However, one particular event that took place began in the early 1980s which was the Iran-Contra Affair. The Iran-Contra scandal is said to be the result of President Ronald Reagan’s attempt to accomplish two things. The first being his desire to see that the Americans which were being held as hostages by Iran, to be freed and the second was that he wanted to provide assistance to the contras in Nicaragua by going around congress. As obvious and as famous as the previously mentioned appears to be, the key states or countries involved are a matter of investigation. The heavy hitters in the Iran-Contra scandal aside from the United States, were Nicaragua, Iran, and Israel, which possess the question; how did several countries from various places around the world become so entangled in one of the world’s most memorable, multinational, scandals of all time?
Every writer has the ability to make their writing remarkable, beautiful, and complex by using elements like genre, discourse, and code. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a semi-autobiographical work by Gloria Anzaldúa. She examines the relations of her lands, languages, and herself overall. She defines the borders she has around herself in the preface of the book: “The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands…the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (Anzaldúa: Preface). The book is broken into two main sections. The semi-autobiographical section composed of seven smaller sections and the poetry section that is both in Spanish and English.
At the congressional hearings, Oliver North took full responsibility for the scandal, claiming he did it in the name of patriotism. In reality, he and his security advisor, Admiral John Poindexter had lied to Congress, shredded evidence, and refused to inform the President of details in order to guarantee his “plausible deniability”. Ultimately, the Iran-Contra investigation raised more questions than it answered. Reagan held fast to his plea of ignorance, the full role of the CIA director remained murky, and the role of Vice President Bush remained mysterious as well. The Iran-Contra affair revealed how secretive government officials undermine the Constitution and compromise Presidential authority under the facade of patriotism.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Birth-Mark." Reading Literature and Writing Argument. Ed. Missy James and Alan Merickel. Fourth ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 527-38. Print.
When we think of high school dropout we automatically start thinking, “Wow, that must’ve been some druggie.” Now what would you say if he dropped out to pursue a dream of his? Would you change your mind? What if he lied on his résumé to ‘compensate for his lack of experience in the film industry’, would you hire him? He gathered all of his knowledge while working at The Manhattan Beach Video Archives. There, he was able to work on some of his earlier scripts such as, True Romance (1993), and Natural Born Killers (1994). Looking to direct his first movie, he was able to get ahold of distribution company, Miramax Films, with Lawrence Bender set in place for production, who was able to secure funding for Reservoir Dogs (1992). Through this, he, Quentin Tarantino was then able to direct his first movie, having grossed 2.8 million from a budget of 1.2 million. He was able to make the difference of the two, 1.6 million, in just eight weeks. In 2009, just seventeen years after his directorial debut, he wrote and directed his first World War II film, Inglourious Basterds. Having set a budget of 70 million, Inglourious Basterds set a domestic gross total of 120.5 million, with a difference of 50.5 million. A huge step from his first. There have been several rumors that have risen since the end of Inglourious Basterds that deals with the films that Tarantino may cover. One specifically deals with a spaghetti western, with a working title of ‘Django: Unchained’.
Numerous Chicana feminist theorists convey interests in reclaiming the Mexican and Chicana’s influential stories that control gender roles. The stories frequently display the influences of colonization. The Chicanas/o’s have ben colonized by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and in 1848 by the United States when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was set forth. This consensus relinquished most of the Southwest to the United States with assurance that the Mexicans who were residing in these territories would be promised ...
Rodríguez, Ana Patricia. 2009. Dividing the Isthmus: Central American transnational histories, literatures & cultures. U.S.: University of Texas Press, 130-167
It sometimes is quite difficult to find one’s voice when no one is truly listening or understands. Yolanda, or "Yo", a Dominican immigrant, has grown up to be a writer and in the process infuriates her entire family by publishing the intimate details of their lives as fiction. “¡Yo!” is an exploration of a woman's soul, a meditation on the writing life, as well as a lyrical account of Latino immigrants’ search for identity and a place in the United States. Julia Alvarez divides her novel ¡Yo! into chapters to distinguish the perspectives of each member of the Garcia family. Through the stylistic, subtle homage to the Spanish language as well as speaking on the horrors that occurred during the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez showcases storytelling in the first chapter of her novel titled “From ¡Yo! The Mother” to show how Yo and her entire family used it to cope with their struggles as immigrants in America. By telling stories, Yo’s mother Laura, battles between her Dominican and American identities to ultimately redefine not only who she is, but also who she and her family will be.
Personalized medicine through the development of modern methods of molecular biology offers application of a suitable drug to the appropriate patient at the right time. The vision of personalized medicine has begun in 1990’s when the molecular research and knowledge about proteomic, genomics and genetic testing escalated. Since then pharmaceutical com-panies, scientists and regulators needed to meet the challenges that the vision was bringing with. Right now “The era of personalised medicine is already upon us” In this paper I am going to discuss this new way of dealing with diseases including several issues which are im-plemented in this section of medicine, these are as follow:
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.
Write an Essay (900-1200 words) in which you analyze and comment on Amy Chua’s article “Why Chinese Parents Are Superior”. Part of your essay must focus on how the writer engages the reader and on possible consequences of adopting Amy Chua’s values and methods of upbringing.
Oftentimes the children of immigrants to the United States lose the sense of cultural background in which their parents had tried so desperately to instill within them. According to Walter Shear, “It is an unseen terror that runs through both the distinct social spectrum experienced by the mothers in China and the lack of such social definition in the daughters’ lives.” This “unseen terror” is portrayed in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club as four Chinese women and their American-born daughters struggle to understand one another’s culture and values. The second-generation women in The Joy Luck Club prove to lose their sense of Chinese values, becoming Americanized.
Suaréz, Lucia M. “Julia Alvarez And The Anxiety Of Latina Representation.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 5.1 (2004): 117-145. SocINDEX with Full Text. Web. 25 Mar.2014.
Certainly, an army would not be able to battle in the war without a commander who in charges of the whole strategy. Correspondingly, any organisations cannot function without leaders. Leader is the most substantial element of successful organizations. Becoming outstanding leaders, leadership skill is vital in order to drive the organizations forward. Several leadership principles are extensively used these days. Burns (1978) identified two types of leadership comprise of transactional and transformational leadership. Hence, leaders should be capable to indicate which theory should be applied in accordance with organization’s culture and objectives. This essay aims to evaluate the resemblances and the differences between transactional and transformational leadership as well as the feasibility to utilize a mixture of them by giving the definitions and examples followed by the supporting researches and studies.