Helplessness and the Third Eye Helplessness is a category of psychological sickness that makes people feel lugubrious and desperate to despair imprisonment from freedom. The Third Eye, which can be also called metacognition, is an asset that people have the inner critique to think about the way they behave responsibly and maturely. A housewife discovered that her husband cheated on her accidentally and he had already owned another lover outside. At the beginning, she was heart-broken. However, when she thought about divorce, she felt helpless because of her children’s paternal love and financial support from her husband. If they divorced, she may lost child custody and properties, which means she will has no money and only can see her children …show more content…
They all belong to the category of people who come to American without their partners. Because of the reduction of living expenses and feeling of loneliness, they live together and enjoy couple’s life. However, their relationship is not as easy as just friends with benefits because Panbin fell in love with Lina and Lina likes Panbin, too. There are emotions between them and it makes things complicated. Lina always repeat they will both back to their families finally. So when Lina’s husband comes to America, Lina leaves Panbin’s apartment and lives with his husband. Lina’s mind is restricted by Chinese traditional thoughts which from what she said to Panbin, “married woman with a husband.”(178). She always wants to improve that she is an obedient good girl because she has rigid adherence. Even though she has already fallen in love with Panbin actually, she hides this truth. In China, if you have married with someone, you need to keep the loyalty and responsibilities. Thus, the slave to convention make she feels more helpless. Lina falls into the centripetal circle and she doesn’t have the Third Eye to pursue the freedom. That’s the result that she jumps into self-fulfilling prophecy loop. Unfortunately, Lina’s husband, Zuming, is taking advantage of her to pay tuition for his business school and he treats her not as well as Panbin. Heartless reciprocity, which means need a …show more content…
Unfortunately, Eileen and Sami both like Dave during the process they get to know each other, but Dave loves Eileen. Eileen struggles from this tough situation and she makes the right choice to break up with Dave. So she can still have family with her daughter. Eileen has the Third Eye when she deals with hard issue between partner and her child. She sees the future forest. If she chooses to stay with Dave, the relationship between her and Sami will break and it’s hard to repair again. Her child is just a student who will go to attend higher education soon. Maybe someday Dave will abandon her, but her daughter is always her closest relative. She also controls herself to stop the tumultuous passions. She loves Dave and they get along together well. It’s difficult to give up a person who you love deeply. Thus, Eileen sacrifices her emotions to Dave and chooses her daughter. Moreover, Eileen is also intellect to distinguish how to use the right way to solve problems. She knows there is no future between her and Dave from Dave’s thought, “If I were to marry an infertile woman, it would devastate my parents. I’m their only son, and they expect me to carry on the family line”. (71) In China, carrying on the family line is important to the whole family, especially for the family that only owns
In her book, The House of Lim, author Margery Wolf observes the Lims, a large Chinese family living in a small village in Taiwan in the early 1960s (Wolf iv). She utilizes her book to portray the Lim family through multiple generations. She provides audiences with a firsthand account of the family life and structure within this specific region and offers information on various customs that the Lims and other families participate in. She particularly mentions and explains the marriage customs that are the norm within the society. Through Wolf’s ethnography it can be argued that parents should not dec5pide whom their children marry. This argument is obvious through the decline in marriage to simpua, or little girls taken in and raised as future daughter-in-laws, and the influence parents have over their children (Freedman xi).
In the beginning of the story, the author describes the Chin Yuen's as American in appearance yet Chinese in customs. Throughout the story she continues to describe the deterioration of the Chinese customs by American ideal. This is pinpointed when Mr. Chin Yuen decides to let his daughter marry the boy that she loves. The conversation that Mr. Spring Fragrance has with Young Carman explains that only in American culture is it customary to find love before marriage; in the Chinese tradition, all marriages are arranged. This clearly exemplifies the manner in which the Chinese characters are more and more disregarding their Chinese culture and taking on this new American standard of living. Ironically, Sui Sin Far conveys the notion that the American tradition is not necessarily better than the Chinese tradition. More so she demonstrates the struggle of identity between two worlds that both make sense. Though Laura and Kai Tzu have found their happiness in the American tradition of marriage, the reader discovers that Mr. and Mrs. Spring Fragrance are equally as happy even through the Chinese tradition of marriage.
However, this “ladder of success” was not as simple as it seemed. First of all, the class of both families will be a huge barrier. We are not even talking about freedom to love here, there is no such thing in late imperial China. Although we can’t say that love doesn’t exist even in such systems, such as Shen Fu and Chen Yun, but most marriages are not about love. Rather, it was about exchange of values. For example, when two families want to become business partners, the parents of the family will have their son and daughter married, so the two families will have closer bonding which made the business much easier. In this sense, we can see that the couple is simply a tool. In the same sense, the families which has not much “values” can only have marriages with the same class of families. Meaning for a women to climb up the ladder of success is not quite possible as the class of her family is a huge deciding factor for marriage in the
In The Joy Luck Club, the chapter "Waiting Between the Trees" illustrates major concerns facing Chinese-American women. Chinese culture is a male dominated culture that leaves women little freedom. Their only job is to make their male spouses content. Living with their traditional culture in American society, Chinese-American women suffer a conflict of culture. While their American husbands are active and assertive, they are passive and place their happiness entirely on the goodness of their spouses. In many cases, this passiveness can be seen as a weakness (Chinese-American Women 1-2) . By looking at two characters from the novel, Ying-Ying and Lena St. Clair, a Chinese mo...
The American culture focuses more on the individual. Typical Americans always want to be independent. Traditionally, they never appreciate anything that they have, are selfish, and ignorant to other cultures. On the other hand, the Chinese culture has many strong beliefs concerning the family. Chinese women value their parents, especially their mothers. It is expected that their daughters also do the same. “Women from Asia value family. Family is all important. Husband, children, parents, relatives come first. Husband and children never take second place to her career (China Bride).” The Joy Luck Club emphasizes family values by explaining how each mother, Suyuan Woo, An-Mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair, came to America so that their daughters could have better lives and everything that they didn’t have. Because the daughters in The Joy Luck Club were born in America, they wanted to be more Americanized than to recognize their true Chinese culture. In particular, Waverly Jong was less successful than her mother, Lindo, in finding her true identity. Lindo honors family and self. Waverly has a hard time finding her true identity. She builds a wall between her and her mother and tries to be he...
Adaptation to unpredictable conditions is a key force in driving human evolution. The ability to overcome predicaments with poise is one of the greatest assets humans possess. In “The Mind’s Eye”, Oliver Sacks recounts various perspectives of individuals coping with blindness. Each individual took a different path to becoming accustomed to their blindness and each of the case studies showed compensatory mechanism unique to the individual. Throughout the article, Sacks credits each person for playing to their assets because he views adaptability as a person’s capacity to alter their mode of thought in order to fit their circumstance. Although Sacks shows many examples of neuronal plasticity as an adaptation to blindness, he eludes to the impact
Today marriage is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as the relationship between a husband and a wife or a similar relationship between people of the same sex. For the purposes of this paper, it will focus on marriage between a man and a woman and how marriage is differently defined between the American and Chinese cultures. This paper will discuss the cultural differences found between the American and Chinese culture with emphasis on age and mate-selection. The cultural differences between American and Chinese culture related to marriage practices shows that Americans value individualism and Chinese historically value collectivism.
A forty-year-old woman watches her husband slam the door behind him. She has no idea where he is going, or when he will be back. Meanwhile, a sixteen-year-old tries to drown out the sound of her parents screaming. Even as she covers her ears and sobs, nothing can mute her parents failing marriage. Diane Medved, a clinical psychologist, writes about the horrors of divorce in her article "The Case Against Divorce". In this article, Medved explains the reality of divorce and why it should not be taken lightly. She goes in depth about the consequences one faces due to the decision to divorce. Based on Medved's article, it can be decided that it is better for a person to try to save their marriage rather than getting a divorce
The film centers on two mainland Chinese people who both came to Hong Kong in order to improve their standards of living but inevitably fall in love over a span of ten years. Through the story of Li-Qiao (Maggie Cheng) and Li-Xiao-Jun (Leon Lai), we can clearly see how difficult new immigrants from mainland China emerge in the Hongkong mainstream society. There are a lot of sacrifices they need to make to be adapted to the society, including to overcome the language barriers as well as the cultural differences. They both came to Hong Kong with clear goals, but eventually they felt disorientated by the future. Take Li-Qiao for example, she tries her best to look like one of the Hong Kong people, including speaking Cantonese and wearing decent clothes, and yet she still felt deep inside her heart a sense of inferiority. When she is finally able to achieve her Hong Kong dream, however, she could not help but felt a sense of loss and loneliness. She knew her success came at the expense of her relationships. Their story is an ellipse of ten of thousand immigrants who suffer the loss of identity while they are struggling to survive. At the end of the movie, Li-Qiao decides to go home, where her heart always belongs
chance to regain it, with the expense of losing her children’s father and her husband,
spend a lot of time together, and are increasingly more stuck in their state of mind. Although there is incredibly strong evidence of their spouse's’ affair, this kind of one track mind can lead to other misconceptions and misinterpretation. Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow are so eager to accept each other’s point of view, that they completely neglected to consider others. Looking at outside perspective, other people could also theorize that Mrs.Chan and Mr.Chow are committing adultery, especially in the more traditionally social China. The two friends fail to realize this perspective, and ultimately, their platonic relationship came with increasing
She’s a mother, she’s a grandmother in her family. She also wants her daughter, her son in law, and their family get a better life. She wants to improve her family member’s life quality, but she’s keeping her own thought in her mind. She wants her granddaughter grows up as normal as her thought, but her daughter doesn’t agree her Chinese education method. In her mind, her granddaughter is a Chinese, she wants to use her Chinese education method to let everybody else know that she’s right. But her daughter thought she cannot assimilate into a foreign country, she cannot take good care of mixed children or foreign children, even her granddaughter, even a Chinese and Irish mixed child. In her family, she is a free baby-sitter of her granddaughter, because if she doesn’t, her daughter may feel she is not supportive, and her daughter is busy every day and every day. Her son in law has not work, and he just goes to the gym to be a mam. At the end her daughter still argue with her, still disagree with her. After her daughter found a new baby sitter, her daughter take her around to look at apartments. Her daughter keeps to have different mind with her, even everybody know that she is fierce. They all adhere to themselves minds are correct, that’s due to the different countries’ education method. Even she is fierce, even she knows how to take care of a child, even she wants their family gets better, she
As long as the world continues to revolve, generations will come and go. Considering that they follow in turn, different generations make themselves disparate from others. This becomes what is known as a generation gap, one we will never be able to fill in, due to our contradictories. As the gap gradually develops, it struck modern generations apart from the others before them. As Lindo stated in Joy Luck Club, “American circumstances but Chinese character…How could I know these two things do not mix?” Culture acts as a crucial influence to why relationships suffer because it has made the new generation indifferent and unable to recount to the monetary struggles the older generations has gone through. Considering our roles in the family, divergent
The third eye is also known as the inner eye or the mind’s eye. It is a symbolic and complicated thought pertaining to a hypothetical invisible eye. It provides insight that’s beyond one’s ordinary sight. The third eye serves as an extension of the mind’s comprehension. It is the passive interactions and awareness of the environment.
For better or for worse, divorce is an emotionally daunting subject that has become more prevalent in recent years. It would almost appear as though everyone you know has either experienced it as a child or have been through a divorce themselves. Despite divorce being so well known as a concept, many of the repercussions of going through one aren’t as well known. This paper will discuss issues with communication, finances, and what can happen to children that are involved in a divorce.