Analysis Of The Love Of My Life By T. C. Boyle

853 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Prevention of teenage pregnancy essays

In “The Love of My Life” by T.C. Boyle, a teenage couple experience any teenager’s worst nightmare, a surprise pregnancy. Yet, throughout the experience,neither Jeremy nor China speak up about the pregnancy. Instead, they hide the pregnancy and attempt to take care of the situation themselves without any outside help. This ends with the newborn girl being born in a motel room and subsequently put in a dumpster and neglected by Jeremy. The speaker’s Aunt from “No Name Woman” would probably sympathize with China, because of her given situation with a pregnancy out of wedlock and her experience with being an outcast herself. Moreover, China and Jeremy’s decision to not seek out help during her pregnancy probably stems from many things, but one …show more content…

The first of this comes from the beginning of the story when she states, “but it’ll kill me if people like Kerry Sharp or Jalapy Seegrand finish ahead of me” when she is referring to class rank (Boyle 557). She knows that she has plenty of years of hard work ahead of her, but the American society that she grows up in is obsessed with competition and who gets what place. Therefore, when she makes a really big mistake by getting pregnant, she undoubtedly felt the extreme societal pressure to hide this baby. As shown in “No Name Woman” these fears of society can go far and often seek to humiliate those who are the target of such scrutiny. Specific to China’s case, is the fact that she is an honor student and one bound to have a successful life laid out ahead of her. Therefore, when she becomes pregnant, it is even harder for her to seek help, because she has labelled herself as “China Berkowitz, honor student…” (Boyle 566). In her society, having a child did not fit her label and she furthered the notion by showing how society had influenced her thoughts on teen pregnancies. She claimed that she would “never, never be like those breeders that bring their… babies to class” (Boyle 558). Thus, when China found herself pregnant, her reaction was much the same as the aunt which was to not “[say] anything” and certainly to not “discuss it” (Kingston

Show More
Related

  • T. Coraghessan Boyle's The Love of My Life Passage Analysis

    986 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jeremy, whose voice we hear in the passage, can't even refer to his child as something human. Jeremy views his and China's creation as an IT and he can't seem to grasp the concept that he has done something immoral and wrong. Mistakes are made by many couples and they most likely will choose to deal with them without any outside help, some problems need other. Problems begin when the people in the relationship forget to realize when to draw the line and focus on what is truly important, which unfortunately to them might not always be the other person's relationship or the relationship itself. When a problem arises and there is a need to make a decision, it is not always the easiest decision to make because when two people are in love, especially when they are young, they forget about the outside world revolving around them....

    Read More

  • Jade of Peony

    2075 Words  | 5 Pages

    Firstly, the relationship expectations in Chinese customs and traditions were strongly held onto. The daughters of the Chinese family were considered as a shame for the family. The sons of the family were given more honour than the daughters. In addition, some daughters were even discriminated. “If you want a place in this world ... do not be born as a girl child” (Choy 27). The girls from the Chinese family were considered useless. They were always looked down upon in a family; they felt as if the girls cannot provide a family with wealth. Chinese society is throwing away its little girls at an astounding rate. For every 100 girls registered at birth, there are 118 little boys in other words, nearly one seventh of Chinese girl babies are going missing (Baldwin 40). The parents from Chinese family had a preference for boys as they thought; boys could work and provide the family income. Due to Chinese culture preference to having boys, girls often did not have the right to live. In the Chinese ethnicity, the family always obeyed the elder’s decision. When the family was trying to adapt to the new country and they were tryin...

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In The Jade Peony

    1274 Words  | 3 Pages

    Before her first words she is already considered a disappointment, “a girl child is Mo Yung- useless” (32). From the time she is born, her grandmother, “the old one” (choy), relentlessly tells her how the world will treat her as a girl. She explains to Jook-Liang, ‘“If you want a place in this world… ‘do not be born a girl child’”(31). She is cast aside before she is given a chance and is never given the same opportunities as her brothers. Instead she is forced to help take care of her little brother (insert quote). The excitement surrounding a baby is always extreme, and it doubles in Chinese culture when that baby is a boy. When her little brother is born, she is truly considered to be nothing in the family. “ I recalled how Sekky had received twice the number of jade and gold bracelets that I had got as a baby, and how everyone at the baby banquet toasted his arrival and how only the woman noticed me in my new dress, and then only for a few minutes to compare Poh Poh and step mother’s embroidery”(32). She is a ghost in her own family, and treated as nothing from the moment she is born. It is because of her gender that she is looked upon as a burden and never given the same opportunities as her brothers so that she may excel in life. Through the shadowed life of Jook Liang one can see how gender roles are enforced by cultural

    Read More

  • Analysis Of About Love By Danielle Crittenden

    1355 Words  | 3 Pages

    The meaning of life and the true meaning of happiness can be pin-pointed simply by: Grow up. Get married. Have children. These three ending sentences form the basis of the main argument in “About Love”, an excerpt from “What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman” by Danielle Crittenden. Crittenden does not limit the use of her emotional appeal to repeated use of terms like “love”, “friendship” and “independence”. One of the strongest qualities supporting the thesis of “About Love” is Crittenden’s ability to use both connotative and denotative language. Crittenden goes on to say “Too often, autonomy is merely the excuse of someone who is so fearful, so weak, that he or she can’t bear to take

    Read More

  • Maxine Hong Kingston's Essay No Name Woman

    698 Words  | 2 Pages

    The “prodigal” aunt in Maxine Hong Kingston’s essay No Name Woman, was shunned from her family and ultimately ended up taking her life and her bastard child’s, as a result of public shaming. Instead of being heralded as a heroine and champion of women’s rights, the aunt’s legacy is one of shame and embarrassment that has been passed down through generations. While this story’s roots are Chinese, the issue at hand is multi-cultural. Women suffer from gender inequality worldwide.

    Read More

  • Immorality in The love of My Life by T.C. Boyle and The Hills as White Elephants by Ernest Hemingwat

    864 Words  | 2 Pages

    T.C. Boyle uses immorality as a central idea to tell the story. Jeremy tells China to end her pregnancy: ‘“You have to get rid of it…go to a clinic’, he told her” (). Here one sees that Jeremy is not a responsible person.

    Read More

  • A Mother-Daughter Relationship in The Woman Warrior

    1481 Words  | 3 Pages

    Kingston’s mother takes many different approaches to reach out to her daughter and explain how important it is to remain abstinent. First, she tells the story of the “No Name Woman”, who is Maxine’s forgotten aunt, “’ Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her can happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born”’ (5), said Maxine’s mother. Kingston’s aunt was murdered for being involved in this situation. The shame of what Kingston’s aunt brought to the family led them to forget about her. This particular talk-story is a cautionary tale to deter Kingston from having premarital sex and to instill in her fear of death and humiliation if she violates the lesson her mother explained to her. Kingston is able to get pregnant but with the lecture her mother advises her with keeps her obedient. Brave Orchid tells her this story to open her eyes to the ways of Chinese culture. The entire family is affected by one’s actions. She says, “‘Don’t humiliate us’” (5) because the whole village knew about the pregnant aunt and ravaged the family’s land and home because of it. Maxine tries asking her mother in-depth questions about this situation, but her m...

    Read More

  • T. C. Boyle's Modern Love

    1184 Words  | 3 Pages

    Love is just a man-made construct created to justify our decadence. Human are hedonistic animals: we always seek pleasure. Truthfully, we are inherently selfish, caring for only our own well-being, and even if we say we love without costs, we love because it gives us the utmost pleasure: the pursuit of happiness.

    Read More

  • The Relationship of Mothers and their Expectations of Daughters in Amy Tan’s "Two Kinds"

    745 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the beginning, Jing-mei, is “just as excited as my mother,”(469). Jing-mei was eagerly hoping to make her mother proud. However, her mother’s obsession with becoming a prodigy discouraged Jing-mei. The daily test began to aggravated Jing-mei because they made her feel less sma...

    Read More

  • Bond between Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

    1751 Words  | 4 Pages

    The Chinese mothers, so concentrated on the cultures of their own, don't want to realize what is going on around them. They don't want to accept the fact that their daughters are growing up in a culture so different from their own. Lindo Jong, says to her daughter, Waverly- "I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents' promise. This means nothing to you because to you, promises mean nothing. A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, a traffic jam, if she wants to watch a favorite movie on T.V., she no longer has a promise."(Tan 42) Ying Ying St.Clair remarks- "...because I remained quiet for so long, now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid."(Tan 64)

    Read More

  • Analysis Of No-Name Woman

    1348 Words  | 3 Pages

    Although she got pregnant by someone other than her husband they did not look at the good and joyful moments the child could bring. Having a baby can be stressful, especially being that the village was not doing so great. The baby could have brought guilt, anger, depression, and loneliness to the aunt, family, and village lifestyle because having a baby from someone other than your husband was a disgrace to the village, based on the orientalism of women. Society expected the women to do certain things in the village and to behave a particular way. The author suggests that if her aunt got raped and the rapist was not different from her husband by exploiting "The other man was not, after all, much different from her husband. They both gave orders; she followed. ‘If you tell your family, I 'll beat you. I 'll kill you. Be, here again, next week." In her first version of the story, she says her aunt was a rape victim because "women in the old China did not choose with who they had sex with." She vilifies not only the rapist but all the village men because, she asserts, they victimized women as a rule. The Chinese culture erred the aunt because of her keeping silent, but her fear had to constant and inescapable. This made matters worse because the village was very small and the rapist could have been someone who the aunt dealt with on a daily basis. Maxine suggests that "he may have been a vendor

    Read More

  • The Representation of Women in The Joy Luck Club

    863 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the novel the women experienced hardship in their country. China contained strict ethics under which women abided by. In the beginning of the novel Suyuan-Woo is emphasizing a better life in America for women. Tan said, “On her journey she cooed to the swan: “In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch” (Tan 3). This shows that women in China simply were treated subpar Comparing an individuals worth to a belch simply is unfair for t...

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Rules Of The Game By Amy Tan

    1401 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...can sence that old Chinese way of thinking when Waverly’s mother says: “We are not concerning this girl. This girl not have concerning for us” (Tan 1117).

    Read More

  • No Name Women

    1007 Words  | 3 Pages

    Kingston uses the story of her aunt to show the gender roles in China. Women had to take and respect gender roles that they were given. Women roles they had to follow were getting married, obey men, be a mother, and provide food. Women had to get married. Kingston states, “When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband…she would be the first wife, an advantage secure now” (623). This quote shows how women had to get married, which is a role women in China had to follow. Moreover, marriage is a very important step in women lives. The marriage of a couple in the village where Kingston’s aunt lived was very important because any thing an individual would do would affect the village and create social disorder. Men dominated women physically and mentally. In paragraph eighteen, “they both gav...

    Read More

  • Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club

    1520 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

More about Analysis Of The Love Of My Life By T. C. Boyle

Open Document