Daksh Thakur Mr. Rios 1st Period Enriched Honors English I 3/7/2024 Unraveling Wildness: The Cultural Construction of Identity in Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish?” In Gish Jen's "Who's Irish," wildness is defined as the state of being untamed, unrestrained, and uncontrolled, exemplified through the lack of discipline or restraint. In this multifaceted narrative, the character of Sophie, a mixed child of Irish and Chinese heritage, is portrayed and viewed as wild by her Chinese immigrant grandmother. Sophie's wildness is not inherent to her nature, but rather a product of the American culture and societal norms that shape her identity which is undomesticated, feral, and not ideal for a Chinese girl according to the grandmother. Through an exploration …show more content…
Amy was Sophie’s babysitter, and she served as a representation of American culture. She is also a facet to consider in Sophie’s wildness, as she is seen affirming and supporting Sophie’s actions in the narrative as follows: “This Amy thinks Sophie should love her body. So when Sophie took off her diaper, Amy laughed. When Sophie ran around naked, Amy said she wouldn’t want to wear a diaper either. When Sophie goes shu-shu, in her lap, Amy laughs and says there are no germs in the pee. When Sophie takes off her shoes, Amy says bare feet are the best, even the pediatrician says so. That is why Sophie now walks around in no shoes like a beggar child. Also why Sophie loves to take off her clothes” (164). This quote shows the fact that American culture is encouraging Sophie to do things that they view as progressive, such as her embracing her body and appreciating her individuality- a prevalent value of American society- and her embracing her bodily functions such as walking barefoot and peeing. The exposure to these values causes a lasting impact on Sophie, through which she duplicates these wild actions according to the Grandmother, who views all of these progressive values as wild and …show more content…
When his mommy came, he threw it right at her. Oh, it’s all right, his mommy says” (166). Viewing this interaction instills a belief in Sophie, in which she perceives that she will not receive any consequences for actions that are harmful and wild, such as Sinbad’s. This belief is reinforced when Sophie proceeds to kick Sinbad’s mom when prompted by him on another occasion, with no immediate consequences from the mother but instead receiving punishment from her grandmother, who spanks her. This underscores how the American ethos, with its emphasis on leniency and the absence of harsh punishments like spanking, can foster a sense of impunity in children like Sophie, ultimately leading to their unrestrained and wild behavior. The Grandmother views Sophie and Natalie's family as embodying wild too, due to her belief that deviating from traditional Chinese culture and community, which she believes to be synonymous with wildness. The concept of wildness represents the unpredictability of American culture, which is juxtaposed with the predictability of Chinese
At the beginning of the story, Amy is a gangly and awkward pre-teen, not caring what others think, playing in mud, and painting on her skin with the blue clay from the creek. As summer comes to an end, Amy stops dressing in her grungy t-shirts and cut off jean shorts, and more like her popular preppy friends at school, as it is more important to her that she wears what her friends wear, rather than what she likes to wear. At school, all of her friends’ names end with an “i”, so hers changes to
Gish Jen’s story titled Who’s Irish is a story about a chinese grandmother who was struggling to adapt to a different culture. Throughout the story, the grandmother’s perception and understanding conflicted with that of her daughter, Natalie, her son-in-law, John Shae, and, her granddaughter, Sophie. The narrator is a Chinese Grandmother who was nameless and spoke in the first person point of view. When the Grandmother first immigrated to the United States along with her daughter and her husband (who passed away,) she found success through her restaurant. She believed that her hardwork and dedication gave rise to her success in a different country. This was why the grandmother does not like her in-laws. She presumes that because they are
Perhaps one of the biggest issues foreigners will come upon is to maintain a strong identity within the temptations and traditions from other cultures. Novelist Frank Delaney’s image of the search for identity is one of the best, quoting that one must “understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors . . . to build our identities”. For one, to maintain a firm identity, elderly characters often implement Chinese traditions to avoid younger generations veering toward different traditions, such as the Western culture. As well, the Chinese-Canadians of the novel sustain a superior identity because of their own cultural village in Vancouver, known as Chinatown, to implement firm beliefs, heritage, and pride. Thus in Wayson Choy’s, The Jade Peony, the novel discusses the challenge for different characters to maintain a firm and sole identity in the midst of a new environment with different temptations and influences. Ultimately, the characters of this novel rely upon different influences to form an identity, one of which being a strong and wide elderly personal
Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish” tells the story of a sixty-eight-year-old Chinese immigrant and her struggle to accept other cultures different from her own. The protagonist has been living in the United States for a while but she is still critical of other cultures and ethnicities, such as her son-in-law’s Irish family and the American values in which her daughter insists on applying while raising the protagonist’s granddaughter. The main character finds it very hard to accept the American way of disciplining and decides to implement her own measures when babysitting her granddaughter Sophie. When the main character’s daughter finds out that she has been spanking Sophie she asks her mother to move out of the house and breaks any further contact between them by not taking Sophie to visit her grandmother in her new place. The central idea of the story is that being an outsider depends on one’s perspective and that perspective determines how one’s life will be.
“Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strengths to establish realities”(5). In the book “The Woman Warrior,” Maxine Kingston is most interested in finding out about Chinese culture and history and relating them to her emerging American sense of self. One of the main ways she does so is listening to her mother’s talk-stories about the family’s Chinese past and applying them to her life.
“The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen, China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain. And I think, my mother was right. I am becoming Chinese. (179). In the story A Pair of Tickets by Amy Tan, the protagonist character, Jing-mei, finds herself in several difficult situations due to how her social and cultural upbringing has shaped her. She finds herself pulled between her Chinese DNA and her American background. While she was raised being told that she was Chinese and “it’s in her blood”, she does not identify as such, because she grew up in America and only sees herself as an American. After her mother’s passing,
Chinese-Americans authors Amy Tan and Gish Jen have both grappled with the idea of mixed identity in America. For them, a generational problem develops over time, and cultural displacement occurs as family lines expand. While this is not the problem in and of itself, indeed, it is natural for current culture to gain foothold over distant culture, it serves as the backdrop for the disorientation that occurs between generations. In their novels, Tan and Jen pinpoint the cause of this unbalance in the active dismissal of Chinese mothers by their Chinese-American children.
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.
The second and third sections are about the daughters' lives, and the vignettes in each section trace their personality growth and development. Through the eyes of the daughters, we can also see the continuation of the mothers' stories, how they learned to cope in America. In these sections, Amy Tan explores the difficulties in growing up as a Chinese-American and the problems assimilating into modern society. The Chinese-American daughters try their best to become "Americanized," at the same time casting off their heritage while their mothers watch on, dismayed. Social pressures to become like everyone else, and not to be different are what motivate the daughters to resent their nationality. This was a greater problem for Chinese-American daughters that grew up in the 50's, when it was not well accepted to be of an "ethnic" background.
Conflict constantly occurs between the mother and daughter in “Who's Irish” surrounding the child rearing of the daughter’s daughter. When discussing her trouble-making granddaughter, the mother explains, “John and my daughter agree Sophie is a problem, but they don’t know what to do. You spank her, she’ll stop, I say another day. But they say, Oh, no. In America, parents not supposed to spank the child. [...] I don’t want you to touch Sophie, she says. No spanking, period” (Jen pg. 3). Later, the daughter insists that the mother use language as an attempt to teach the granddaughter how to behave properly instead of spanking. The mother says, “use your words, my daughter says. That’s what we tell Sophie. How about you set a good example” (Jen pg. 3-4). Thus, the different approaches in child-rearing brings stress to the relationship between first-generation American children and their immigrant
There is particular consideration given to the political climate in this story. It is incorporated with social and ethnic concerns that are prevalent. The story also addresses prejudice and the theme of ethnic stereotyping through his character development. O'Connor does not present a work that is riddled with Irish slurs or ethnic approximations. Instead, he attempts to provide an account that is both informative and accurate.
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
While the first sentence is mostly objective description, the second sentence is full of the affectation of a subjective point of view. Aunt Amy is described as wearing a “white collar [that] rose from the neck of her tightly buttoned black basque, and round white cuffs set off lazy hands with dimples in them, lying at ease in the folds of her flounced skirt.” Words like “tightly,” “lazy,” and “ease” seem to describe what would be considered the traditional concept of the Southern woman. The wealthy Southern female is conservative, pure, fragile, peaceful, and delicate. These descriptive words could be viewed as an alignment with the traditional Southern view of women; therefore Amy is “beautiful and charming” in the eyes of the Grandmother and “every older person” and “everyone who had known her.” However, within those same words there appears the rather opposite yet still highly subjective view of the young girls who are attempting to reconcile the new values and ideas of the present with the old traditions of the past. The words “tightly,” “lazy,” and “ease” could be seen from the young girls perspective as negative descriptions suggesting boundaries, confinement, limitations, and exclusion.
Author Alice Walker, displays the importance of personal identity and the significance of one’s heritage. These subjects are being addressed through the characterization of each character. In the story “Everyday Use”, the mother shows how their daughters are in completely two different worlds. One of her daughter, Maggie, is shy and jealous of her sister Dee and thought her sister had it easy with her life. She is the type that would stay around with her mother and be excluded from the outside world. Dee on the other hand, grew to be more outgoing and exposed to the real, modern world. The story shows how the two girls from different views of life co-exist and have a relationship with each other in the family. Maggie had always felt that Mama, her mother, showed more love and care to Dee over her. It is until the end of the story where we find out Mama cares more about Maggie through the quilt her mother gave to her. Showing that even though Dee is successful and have a more modern life, Maggie herself is just as successful in her own way through her love for her traditions and old w...
...all Chinese, and the daughters are Chinese-American. The mothers grew up in a more strict environment and followed the rules by the book. They were taught by their mothers, how to act, who they were, and what being Chinese meant. The daughters in this story grew up in a more relaxed world, where being an individual was accepted and appreciated. No one was punished for being themselves in America. For the women in this novel, finding their true identity was one of the most important things. By using their cultural background and discovering who their mothers were, they were able to find their true selves in the end as well giving them a complete sense of identity.