In the poem “Suicide Note” by Janice Mirikitani, the author goes into the different emotions a young college student who is a woman experiences which leads to taking her own life and leaving behind an emotional suicide note to get her point across to her parents. The themes used in this setting represent the pressure to succeed, the feeling of not being good enough, and the struggles faced by a young Asian American college student wanting to not only make her family proud but also strive for success as an individual. In the 1980’s, young Asian American women faced the dichotomy of academic ambition and emotional struggles. They took on some pretty big traditional gender roles all while entering a professional workplace career; they also were seeking higher education to …show more content…
The claim that this poem seems to have made is that the topic of gender roles in an Asian American household plays a key factor. In the poem, the narrator states “If only I were a son, shoulders broad as the sunset threading through pine, I would see the light in my mother's eyes or the golden pride reflected in my father's dream of my wide, male hands worthy of work and comfort.” (lines 10-16) Expressing if she had been a boy, then maybe she would have felt the mother and father would have been more proud of her hard-working efforts. This shows how gender norms within their culture came into play, carrying a lot of pressure. The narrator wanted to strive for a better future for herself but compared her gender roles in the eyes of what her parents may have thought of her because of her role as a woman and not feeling good enough to please her parents and those expectations the parents had on her versus to the expectations of what they expected from a young
The poem explains her hardships. Reading poetry is different from reading prose because you really have to dig deeper and study harder. A poem is not always straight forward like many other writings. You have to use context clues and understand imagery, tone, and sense. Summarizing a poem becomes difficult if you do not re-read several times. I learned that figurative language and lifestyle really tells a great story. Language especially helps you understand what is going on between the lines. Overall, family is always there at the end of the day. Sometimes situations get tough, but there is always a light at the end of the
Li-Young Lee’s poem, A Story, explores a complex relationship between a father and his five year old son. Although the poem’s purpose is to elaborate on the complexity of the relationship and the father’s fear of disappointing his son, the main conflict that the father is faced with is not uncommon among parents. Lee is able to successfully portray the father’s paranoia and son’s innocence through the use of alternating point of view, stanza structure, and Biblical symbolism.
In “Suicide Note” composed by Janice Mirikitani, Mirkitani describes the speaker as a college student who kills herself after not receiving a perfect grade point average. When people look at her body lying down on a cover of snow, they perceive that her suicide is due to her inability to become perfect. However, on a deeper meaning, the suicide symbolizes her inability to realize the concepts of family love, hard work, and happiness. To begin with, when Mirkitani’s speaker experiences the stress from her parents as a daughter, she compares herself to a son in the family. The speaker describes herself as “if only [she] were a son,.
The American-born daughters do not fathom the amount of pain that their mothers had experienced so they do not realize that their problems could be much worse. The daughters relate to their mothers in that they are all facing their greatest problems. No matter how trivial or significant problems may seem, to one it may be the worst they have experienced and to another it could be less worse than what they have experienced. The immigrant mothers grew up with much more pain than their daughters, therefore they have a thicker skin and are less ignorant. Since the daughters have grown up “swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow,” (Tan, 17) they experience pain from seemingly insignificant problems in comparison to their mother’s hardships. The mother’s good intentions and struggles are unrecognized by their daughters. Tan writes about this misfortune through describing an old Chinese woman immigrating to America in the beginning of the novel: “But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leaving the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind” (Tan, 17). This immigrant’s story represents the four Chinese-American immigrants and how their hopes and dreams were hit with reality when they came to America. For example, Lindo describes how America has certain secret rules that you must discover. "This American rules...Every time people come out from foreign country, must know rules. You not know, judge say, Too bad, go back. They not telling you why so you can use their way go forward. They say, Don’t know why, you find out yourself. But they knowing all the time. Better you take it, find out why yourself" (Tan, 94). Lindo obviously believes in
Not only does it deal with gender identity and the relationships between Chinese-American cultures, but it also deals with mother-daughter relationships. Amy Tan shows us how mothers and daughters mirror each other. Every daughter in this novel hears about their mother's life and sees some comparisons to her own life. "All women are daughters and must resolve the conflicts inherent in the mother/daughter relationship if they are to understand themselves and ultimately to establish their own identity". (Internet 1) No matter how old they get, mothers and daughters play similar roles.
many Asian families being born a girl isn’t always a good thing. As we read in lines thirteen and fourteen she states “the golden pride reflected in my father’s dream.” Did her self-loathing begin long before she wrote this note?
However, knowing this doesn’t appear to be enough to bring her inner peace, she is still very much saddened by the fact that things don’t appear to be changing and people are still getting punished for being themselves. Lastly, in Queer Theory: According to my Grandmother the idea of “being oneself”, is more in the lines you should be able to do what you want to express yourself, like drawing what you like, and watching the movie you like. It looks like whoever the speaker is lecturing is not being given the opportunity to be himself. It appears that this poem emphasizes that “being oneself” should consist of being able to make your own choices when it comes to the little things in life.
By allowing the reader to feel her discomfort with herself and her identity, one can imagine or relate to how being a woman can make these problems even more difficult. Using her own point of view makes it easier for her to display her feelings in a way that is easier to digest for society. To feel the torment and tiring exertion of being not only an immigrant/first generation American, but also being a woman carrying that role helps readers deeply connect with the issues discussed in literature. While reading Okita’s story, it was clear that the meaning he laid down for his character was quite compelling. In similar ways, Pat Mora’s poem allowed the reader to be at their most vulnerable, by relating to her or putting themselves in her shoes for the first time.
Suicide Note, written by Janice Mirikitani, is a poem in which a girl apologizing to her parents and expressing herself and her actions. The poem is well constructed and the author describes many of the feelings using metaphors. The author’s purpose was to show people how many kids felt in her days. Although there is no reason for a person, who chooses to fail and pity themselves, to end there life, let alone write about how they pity themselves. I hate these kinds of poems because they are stupid for such stupid actions, but I guess the author had a reason. No matter the circumstances, not child or adult should take their own
In the Asian culture, men are typically looked upon as being strong, smart, and independent. In “Suicide Note,” the speaker wishes that she were a son, so she could feel confident and strong throughout all of the hardships in her life. In the poem, the speaker compares herself to a fragile female bird, facing the harsh snow in winter. As she apologizes to her parents, she says “If only I were a son, shoulders broad/ as the sunset through the pine” (Mirikitani 10-11). The speaker contrasts her situation in the cold and harsh snow, with the
In the opening lines Hughes writes, “Let it be the pioneer on the plain, seeking a home where he himself is free”, which sets the tone for the rest of the poem to indicate that this dream is only for men. The narrator cares little for women’s freedom and make it’s a point to identify the dream as a male centered objective. This can be vindictive towards women’s place in society or it could be reflecting the fact that when the American Dream was originally conceived, women were not complicit in the dream, except to play the part of wives and birth-givers. Inclusion of all men is further stressed in the line, “the land where every man is free”, this creates an air of forced equality, but the double edged sword is that instead of including everyone or all people, the word chosen is “man.” This exclusion of women establishes a wall between the sexes where women are not included in the vision of the American Dream or freedom. It is not an all-encompassing freedom, but rather a discriminatory stance that builds off the absence of women voices to profit the progression of men. Furthermore, the
After rereading several times, the poem reveals more than just a message, it reveals the author’s true nature as feminism. Feminist is about equality between men and women. Yet, in the poem, there is very little information about the men she mentioned. The poem is vastly about her or her own body, because she desperately focuses on her image. While she has no argument for men, what she said is a completely one-sided opinion.
In this excerpt from her book, Gaines explores the link between teen suicides and society, and concludes the high rates of teenage suicide are due to the “burnout” culture. Gaines linked the human behavior of suicide to the whole of society in societies treatment of kids who are not the smartest, or the most engaged, or the most well behaved, who are relegated to the category of “burnout” forever. “… it was adult organization of young people’s social reality over the last few hundred years that had created this miserable situation…” [CITATION]. Thus, Gaines demonstrated the link between a person’s behavior and
In a typical family, there are parents that expected to hear things when their teenager is rebelling against them: slamming the door, shouting at each other, and protests on what they could do or what they should not do. Their little baby is growing up, testing their wings of adulthood; they are not the small child that wanted their mommy to read a book to them or to kiss their hurts away and most probably, they are thinking that anything that their parents told them are certainly could not be right. The poem talks about a conflict between the author and her son when he was in his adolescence. In the first stanza, a misunderstanding about a math problem turns into a family argument that shows the classic rift between the generation of the parent and the teenager. Despite the misunderstandings between the parent and child, there is a loving bond between them. The imagery, contrasting tones, connotative diction, and symbolism in the poem reflect these two sides of the relationship.
At the age of fifteen I started to question my sexuality. At the time I did not know how to explain the feelings I was having which led to a lot of confusion in my life. As I started to get older, I started to struggle even more to the point of where I had depression. Serbia is a very conservative country and I knew that if I was “different” from everyone else I wouldn’t be accepted. My mother grew up in a culture and century where being gay was the greatest shame one could have; so how could she live with a daughter that is gay? The biggest fear I had when I was a teenage was disappointing my parents for being different, so I decided to keep it to myself. I felt exactly like the girl in the in the poem, “Suicide Note” written by Janice Mirikitani. Her biggest fear was disappointing her parents, which eventually led her to take her own life. “Not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough” are repetitive lines that we see throughout the whole poem. The author’s use of repetition is a way for us to see the main point; to see the struggles of this young girl and experiences what she’s going