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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. The main character is a Chinese grandmother who previously owned a restaurant and now devotes her time to babysitting her 3-year-ol...
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
The teenage years and transition to adulthood is in itself a very difficult period. Blending or fitting in are omnipresent issues that must be dealt with. For children of immigrants, this difficulty is only intensified through language. Both Amy Tan and Khang Nguyen strategically use narrative anecdotes and employ several rhetorical devices to illustrate this struggle in their works, “Mother Tongue” and “The Happy Days,” respectfully. Amy Tan chooses her childhood home as the primary setting of her work. This allows her to focus primarily on her conversations and interactions with her mother. However, she also gives several anecdotes in which her mother’s background and improper English negatively affected her, outside the home. Through her recollection of these events, she reveals both her immediate reactions and her thoughts and opinions looking back as an adult. Both the comparison of settings and changes in point of view, help to illustrate Tan’s intimate relationship with her mother, and her desire to understand it.
“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.
Justina Chen Headley explores in her book Nothing but the Truth (and a few white lies) the search for her protagonist’s identity, Patty Ho, which is a part Taiwanese, part American girl. Headley displays the mother as a one-dimensional parent who is holding onto conservative and traditional Taiwanese values, and is imposing her cultural values onto her daughter as a justification for her strict parenting style.
Maxine, being of the first generation of her family to be born in America, only knows about China from what she hears in her mother’s “talk-stories.” These stories are told to act as lessons on how the Chinese people were and should be, and are often vary critical. In “No Name Woman,” the tale of Maxine’s aunt who was shunned from her family for having an affair shows how careful young women must be when growing up in Chinese culture. “My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devoted pages to her…” (17). Maxine feels remorse and can relate to her aunt because she too feels a sense of alienation from her traditional Chinese and seemingly narrow-minded heritage.
Language is the most obvious determinant of ethnic identity, especially in the United States. Language barriers were particularly apparent in The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston. The main character’s family in this novel was Chinese and represented the first generation of immigrants for this family. Due to the fact that the entire family spoke Chinese, they were forced to find housing in an area where it was possible to carry on a normal life without speaking English. This area turned out to be Chinatown, in San Francisco. Living in a haven geared to one culture would limit the ability of younger generations to expand past the boundaries of Chinese culture and become ‘Americanized’, which served to preserve many aspects of Chinese culture even further, and truly defining the children of Chinatown, an...
Lindo Jong provides the reader with a summary of her difficulty in passing along the Chinese culture to her daughter: “I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix? I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it's no lasting shame . . . You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your head . . . In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you. . . . but I couldn't teach her about Chinese character . . . How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best”(Tan 289).
The Joy Luck Club ladies were all friends who over time have formed blissful lives for themselves in America. All of the daughters in this book were raised with high expectations, even the mothers while they were in China. This is contrary to an overall idea that girls in China were not a great commodity to their parents. Each member of the Joy Luck Club was a mother that only wanted their own daughters to understand why they should be respectful of their Chinese culture and grateful for their American opportunities. Waverly Jong, daughter of Lindo, was raised in Chinatown and her mother taught many lessons to “raise them out of circumstances.” (Tan, 90) Lindo thought the best combination was “ American circumstances and Chinese character.” (259) The women of the Joy Luck Club were competitive amongst each other when it came to their children’s successes. Jei-Mei (June) Woo’s mother wanted her to be a chess prodigy like Waverly Jong, or become a Chinese Shirley Temple. Jei-Mei’s mother, Suyuan, wanted her daughter to be a Chinese version of the epitome of American culture and the “perfect child” during the 1950s. Chinese mothers even go to great extents to instill their values into their children. The family of An-mei Hsu in China and Lena St. Clair’s mother, Ying-Ying, both would make up stories to make a moral to a story, to put fear into their daughters and detour them from trouble. Avoiding trouble is also an instinct for the Chinese. Their natural instincts tell them when something will not go well.
This novel traces the fate of four mothers, Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair and their four daughters, Jing-mei Woo (June), Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. All four mothers fled China in the 1940s and retain much of their heritage. All four daughters are much Americanized.
“Paper Menagerie,” by Ken Liu, is an emotional story of a selfish son and his interactions with his out-of-place mother, who had immigrated from Asia to be his father’s wife. Jack is a half-Chinese, half-American boy who lives in Connecticut. In the beginning of the story, he is very attached to his mother, but certain incidents with other kids make him want to be as distant as possible from his Chinese mom. He demands that his mom converts to being a “normal” white American mom and that he and his family should give up all Asian customs. This beautiful story shows that selfishly basing your actions on the need to fit in can harm yourself and others.
Why are so many people spending money on Cosmetic Dentistry? is an editorial from the Irish Examiner written by Helen O’Callaghan. The Irish Examiner is a national daily newspaper founded in 1841. Helen O’Callaghan is a recurring writer for the Irish Examiner with a reputation for having a strong opinion on parenting. Parents spending exponential amounts of money for their teenagers to have straight teeth is called into ethical questioning in this news article published on February 18, 2017. In this article, there is an opposition towards dental cosmetics which will help build the opposing argument for my topic. This editorial is mostly subjective. O’Callaghan uses some facts to back her questioning of the morality of spending so much money
For those coming to America seeking freedom and rights, they have many hurdles to jump over before they are free. One of the biggest challenges for immigrants, like those in “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, is the blending of various cultures. In most circumstances, parents and older generations generally have a harder time adjusting to the new way of life after moving to America. According Jing-mei’s mother in “Two Kinds” “you could be anything you wanted to be in America “ (Tan 2). However, after being embarrassed by her daughters atrocious talent show performance and opposed by her daughter for the first time, Jing-mei’s mother instead believes that there are “only two kinds of daughters…. those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind” (Tan 74 ). After being made a fool in front of her sister and prodigy niece, Jing-mei’s mother goes from an American style of thinking her daughter can be anything she wants to be, back to a Chinese style of ordering her daughter around and expecting Jing-mei to comply. Contrary to her mother, Jing-mei has transitioned from her Chinese lifestyle of being obedient and respectful, to the American lifestyle of standing up for herself. Jing-mei knows that it is not likely for her to be anything she wants to, she can only be herself, this is shown when Jing-mei shouts at her mother “you want me to be someone I’m not, I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be”
Beginning with a section named “No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston places a dead, ostracized aunt at the center of her conflict with being a young Chinese-American woman living between two vastly different cultures. When thinking about her Chinese ancestry, she reflects on the differences between the voices when she writes:
This narrator portrayed a true China’s unique tradition by telling the story about her aunt. Even though the narrator and her aunt differ in the cultural region and the age, the narrator who is Chinese American she heard and learned many labels on women such as frivolous, docile, and vulnerable because Chinese culture is an a part of her. In other words, stereotypical notion of fragile women has stood as part of their cultural and ethnic identity. However, she also tried to show the endeavor to find women’s true identity. The narrator was reluctant to be a one of the village people who represent traditional Chinese. Instead, she concerned about the silence. She tried to get her aunt’s voice.
The cultural identity of an individual is greatly influenced by where and how one lives. According to Dinesh Bhugra and Matthew Becker of The World psychiatric Association the cultural identity of a person is susceptible to change over time, “Psychosocial changes experienced by immigrants include assimilation… a process by which cultural differences disappear as immigrant communities adapt to the majority or host culture and value system. An individual's cultural identity may be lost during the assimilation process”(Bhugra and Becker). Immigrants progressively begin to mix their old customs with the ways of their new home, as this change occurs the identity of the person gets revised to adjust to the new lifestyle. On many occasions children of immigrants do not feel like they truly belong in any cultural group. This was conveyed in how Waverly felt about her own Chinese heritage, “‘What if I blend in so well they think I’m one of them’... ‘They know Just watching the way you walk, the way you carry your face. They know you do not belong’”(Tan 288). Lindo, Waverly’s mother, tells her that even though she may look Chinese on the outside, her American background and upbringing will always make her stand out in China, Waverly can not fully identify as Chinese or American because of her mixed upbringing. On the contrary, many immigrant children also tend to deny their heritage. Jing- Mei does not like to adress her Chinese background, “when I was fifteen I had vigorously deny that I had any Chinese whatsoever below my skin”(Tan 306). Her heritage is a central part of her identity, a part of who she is which she can not put down. Even though Jing- Mei was raised in America she has been brought up in a mix of both Chinese and American