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Roles of women in chinese culture
Roles of women in chinese culture
Roles of women in chinese culture
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Nothing is more enduring than a mother- daughter relationship. This bond is specifically explored in the books, The Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother by Amy Chua and The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Authors of these books precisely show the complexity of this type of relationship. Chua and Tan show the reader how a mother and daughter can hurt one other but ultimately forgiveness finds its way through. The similarities in these books include the difficulty of communication between the mother and daughter and their sacrifices for love. The difference between these books is the mothers’ outlooks of the role women play in society.
The Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother and The Joy Luck Club both demonstrate the barriers that exist between the mothers and the daughters of the Chinese culture. These barriers are often caused by the inability to communicate with each other. In both books, the daughters believed that they could never make their mothers proud. In The Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother, the mother, Amy Chua, was never satisfied with Lulu’s or Sophia’s roles with their instruments. These two daughters believed that their mother was out to get them when in fact Chua had high hopes and pure intentions for them to become successes and prodigies. Chua never believed that there was a task that her daughters couldn’t conquer. She made Lulu practice this very intense piano piece and for a long time Lulu was stumbling over it. It came to a point where the father, Jed, pleaded for Chua to let Lulu take a break. This went against Chua’s beliefs and as a result, Lulu was not allowed to give up. Later that night, Lulu had mastered the piano piece and was thankful that she was pushed as hard as she was by her mother. Lulu’s success over this piece did ...
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...control over anything while the other believes that women are equal to men.
Both books center on mother and daughter conflict. Mothers are continuously shown to have high hopes for their daughters in these books. Though their daughters fail many times, a lesson is learned from each experience. The daughters are noted to feel equivalent to a failure in their mothers’ eyes, but this is only due to the lack of communication between them. In The Joy Luck Club, generational roles that women play help establish the pattern of relationships between a mother and a daughter. To explain the relationship, this book is divided into mother stories in the first two halves and daughter stories in the last two halves while Amy Chua models her book in chronological order of occurrences. In the end of it all, mothers and daughters learn to accept each other for what they are.
No relationship is ever perfect no matter how great it seems. In the novel The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan, she tells the story of a few mother daughter pairs that are in a group named the Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club is a group of women who come together once a week to play mahjong. The founder of the Joy Luck Club, Suyuan Woo, dies, leaving her daughter Jing-mei to take her place in the club. Her daughter, Jing-mei, receives money from the other members of the club to travel to China in order to find her mother's twin daughters who were left many years ago. In this book you get more of the details of this family and a few more. Amy Tan uses the stories of Jing-mei and Suyuan, Waverly and Jindo, and An-mei and Rose to portray her theme of, mother daughter relationships can be hard at times but they are always worth it in the end.
Mothers always want the best for their daughters, it’s a given feeling for a mother. Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom is written in her perspective as the mother. In The Joy Luck Club, Amy tan writes the novel through her eyes as the daughter of the relationship. Both passages portray the harsh emotions between the mother and her daughter. These emotions are caused by the mother pressuring her daughter to achieve expectations. The two excerpts have similar stressful tones but Amy Tan’s novel is much more intense and displays a uglier relationship.
Throughout Asian American literature there is a struggle between Asian women and their Asian American daughters. This is the case in The Joy Luck Club, written by Amy Tan and also in the short story "Waiting for Mr. Kim," written by Carol Roh-Spaulding. These two stories are very different, however they are similar in that they portray Asian women trying to get their American daughters to respect their Asian heritage. There are certain behaviors that Asian women are expected to have, and the mothers feel that their daughters should use these behaviors.
Throughout Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the reader can see the difficulites in the mother-daughter relationships. The mothers came to America from China hoping to give their daughters better lives than what they had. In China, women were “to be obedient, to honor one’s parents, one’s husband, and to try to please him and his family,” (Chinese-American Women in American Culture). They were not expected to have their own will and to make their own way through life. These mothers did not want this for their children so they thought that in America “nobody [would] say her worth [was] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch…nobody [would] look down on her…” (3). To represent everything that was hoped for in their daughters, the mothers wanted them to have a “swan- a creature that became more than what was hoped for,” (3). This swan was all of the mothers’ good intentions. However, when they got to America, the swan was taken away and all she had left was one feather.
No two mother and daughter relationships are alike. After reading “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker and “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan I realized that the two stories had the same subject matter: mother and daughter relationships. These two stories show different cultures, generations and parenting methods. Although the two mothers act differently, they are both ultimately motivated by the same desire: to be a good parent. In addition, while researching related articles, I realized that there were two recurring themes of mothers and daughters: respect and diverse ways of parenting.
The Joy Luck Club is an emotional tale about four women who saw life as they had seen it back in China. Because the Chinese were very stereotypic, women were treated as second class citizens and were often abused. Through sad and painful experiences, these four women had tried to raise their daughters to live the American dream by giving them love and support, such things which were not available to them when they were young. These women revealed their individual accounts in narrative form as they relived it in their memories. These flashbacks transport us to the minds of these women and we see the events occur through their eyes. There were many conflicts and misunderstandings between the two generations due to their differences in upbringing and childhood. In the end, however, these conflicts would bring mother and daughter together to form a bond that would last forever.
Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club describes the lives of first and second generation Chinese families, particularly mothers and daughters. Surprisingly The Joy Luck Club and, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts are very similar. They both talk of mothers and daughters in these books and try to find themselves culturally. Among the barriers that must be overcome are those of language, beliefs and customs.
One type of effect the Chinese mothers’ expectations has in their relationship with their “Americanized” daughter is negative since the mothers are unable to achieve anything. An-Mei Hsu expects her daughter to listen and obey as the young ones do in Chinese culture, but instead receives a rebellious and stubborn daughter, “‘You only have to listen to me.’ And I cried, ‘But Old Mr. Chou listens to you too.’ More than thirty years later, my mother was still trying to make me listen’” (186-187). Instead of the circumstances improving, the mother is never able to achieve anything; her forcing and pushing her daughter to the Chinese culture goes to a waste. They are both similar in this sense because both are stubborn; the daughter learns to be stubborn through American culture and wants to keep herself the way she is, whereas the mother wants to remove this teaching from American culture and does not give u...
Parents play a crucial role in the development of children, varying from culture to culture. Although imperative, the mother and daughter relationship can be trivial. Many women writers have exercised their knowledge and shared their feelings in their works to depict the importance and influence of mothers upon daughters. Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Kiana Davenport are only three of the many women writers who have included mother and daughter themes in their texts. These writers explore the journeys of women in search of spiritual, mental and individual knowledge. As explained by these authors, their mothers' words and actions often influence women both negatively and positively. These writers also show the effects of a mother's lesson on a daughter, while following women's paths to discovery of their own voice or identity. In Kincaid's poem, Girl; Hong Kingston's novel, Woman Warrior; and Davenport's short story, The Lipstick Tree, various themes are presented in contrasting views and contexts, including the influence of mothers upon daughters.
The Joy Luck Club daughters incontestably become Americanized as they continue to grow up. They lose their sense of Chinese values, or Chinese tradition in which their mothers tried to drill into their minds. The four young women adopt the American culture and way of life, and they think differently than their traditional Chinese mothers do, upsetting the mothers greatly. The daughters do not even understand the culture of their mothers, and vice versa. They find that the American way of thinking is very different from that of the Chinese.
The first three stories in this section are talking about the relationship between mothers and daughters and the last one is concluding the whole book "The Joy Luck Club". By examining this section, there is one moral in these four stories, which is the relationship between daughters and mothers, is very strong and mothers and daughters have similar fate and face.
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)
Anna Quindlen’s short story Mothers reflects on the very powerful bond between a mother and a daughter. A bond that she lost at the age of nineteen, when her mother died from ovarian cancer. She focuses her attention on mothers and daughters sharing a stage of life together that she will never know, seeing each other through the eyes of womanhood. Quindlen’s story seems very cathartic, a way of working out the immense hole left in her life, what was, what might have been and what is. As she navigates her way through a labyrinth of observations and questions, I am carried back in time to an event in my life and forced to inspect it all over again.
...ith Jing Mei and her mother, it is compounded by the fact that there are dual nationalities involved as well. Not only did the mother’s good intentions bring about failure and disappointment from Jing Mei, but rooted in her mother’s culture was the belief that children are to be obedient and give respect to their elders. "Only two kinds of daughters.....those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!" (Tan1) is the comment made by her mother when Jing Mei refuses to continue with piano lessons. In the end, this story shows that not only is the mother-daughter relationship intricately complex but is made even more so with cultural and generational differences added to the mix.
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. The four daughters: Waverly, Lena, Rose, and Jing-Mei are all Americans. Even though they absorb some of the traditions of Chinese culture they are raised in America and American ideals and values. This inability to communicate and the clash between cultures create rifts between mothers and daughters.