The Good Daughter Caroline Hwang Analysis

The Good Daughter, written by Caroline Hwang, is a story about her own struggle between two generations: her parents’ and her own. Being a second generation American, she reveals to the readers the problems she’d dealt with in her life through stylistic techniques. In her story, she refers to herself as well as to other children of immigrants as “living paradoxes” as she states, “ Children of immigrants are living paradoxes. We are the first generation and the last.”(18) This comes to show the cultural challenges that most children of immigrants face as they balance their ethnic identities with the cultures they are exposed to.

Hwang started her story with an encounter between her and the dry-cleaning lady. Since she knew that the lady was

Korean, Hwang bowed her head at the lady to show that they share the same heritage. She uses imagery as she wrote, “I tilted my head forward, in a shy imitation of a traditional bow.”(1) This enables her to create an image of the bow she gave to the korean lady. Based on her description, it hinted that she wasn’t confident with her action and/or is perplexed with it. Even so, her description tells us that she isn’t fully exposed to her culture. As a Korean, most bows are usually done slow and with respect; however, Hwang’s was barely a bow. Therefore, her cautious action and the description of it strikes the reader to know that she is not perfectly Korean.
Furthermore, Caroline uses sentence variety as she continues her story. In paragraphs 7 and 8, she wrote, “ ‘Oh, Fxuang,’ she said, doubling over her laughter. ‘You don’t know how to speak your name.’ I flinched. Perhaps I was particularly sensitive at the time, having to dropped out of graduate school.” By combining long sentences with the short sentence, it draws more attention to the shortened one. Even though the sentence only consists of two words, it reveals how deep the previous statement affected her. When the dry-cleaning lady said that Hwang can’t pronounce her own name, it caught Hwang by surprised. A name is something that defines who a person is and is what gives a person a sense of identity; in Hwang’s case, not knowing how to say her own name causes a barrier between her native language and who she identifies with. This use of stylistic technique connects to her culture because it symbolizes how lost she is between two cultures and her imbalance of interactions with one culture over the other.
Lastly, Caroline Hwang uses tone in her story.

She paired the tone with her mom through the context, “ When I got home, I called my parents to ask why they had never bothered to correct me. ‘Big deal,’ my mother said, sounding more flippant than I knew she intended.” In her mom’s dialogue, she gave off a tone of indifferent which reveals to the reader that her mom doesn’t seem to worry about the fact that Hwang can’t pronounce her own name. The shows that it is because of her parents that Hwang is feeling lost. As the story goes on, Hwang talks about having a ‘normal’ childhood, but ‘normal’ to her is the American childhood; not a Korean one. Through her approach with tone, the readers begin to feel her craving to fit in with one culture perfectly, but is not able to. The tone that her mom uses suggests that her parents did not want her to keep their korean culture. Instead, they want her to assimilate into the American one.

All in all, even though The Good Daughter is based off of Caroline’s experience, it is a story that almost all of the second generations can relate to. Through stylistic techniques, her story allows the children of immigrants to compare her experience to their own lives, and also, gives those who aren’t children of immigrants a peek into the confusing life of

one.