Who Is Jean Kwok's Girl In Translation?

488 Words1 Page
bulb-icon

Recommended: Analysis girl in translation

Girl In Translation by Jean Kwok is a book based on a young Chinese immigrant named Kimberly. In this book the protagonist Kimberly faces many obstacles, and heartbreaking decisions. The biggest dilemma she faces is whether or not to keep her baby. This decision will not only greatly affect the course of her life but will also affect those closest to her, her boyfriend Matt, her best friend Annette, and her mother. Kimberly is very conflicted about this decision because she worked very hard to get her life on this path to success and keeping the baby would derail this path and potentially burden her loved ones. Kimberly makes the right decision by choosing to have the baby and although it made her path more difficult to travel, she is still able to go to Yale and be a good role model for her son. …show more content…

Her boyfriend Matt has a very strong influence on Kimberly being the child’s father. Kimberly has a very hard time deciding if she is going to tell Matt about his son or if she is just going to leave him and not tell him. Kimberly grew up living with Aunt Paula and being told by her that she was not good enough, would never get anywhere, and that she was only a factory girl. Being accepted into Yale, Kimberly wanted to prove to her Aunt Paula that she was very intelligent, wasn’t just a factory girl, and that she could be successful even with a baby at her age. Mrs. Chang has always wanted the best for her daughter Kimberly. When she got accepted into Yale, Mrs. Chang wanted her to go, and be the best student she could be, and she also didn’t pressure Kimberly or leave her side at any time during this hard decision unlike the other two social

Show More
Related

  • Summary Of Before We Were Free By Julia Alvarez

    1136 Words  | 3 Pages

    I read the book Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez. Anita, an eleven year old girl, is suddenly sent into a very scary and unknown world, right in her own home. Her cousins are running away to the United states, but to get away from what? Her parents are keeping secrets and she tries to get information from her sister, but finds out very little. Anita finds herself struggling when she is forced to grow up very quickly and try not to act as scared as she feels at times. Through the view of a young girl, this story really captures what it’s like to feel like immigration is the only option for a family.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Red Scarf Girl

    1014 Words  | 3 Pages

    At first, Ji-li thought she was the luckiest girl in the world. She came from a very wealthy, loving, respected, and dependable family. In growing up in such was so was she too, “I was happy because I was able to excel and always expected to succeed. I was trusting, too. I never doubted what I was told…”(Jiang 1). The way Ji-li felt towards her family, proving that is the kind of family is everything Ji-li wanted. It is important for her, so then she can feel comfortable, then the family dynamics changed. Ji-li’s relationship has changed due to the Cultural Revolution, because when the change started to happen, she was okay. Ji-li then hated her family’s guts and background; near the end of the book. Ji-li feeling’s toward her family was unbreakable or even strengthened more than ever, and never went away. “… I would never do anything to hurt my family, and I would do everything I could do to take care of them. My family was too precious to forget, and too rare to replace.” ( Jiang 262-263). The importance that she will never abounded her family even in the most difficult times in her life. The reason the change occurred was Ji-li knew she could change her name, but she will always be a Jiang. She could also never leave the best thing in her life. Ji-li had other problems in her life as well, besides her family, there were her friends. Well

    Read More

  • Perfection In Judith Guest's Ordinary People

    536 Words  | 2 Pages

    She doesn't want anybody to know that her family is not perfect, so she gets upset when Cal mentions Con’s doctor. She does not care about how it might help her son recover, all she cares about is how it affects the appearance of her family. If she put half the effort to the internal well being of her family as she did to the outer appearance of it, then the inevitable separation of her family could have been avoided.

    Read More

  • An Analysis Of Spare Parts By Joshua Davis

    918 Words  | 2 Pages

    First of all, I can relate to the part in book when Joshua Davis said Luis Aranda’s mom (Maria) felt the only option to give her kid a better life was by coming to the United States (Davis, 82). A Japanese lady Maria worked for offered to adopt him, because she recognized Maria was struggling. Maria knew that Luis

    Read More

  • Summary of Gish Jen's Who's Irish

    537 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Factory Girls By Leslie T. Chang

    1391 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Factory Girls” by Leslie T. Chang provides an inside look on migration in the inner cities of China. The book follows the lives of women who have left their home villages to work in factories. Primarily, Chang focuses on the lives of two women, Min and Chunming. Min left her village at the age of sixteen with her older sister to chuqu, or to go out, and see the world. She often changed jobs while in Dongguan because she is never satisfied with her position. Chang met Chunming at a dating agency where men and women could mingle with one another. Chunming began her career at a toy factory. In her diary, she often wrote out the goals she wanted to accomplish and how to accomplish them. She was very determined to become successful. Her persistence

    Read More

  • Americanization in The Joy Luck Club

    1951 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight In Heaven

    649 Words  | 2 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Critical Analysis Of Mosquitoland

    719 Words  | 2 Pages

    For summer reading this year, I read Mosquitoland, by David Arnold, about a girl’s adventure cross-country. Though it seems to her in the beginning that her goal is to reunite with her sickly mother and get away from her new life in “Mosquitoland,” as the story progresses, the main character Mim discovers new perspectives about herself and her family that she previously had never considered. While she does achieve her initial goal of finding her mother, she learned more from the adventure than its end; as new perspectives were introduced to her, she changed, and learned that things are not always exactly how she sees them.

    Read More

  • Author Amy Tan

    1344 Words  | 3 Pages

    One’s ability to craft their own identity often starts out with determining their inner set of ideologies and values. New York Times bestselling author, Amy Tan, is one of many great examples who was able to mirror her own values into her bestselling novel, The Kitchen God’s Wife. Known for incorporating mother-daughter relationships into her stories, Tan uses her novel to allow readers an inside look into her personal set of beliefs and values. The story follows a Chinese immigrant living in America, Winnie, who tries to reconnect with her “Americanized” daughter by reciting her story of the struggles she faced while living in Shanghai. While writing the novel, Tan was able to incorporate her own values of creativity, integration into both Chinese and American culture, and independence which were influenced by her parents and her surroundings. Therefore, Amy Tan’s ability to shadow her socially influenced values of creativity, integration, and independence in her critically acclaimed novel The Kitchen God’s Wife demonstrated the identity crisis that her characters go through when being tied up in a knot of two distinct cultures and opinions within society.

    Read More

  • Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife

    1223 Words  | 3 Pages

    Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife is the story of a relationship between a mother and daughter that is much more than it seems. This touchingly beautiful narrative not only tells a story, but deals with many of the issues that we have discussed in Women Writers this semester. Tan addresses the issues of the inequality given women in other cultures, different cultures' expectations of women, abortion, friendship, generation gaps between mothers and daughters, mother-daughter relationships, and the strength of women in the face of adversity. Tan even sets the feminist mood with the title of the book, which refers to a woman in Chinese Mythology who cared for a selfish man who became a minor god. She pulls from her own life experiences, relatives, and emotions to write this story, a factor that probably contributes to the realness of the plot and the roundness of the characters. Tan's mother's previous marriage to an abusive man, her father's death, and her loving relationship with her relatives (specifically her mother) all show themselves in the intricately woven story of a mother named Winnie, and a daughter named Pearl, and their struggles as Chinese-American women.

    Read More

  • Brothers Movie Analysis

    1298 Words  | 3 Pages

    When her husband came home she had to become a caretaker of him and a mediator between him and other people, especially the children. Now that her husband is back she is having difficulties keeping up with the new demands on her role as a wife. She wants to be there for him while he is struggling through his issues, but he does not want to comfort that she is offering. She also needs support from him for what she went through (Knobloch & Theiss, 2012). There was one scene when she was talking with her two daughters about their father and why he was behaving the way he was. She was trying to explain behavior that she did not even really understand herself, but she tried to support and understand him even when it became very difficult to do. In Knobloch and Theiss’ article, they say that partners must manage strong emotions and try to share their experiences. During the reunion period when the soldier comes home it is very difficult to do those things and the partner must be able to deal with it, and it may be very difficult, like it is for the wife in this

    Read More

  • Lost in Translation

    1145 Words  | 3 Pages

    Poems have the ability to bring readers to a new place and to challenge their thinking. In a few words and often less than a page, poems expose readers to emotion and meaning in a limited space. With the presence of translation, readers around the world are able to dissect and discover the writings of authors in countries other than their own. However, different readings of a poem provide audiences with a different understanding of the poem, for one language does not translate directly into another. Sometimes, the rhyming scheme is lost. Other times, a common saying or phrase is understood too literally. Though translators of poems put forth great effort to allow foreign audiences the opportunity to read international literature, it is impossible to directly translate a poem in the manner the author originally intended. Utilizing Boris Pasternak's poem, “Hamlet,” one translation by Joanna Radwanska-Williams and another by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France allow readers to see the differences in translations of this wonderful work of Russian literature.

    Read More

  • The Joy Luck Club Identity Essay

    1671 Words  | 4 Pages

    How can two people fully understand the thoughts and emotions of each other if they grew up in completely different environments and generations? The struggle between the mothers and daughters to find common ground and connect is not at the fault of either party, but truly circumstantial. Regardless, the mothers grew up in China, where they practiced traditional cultural activities and values, while their daughters were raised in America with western values. The disconnect is seen in each mother-daughter relationship told in the novel. Jing-Mei Woo, one of the daughters, recalls: “A friend once told me that my mother and I were alike, that we had the same wispy hand gestures, the same girlish laugh and sideways look. When I shyly told my mother his, she seemed insulted and said, “You don’t even know little percent of me! How can you be me?” And she’s right” (14-15). This quote shows how acutely aware both mother and daughter are of the fact that they do not know each other on a deeper level, and the manner in which it is addressed reflects hurt feelings. While it is acknowledged, there remains a sense of sadness and anger at how little they know about each other’s lives and past experiences. Similar feelings surface in Lindo and

    Read More

  • Lost in translation

    670 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Lost In Translation” is one of those movies that seek to be something having something extra something that is more than a regular movie. Moreover, it does so effectively without being pretentious, all through the movie it does not seem like it is trying too hard to be something other than what is there. It is skillfully written, well directed and it boasts of a solid cast not very spectacular but full of good actors. Jointly, this eventually results in an enjoyable and interesting movie. The important thing is that it has a message to it. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson play two individuals lost in the new and unfamiliar surroundings, restlessly moving around a Tokyo hotel in the middle of the night, who fall into talk about their marriages, their pleasure and the significance of it all. What occurs between them is very deep they open their hearts to one another letting the other know about the feelings and problems they are having with their marriages. In my view, these conversations can in fact only be held with strangers. We all need to talk about metaphysics, but those who are close to us want information and details; outsiders let us function more loosely on a cosmic scale.

    Read More

More about Who Is Jean Kwok's Girl In Translation?

Open Document