Amy Tan Identity Essay

Given that women have led successful businesses, raised families, and created positive changes all over the world, it is shocking how in many countries women are still being oppressed because of their gender. Amy Tan was aware of such male dominating cultures when she wrote her book, The Joy Luck Club. Within her novel, stories of Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters reveal the cruelties towards women in the Chinese culture. One of her characters, An-Mei Hsu, speaks out on her experiences as a woman living in China. Through her rhetorical devices, she reveals her main idea that women living the Chinese way are stuck in a cycle of pain

Tan shows that she is embarrassed in her family for their lacking of proper American manners. Although at the time she felt ashamed, the words spoken by her mother, “Inside you must always be Chinese. You must be proud you are different. Your only shame is to have shame” became better understood later in life. In Amy Tan's work, the strong use of description of both the event that are occurring and Amy’s feelings about them, draws the reader in and makes them feel as if they are part of the action. Tan's Chinese-American culture and life stories are imprinted in her writing which gives the reader an opportunity to gain knowledge about the way of life in her family, friends, and even the Chinese culture. Tan's main purpose of writing is to inform and educate people about growing up as a minority in the American society.

 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

    The complexitities of any mother-daughter relationship go much deeper then just their physical features that resemble one another.  In Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, the stories of eight Chinese women are told.  Together this group of women forms four sets of mother and daughter pairs. The trials and triumphs, similarities and differences, of each relationship with their daughter are described, exposing the inner makings of four perfectly matched pairs.  Three generations of the Hsu family illustrate how both characteristics and

In the novel The Joy Luck Club written by Amy Tan, there are several stories that intertwine into one novel. Each of the stories takes place China where the roles and the actions of woman are vastly different compared to American tradition. In the different stories, they all are about different mothers and daughters. Throughout the book, the reader can see the development in each relationship between mother and daughter with their conflicting backgrounds from China to America.

Tan continues to publish popular works. She often emphasizes that she writes primarily to create a work of art, not to portray the Chinese-American experience, that her bicultural upbringing is the source of inspiration for her work, not the end product.

In the final chapter of “The Joy Luck Club”, Jing-Mei is able to finally fulfil her mom´s wishes after her death. By flying to China with her father Jing-Mei is able to meet her twin sisters. During the trip Jing-Mai learns more about her mother and the way she loses the twins. Suyuan, Jing-Mei´s mom always hope about finding her missing daughters. When Jing-Mei is able to see her sisters for the first time, she sees how similar they look to Suyuan. Jing-Mai accepts herself the way she is. At the end Jing-Mai makes peace with her mom´s death.

In the story “Two Kinds”, author Amy Tan, who is a Chinese-American, describes the conflicts in the relationship of a mother and daughter living in California. The protagonist in this story Jing-mei Woo’s mother is born and raised in China, and immigrates to the United States to escape from the Chinese Civil War. For many years she maintained complete Chinese traditional values, and has been abided by it deliberately. This kind of traditional Chinese culture has also affected her daughter profoundly. However, Jing-mei is born and raised in the United States. Despite she has a Chinese mother; she is unfamiliar and uncomfortable with Chinese

    Amy Tan's immensely popular novel, The Joy Luck Club explores the issues faced by first and second generation Chinese immigrants, particularly mothers and daughters. Although Tan's book is a work of fiction, many of the struggles it describes are echoed in Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiographical work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. The pairs of mothers and daughters in both of these books find themselves separated along both cultural and generational lines. Among the barriers that must be overcome are those of language, beliefs and customs, and geographic loyalty. The gulf between these women is sadly acknowledged by Ying-ying St. Clair when she says of

    Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a novel that deals with many controversial issues. These issues unfold in her stories about four Chinese mothers and their American raised daughters. The novel begins with the mothers talking about their own childhood’s and the relationship that they had with their mothers. Then it focuses on the daughters and how they were raised, then to the daughters current lives, and finally back to the mothers who finish their stories. Tan uses these mother-daughter relationships to describe conflicts of history, culture, and identity and how each of these themes are intertwined with one another through the mothers and

Thesis: Amy Tan’s story “Two Kinds,” shows how a mother's pressure on her daughter to become extraordinary can make a daughter's quest to be ordinary a great struggle. The short story “Two Kinds,” written by Amy Tan, tells about Jing-Mei’s complex relationship, as a child, with her mother, Mrs. Woo, who had immigrated to America from China years before. Mrs. Woo had a very harsh past in China, having to give up the lives of her two daughters to be able to leave, and as a result has very strong beliefs for life in America. Spending much of her life in China, Mrs. Woo is not yet completely acquainted with the American culture.

Jing-Mei's opportunities clearly in her mother's mind are much more then what she had as a child. "She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in

    The dominant theme of The Joy Luck Club is the clash between Chinese, American cultures, and how it affects the relationship between mothers and daughters. All of the mothers in the book were born and raised in China. All of their daughters were born and raised in the United States. Because of the differences in family traditions and values between the way the mothers had been raised in China and the way their daughters were growing up in America, there was bound to be a clash between the two generations. Perhaps the most dramatic example of how East-West conflicting traditions and values affected a mother-daughter relationship was that of Suyuan Woo and

In addition to the cultural conflicts and confusions with Chinese immigrants ethnic heritage , Amy also portrays how television shows during this era of American culture influences conflicts and confusions in the Chinese immigrant communities. In her attempt to

In Mother Tongue, Amy Tan states that there is a huge influence that her mother had impacts her in her life; because as an immigrant, her family, especially her mother have to deal with the problem of language. For example, "We were talking about the price of