Mrs. Hayashi's Creative Outlet Essays

In “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan an American writer, shares her experience growing up with the family where no one speaks perfect English, and how it affected her education and her life. As the second generation of Chinese immigrants, Tan faces more problems than her peers do. Her mother, who speaks limited English needs Tan to be her “Translator” to communicate with the native English speakers. Tan states, “I was ashamed of her English” (2). Her mother is like a burden to her, at least in Tan’s early years. But the cultural conflict she becomes the theme of her writing and it is under this situation she wrote many novels and essays including “Mother Tongue.”

Every individual in this world faces some type of problem through out their lives, and everyone overcomes them in different ways. People sometimes release their stress and problems through writing what they feel, and by writing they feel they go somewhere else. Amy Tan, a Chinese American, struggled with her true identity which influence her works which mainly focus on identity, the Chinese American dream, and family struggles. Amy Tan had a childhood full of ups and downs, and they are all part of her stories and poems. She overcame many obstacles in her life and learned many lessons that are all reflected in her works. Many of Tan’s works are about personal experiences she had and about her family.

Inability for the mothers to understand the daughters as well as the daughters to understand the mothers is a very prevalent theme in novel. This is because of the generation gap between the mothers and their daughters. All of the daughter can speak only a little bit of Chinese, and their mother speak very

The spacing and structure of the poem is set up to allow flow and momentum in the poem and its narrative. The speaker’s voice is present with emotion as emphasised in a natural rhythm of thought offering an honest and bare interpretation of motherhood. The open “blank space” of the poem encourages a calm and breathy atmosphere, fulfilling a mood of tranquility and bliss. Each stanza is short with a couple quick fragmented thoughts before closing each section with the power of a single word. Each stanza breaks apart a separate thought filled with a loving passion the speaker uses to stress the beauty, wonder, and over-flowing love present in motherhood. To better the structure, the poem itself is broken into three parts, each representing a stage of motherhood. The first segment of motherhood that is represented is during the moments while the baby is still in the womb and the mother waits in anticipation for the baby to arrive. This “honeymoon” phase is expressed with a tone filtered through a perception of rose-coloured glasses and excitement as the mother is in utter bliss to carry a life into the world. The

Why was writing poetry so popular in the internment camps? Jori and Kay Nakano relate that short poems "were ideal forms for the internees' expression of their pent-up emotion," because of the scarcity of writing paper. The Nakanos also point out that short poems were a Japanese tradition of expression, and thus a form that the people of Japanese descent were comfortable with. Their poetry offered a means of escape and relief, a way to vent and reflect in the harsh environment they were trapped in. While commenting on his own experiences, Inada asserts that "if it weren't for the poem, the thoughts and feelings would have stayed submerged, unexpressed, gradually fading and dispersing in my consciousness," and that

S. I. Hayakawa wrote and published an article named "What lt Means to Be Creative". This article challenged how a creative person could be defined and identified. In Hayakawa’s essay he presents several points of view an individual could be characterized as being creative. His writing forces you to contemplate on how a person’s aptitudes are categorized. Hayakawa tests your ability to be opened minded and makes you visualize how a person could be described as a creative individual but may discredited themselves due to society’s standard of this word. After reading his writing, I believe I can summarize his analogy.

In his article “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” Tony Hoagland argues that modern poetry is “oblique,” “fractured,” and “discontinuous”. He believes that poems no longer have systematic structure or development, making them appear random with skittish tendencies. Because of the poems that Hoagland feels are different, he categorizes most new poems to be like the kind he describes in his article. He further evaluates new poetry by claiming that “narrative poetry is tainted by overuse” and that the time we live in is “simply not a narrative age.” He uses several poems to support his argument such as, “Couples” by Mark Halliday and “First Person Fabulous” by Matthea Harvey. He utilizes these poems because they possess no true focal point and the structure restricts them from having a clear narrative.

At hoe, Amy Tan maintained a loving relationship with her mother. There, they were able to speak to each other the same way and understand each other perfectly. It was only outside the home that communication became a problem. She recalls how people disrespected her mother in department stores, restaurants and other places. Her mother, on a daily basis, received a constant condescending attitude from people. Tan became very uncomfortable with such attitudes. When her mother is disrespected or treated unfairly, Tan would simply “sit there red-faced and quiet”. She never felt angry toward her mother, like Khang did. However, she did feel that her mother’s informal English limited her perception of her.

In Amy Tan’s famous speech “Mother Tongue”, mainly describes the struggle about her and her mother as a foreign immigrant in America. She points out the differences and conflicts between these two different cultures throughout the speech. Tan virtually informs the reader that life in America can be tough if you can’t speak the good English. However, the story mainly focuses on the prejudices of Amy Tan and her mother. Her mother has been discriminated throughout her whole life because of the fact that she speaks the “broken”, “limited” or also known as the “fractured” English. Tan describes her struggle of growing up with her mother’s “limited English”, but eventually embrace the beauty of it. The author’s main purpose is to show the audience that the “standard English” is not the only proper way to communicate with each other, that “broken English” can also be an important tool to express our thoughts and emotions.

The poem Suicide Note, written by Janice Mirikitani (1987), talks about a young lady, who has studied in an Asian-American female college. The lady, unfortunately, committed suicide by jumping through her dormitory’s window. She left behind a note, citing reasons that led to her actions. After a critical analysis of the note, her parents were held responsible for her actions; they were pressurizing her to perform better in her exams. The poem, thus, describes the real feelings and the emotions of this young lady, who believes that committing suicide is the only option left to please her parents and to escape the enormous pressure placed on her. The persona uses voice in the poem to bring our attention to the sufferings she was going through, and that led to the devastating event. Voice in poetry is the strong words of a line, stanza or a page that creates a relationship between the audience and the persona. Voice can, therefore, be categorized as imagery, patterns of sounds created, rhythm, tone, and diction (Gahern 166). The following is a description of how the voice in Mirikitani’s suicide note helps the reader understand the persona’s reasoning.

You used to think the philosophy 'you only live one' is the most ridiculous excuse for justifying everything you've ever heard of - if you're meant to be reckless and live as fast as you can, 'there's a million and one ways to die' sounds much nicer. Explore them. Investigate them. Enjoy them. Cherish everyone of them, especially that split second between when you lean back in your chair and it hangs midway in air so close the the ground that the only thing you can think of is 'that is it.'

In Wordsworth’s sonnet, he uses only the four rhymes to show that, even in constraining himself, he is still free. He may be confined to a cell or a rhyme scheme, but it is in such confinements that he finds liberty. Millay, too, is playing off of this idea – simply by being a woman she is confined by society, but through her poetry she can recognized for the brilliant writer she is; hence, she quite literally frees her poetic reputation by constraining herself to such strict bounds. The irony in this reference to Wordsworth’s work, however, is the contrasting subject matters – he writes of metaphorical nuns, while she writes of rejection and lovers.

Poetry is the creative means in which emotion is expressed through the literary art of rhythm, rhyme and repetition. Over time, the distinctive style of poetry has been altered to create great diversity branching from the traditional poetic style of writing. Missouri born author, Naomi Shihab Nye, provides a great example of a unique style of writing. Nye is a poet, songwriter and novelist whose style incorporates everyday objects in her writing to create a spontaneous, yet thoughtful connection between these everyday items and the reader. In the most basic form, Nyes’ poem is about fame. She implies that it is essentially “these little things that we overlook – all these everyday, seemingly unimportant things – are really what deserve

In “Seventeen Syllables”, written by Hisaye Yamamoto, and “Everyday Use”, written by Alice Walker, the relationship between the mother and the daughter is portrayed. In “Seventeen Syllables”, the protagonist, Rosie is an American born Japanese (Nisei) who does not understand well about the Japanese culture, whereas her Issei mother, Mrs. Hayashi was born and raised in Japan and married to America. Mrs. Hayashi loves writing haiku, a traditional Japanese poetry, to escape from the reality of her loveless marriage. In “Everyday Use”, Mama is a traditional Afro-American woman, who receives little education and raised her two daughters by doing ‘man’s job’. Dee instead influenced by the Black Power Movement, tried to trace back her African

In this literary analysis it is essential to compare and contrast Cathy Song’s poem “Heaven” and Bryan Thao Worra’s poem “Pen/Sword” to give the reader a better understanding of what the authors’ are conveying to their readers. The similarities in the style, word choice, and theme will be compared, along with the differences of style, word choice, and theme reflected throughout each poem. Furthermore, I will determine the meaning behind the broken up and/or the way the lines of each poem while describing why the lines are strategically placed throughout the pieces. This will allow me to identify the meaning that the authors’ are explaining to the reader. Each poet specifically writes to give the reader(s) a picture of what they are feeling and defining their emotion through their writing.