Overcoming Obstacles In Fish Cheeks

Amy Tan recounts her experience of a disastrous Christmas dinner with her and the minister’s family. Her crush Robert is there and he makes her feel ashamed of her family’s actions and traditions. In the short story Fish Cheeks by Amy Tan, a young girl is embarrassed of her Chinese heritage but grows more confident after a disastrous dinner.

Wrong. And yet, as a Hispanic student, all of this are stereotypes that I have to deal with. At school, I am a minority within a minority. In college, so many students acted based upon how social media portray them. They very well fit into the categories of troublemakers, the loud ones, the uneducated ones, and the ones wearing clothes two sizes too small the typical Hispanic. But

What pressures an individual to conform? Two short stories by Romesh Gunesekera and Amy Tan inform the readers of the effects that society and culture has on an individual. They introduce two characters whom are affected: Amy Tan, a teenage Chinese girl living in the United States, and a young Sri Lankan woman whose name is unidentified. Ultimately, society and culture affect an individual by pressuring them to conform as seen throughout “Carapace” and “Fish Cheeks” with the use of vivid language and profound narration.

Adversity will be overcome when one becomes brave , determined , and has the willingness to fail.As being born without a arm, baseball player Jim Abbott, had a long journey ahead of him.Or the brave runners who ran the Boston Marathon after two bombs went off at the finsh line. last year.Even Malala Yousafzai, a young who got shot in the head by the taliban because she thought that girls all girl should get an education.All of these people remember to maintain in control , be brave , and accept failure when overcoming adversity.

Overcoming adversity is hard, but these people survived the toughest obstacles that life could throw at you. Adversity is something everyone goes through, but these are extraordinary cases of what people went through.This crowd of people overcame adversity in three ways, only caring about what they thought, being creative, and facing their problems.

“We all use stereotypes, all the time, without knowing it. We have met the enemy of equality, and the enemy is us,” said Annie Murphy Paul who is a magazine journalist and book author that writes about the biological and social sciences. Stereotypes are a part of everyday life. Every person, young or old, has been labeled with a positive or negative stereotype. They are heard everyday and sometimes label certain groups of people. As Martina Navratilova said, “Labels are for clothing. Labels are not for people.” A lot of time stereotypes don’t fit what they are labeling. They can have a bad effect on people’s emotions, the way people interact with each other and their social lives. A common stereotype of many U.S. citizens is that all Mexican immigrants are criminals and have come to the U.S. illegally; therefore, this stereotype has a bad affect on the way Mexicans and other people think and act.

Latinos are all illegal immigrants/dangerous thugs who sleep around, do drugs, and break the law, universal generalizations seen in the twenty-first century. Stereotypes have become a method of systematic suppression in America, a way to judge Latino immigrants and their children, to trap them in an endless cycle of misery and discrimination. Michael Dorris perfectly explains negative stereotypes influencing a minority in “Crazy Horse Malt Liquor”. Dorris describes the stereotypical views of Native Americans, and how they have a pattern of being negative, similar to how stereotypes about Latinos tend to be negative. The people of America form opinions based on stereotypes, stereotypes about Latinos that aren’t necessarily true. Stereotypes have become part of a system;Hollywood exploits them and then used as a form of judgment, which harms both the physical and mental health of both Latino immigrants and Latino citizens.

A stereotype can be defined as a widely held, but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing. Stereotypes are in most cases falsified views that are used to represent an entire entity. Even when proven untrue, these persisting ideas can consume the naïve and offend the accused. As I sat in this Latin American Pro Seminar course, I noticed how unique and extraordinary each young lady in the class was. Even though they were all of Latin American descent, they differed in so many ways. I also noted that these ladies were different than the Latina individuals that I had previously seen in the media. Captivated by how intelligent and distinctive my colleagues were, I was prompted to write my research paper on the different stereotypes of the Latina woman and how I perceive them to be inaccurate.

First,in ways, people overcome obstacles is keeping a positive attitude since when you have a positive attitude you are harder to discourage.An example of positive attitude while facing adversity would be in the text “A work in progress” where Aimee Mullin faces her adversity with humor like when she broke her wooden leg and while all the other people in that room were freaking out all she could think about was that her parents were going to kill her.I chose this example because out of all the stories we read in class about facing adversity Aimee Mullin struck me as the most positive about her obstacle.It’s important because it shows my point that with a positive attitude you don’t get discouraged as easily and like Aimee Mullin you can achieve whatever you wish no matter your adversity.Another example from “A work in progress” that shows positive attitude would be when Aimee Mullin got her new legs and was stating all the good qualities about her legs instead of being like oh I don’t this about them or

Whether you are seen as black criminal, white trash, or Mexican gangster, we all had to define our own identity beyond what society believed us to be. For many of us, our identity is not who we are as individuals, but who we are as a tribe, a family, a culture, moreover a movement. People of the Mexican American culture were thought to only ever be gang bangers, house keepers, and immigrants. Being brown weighed heavily on their lives, social and economic success. The majority believed any work produced by a Mexican American was nothing more than peasant work.

The only way they can assume if they base what they did on what others like them did. This shows how those who make bad choices affect those of the same race because one person did something then people will make it a stereotype and say that everyone of this race does this one thing. Similarly, mexicans have been treated bad just because in their country they have some problems. In Los Vendidos. The salesman that was selling mexicans was asked by the white lady about what does the mexican do. Teh sells men responds saying. “Anything and everything necessary for city life. For instance survival; he knife fights… he dances...he gets arrested,but not without resisting, or course” (valdez 106). This quote is stating some of the stereotypes that have been placed on the mexican community such as being able to knife fight, dancing, and resisting arrest. All these stereotypes do not show how all mexicans are. There are only a few mexicans who can do these things like knife fight and resist arrest. Not all do thies thing a lot of them are honest people who have never fought in their

When people first hear Hispanics or Mexicans people first think Spanish music or Mexico for one. Some people may have different opinions on stereotyping Hispanics in saying that all Hispanic people love tacos and speak fluent Spanish and only Spanish. Not all people who come from a certain race, religion, or ethnicity fall into the stereotypical categories that people put them in. Placing people in stereotypical categories is wrong because it causes for misjudgment amongst people in society. It is dangerous to define a person based on stereotype because one person does not define a whole race and who an individual person is.

Overcoming adversity is a challenge that everyone has to face. Some good examples of people who overcame adversity are the Boston Marathon runners, John J. Pinder, and Malala Yousafzai. They all had challenges to face, but they never gave up. Overcoming adversity is going to be hard, but the ending will be worthwhile, that’s why patience is needed to overcome adversity. Life is like a roller coaster, full of ups, downs, inside outs, sometimes you may start out slow, but as you go along, you speed up, in adversity, it may take some time to think about how to overcome it, but you’ get the hang of it and will eventually overcome it. Malala was faced with a lot of problems and challenges, but she pulled through and overcame adversity.

Everyone experiences adversity. Challenges that everyday people experience can potentially shape, improve, or destroy one's sense of self and personality. Through all these hardships and seemingly impenetrable obstacles, the most pertinent component of one's ability to overcome can only be shown in actions taken despite the odds. People have one of two options; to let those obstacles overwhelm them and keep them from pursuing all that they were destined to accomplish, or to march forward, fight harder and push past the seemingly impossible circumstances to become greater than they ever expected to be, but until they take the step that enables them to be successful -- they are stranded. All of our actions, mistakes, successes, and behaviors shape our person and what we can or cannot become, but what will always matter is our individual decisions and actions not those of the people around us because at the end of the day, we are the ones who have to deal with ourselves.

Just a few days before I had to do this essay, my mom shared a story with me. In the middle of a Spanish lesson, one of her students asked her a completely unrelated question: Why do Mexican children always wear frilly dresses and slippers to the supermarket, and why do the men always crowd in the back of pick-up trucks to go to work? Although some of the students thought it was funny, my mother, of course, couldn't pass up this opportunity to respond and teach a more important lesson, interestingly enough, about stereotypes. She reminded me of our trip to Mexico some time ago and related those experiences to her students.