In the book Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng, the Lee family the only Chinese family in their Ohio town loses their daughter Lydia, the main character to “suicide”, but then later find out that it wasn’t as the story unravels. Each family member tells their version on the story and the narrator Lydia’s version. Each version of Lydia’s death and her story varies from each person, each one revealing different secrets about the family and Lydia that would help to unravel her murder mystery. With this suspense and emotions felt through the pages, it is as if the Lee family was your own, by the way Ng is able to capture the reader's emotions, which is why Everything I Never Told You is a significant piece of literature.
The sadness of not being able to accomplish a goal can sometimes ruin your life or someone else’s. Marilyn, the main character's mother pressures Lydia into accomplishing her life goal of becoming a doctor just like her mother wanted to accomplish her life goal because her future was decided by fate and her own mother. Marilyn says, “For the rest of her life, this would be what Marilyn thought of first when she thought of her mother. Her mother who had never left her hometown eighty miles from Charlottesville, who always wore gloves outside the house, and who never, in the 81 years Marilyn could remember, sent her to school without a hot breakfast. Who never mentioned Marilyn’s father after he left, but raised her alone. Who, when Marilyn earned a
Unlike Tan’s other novels, which are based on oral narratives of mothers, this story develops by the act of documenting past. Ruth who is the ghost writer, major character, starts to amend her life by initiating a unique creative writing, with all immaculate insight that she has attained about herself. In other words, by looking back and by the power of recalling past memories, Ruth has obtained a new vision of future; as she writes the story of her mother and her grandmother, she reveals her vision, in the closing words of the novel, They write about what happened, why it happened, how they can make other things happen. They write stories of things that are but should not have been. They write about what could have been, what still might be. They write of a past that can be changed. Ruth discovers the answer to her philosophical questions about life. Interestingly, this insight belongs to a feminine sphere and its instructors are all women who share their memories with their daughters, to protect them from hazards of life. Therefore, this story develops by the act of documenting past. However, the written word serves to perform as the savior of ancestral memories and preserves the history of a family and in larger scale, a
In many novels, readers tend to relate situations with other novels. Various readers see the similarity and the contrast of the type of characters there are, the theme, and how the plot is comparable. Sister, from “Why I Live at the P.O.” by Eudora Welty, is being treated so cruelly by her whole family. She tends to move out of her home and live her life where nobody bothers her. Sister well knows that nobody tends to believe her nor give her attention. Jing , a character from “A Pair of Tickets” by Amy Tan, has a desire of finding her lost half-sisters. She wants to accomplish the last wish her mother wanted to do. Jing feels that is the last thing she could do for her half-sisters since she had lived with her mother for so long.
There is a common theme of hope throughout the stories of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Even in the face of immeasurable danger and strife, the mothers and daughters in the book find themselves faithful in the future by looking to the past, which is only helped by the format of Tan’s writing. This is shown specifically in the stories of Suyuan and Jing-Mei Woo, Lena and Ying-Ying St. Clair, and Lindo and Waverly Jong. The vignette structure of The Joy Luck Club allows the stories to build on one another in a way that effortlessly displays both the happy and dark times in each mother’s life, which lets their experiences act as sources of background and guidance to their daughters in times when they need it most.
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.
There was one moment in the book where she had to make probably one of the most difficult choices in her life, yet she did not hesitate to make that choice. Jeannette’s older sister, Lori, always wanted to move to New York to escape her delusional parents. However, she did not have enough money to pay for a bus ticket, wiping out any hope that she had. " ‘I'll never get out of here,’ Lori kept saying. ‘I'll never get out of here.’ ‘You will,’ I said. ‘I swear it.’ I believed she would. Because I knew that if Lori never got out of Welch, neither would I.” Then one day, Jeannette was offered $200 and a bus ticket back to Welch to take care of a woman’s two toddlers in Iowa for the summer. Instead, she insisted that the woman, Mrs. Sanders, should take Lori and her payment be a “bus ticket to New York City.” The fact that Jeannette easily made the decision of sacrificing her ticket for Lori amazes me; she knew how important the trip the New York was for her, so she wanted to make that dream happen. When Lori left, Jeannette still did not give up on her dream to go to New York and become a journalist. She joined just about “every extracurricular event at the school” to gain the attention of colleges, particularly in New York. The motivation that can be found in this is that you cannot give up on your ambitions
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.
Sarah’s mom suffered from effects related to diabetes and passed away and her father passed away from cardiac dysfunction. Also, Sarah and her husband begin to have problems with her marriage. In her early 40’s, I decided that Sarah and her husband were in an unhealthy relationship and needed to file for divorce and live separate lives. She begins to focus more on herself and being with her children and close friends after the divorce. Ten years later, Sarah finds a new romance and is again married. At this point in adulthood, Sarah’s children are all grown up at this point in adulthood. Hannah graduated from school, gotten married, and has a child named Lucy. Sarah’s other child Will, has gone to college and is attending a top-ranked program for engineering. Sarah’s health must be watched closely during this stage in adulthood because previous stressors in her life caused significant weight changes earlier on in adulthood. As Sarah enters late adulthood, she comes to terms with her identity and is always finding new ways to engage in different
Out of the Past is definitely an interesting movie with a lot of things to talk about. I will touch briefly upon two main things I have noticed during the screen: the film noire genre and the image of the femme fatale.
In this section, Jeannette Walls starts off, in the present time by telling the readers about her seeing her mom on the street, that she hasn’t seen in a long time. Jeannette uses emotional words like blustering and fretted to show that seeing her mom was an emotional time. Later in the section, she goes way back into her life to when she was three years old and when her family and her was living in the desert. She started off telling a story of when she was on fire. This story was intense, it was really dramatic on her parents part, her dad was screaming at her and the doctor a lot. Then she talked about when they moved to Las Vegas, her family lived in a motel room, which didn’t last long, they had to leave Vegas in a rush, because her dad was cheating in blackjack and the dealer found out. The last story in the section is where her family drove to San Francisco and stayed in another motel. One night her dad was at the bar, across the street. He left Jeannette and her three other siblings in the room. Jeannette got bored so she decided to play with fire and that let to a big disaster resulting in the whole hotel burning down.
Marie developed an independent personality early on and rarely relied on her family for help. She was accustomed to collecting her school records from one school and enrolling her-self in the next school. A particular principle stands out in her memory, by looking at her records, which were from Texas, he told her that he was going to hold her back a year as the Texas school system was behind the Pennsylvania school system. This made Marie very angry because she sure didn’t want anyone to think she had failed. So she bargained with the principle, asking him to let her be in the grade she should be in and if she couldn’t do the work
In the book The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, the author, Kim Edwards, designs a story about a father who abandons her down-syndrome daughter, which then leads to many different outcomes and consequences. As Edwards creates her story, she incorporates many aspects of the book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Some of the specific chapters that are evident in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter are Chapter 10 It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow, Chapter 12 Is That a Symbol?, and Chapter 23 It’s Never Just Heart Disease… Furthermore, these chapters are also significant in helping develop most of the plot, conflict, characterization, etc. of Edward’s novel.
Chapter one titled, “No Name Woman”, is an example of the narrator referring to her mother’s talk-stories and a prominent illustration of incorporating the past into the present. This talk- story is culturally based to express information about the past. In “No Name Women”, the narrator explains that her mother, Brave Orchid, would use the stories to give lessons on life that would stick with her children. She represents a bridge figure with one foot in the past, her Chinese culture that she relays on to the family and one foot in the present, her assimilation to American life. The bridge that Brave Orchid acts as brings together the two cultures and allows her to incorporate the family’s Chinese history into their present
The theme of the novel, Everything, everything, is that you must take risks in order to be satisfied with your life.
She lost another love by the name of Oluf, could not find much work, and lost hard-earned money through a bad business investment. After all this peril she took Russell and Doris and moved to Baltimore. Another move equaled more stress, less money, and more struggling to get by. With what seemed to be the world against her, she made it. She remarried, bought a house, and became the success she demanded of herself. Every step of the way Russell was exposed to all the ups and downs. His mother’s life during those times shaped and influenced his own.
expectations, not showing promise in any field her mother finally decides that she will become a