Who's Irish Gish Jen Analysis

“The Jade Peony” by Wayson Choy is about a Chinese immigrant family struggling to adapt to their new unfamiliar lifestyle in Vancouver. As the older children begin to neglect Chinese customs and become accustomed to the Canadian culture, 8 years old Sek-Lung is the only child interested in Grandma’s traditional customs. Sek-Lung accompanies Grandma as looks for abandoned fragments of glass and metal to finish her precious wind chime before she passes. As Sek-Lung spends time bonding with Grandma, she also reveals her past and first love “the juggler”.

There are three women in this short story, two sisters and their mother. One of the sisters is named Maggie and the other is named Dee. Maggie and her mother believe that the word "heritage" deals with their family?s traditions. These traditions are the only ones they have ever known and/or cared

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

Her and her two brothers wait outside of church for their grandmother one day, while she is praying, and at the end of she story the grandmother asks two "typical" Americans to take their picture, and asks them in English, and the litter girl is astonished that her grandmother even speaks English, because she always spoke to the kids in Spanish. The grandmother calls Americans barbaric, implying her distaste for America. The little girl, despite being brought up by her "Merican" hating grandmother feels as though she IS an American.

Taiwanese-born American filmmaker Ang Lee tells the story of a closely knit family with repressed emotions in Taipei, Taiwan during a time of rapid modernization. Aging master chef Chu, Old Chu, who has lost his sense of taste and his three unmarried adult daughters have a tradition of eating elaborate Sunday dinners together. The eldest is Jia-Jen a schoolteacher and a converted Christian. Jia-Chien, is the beautiful middle daughter who is a successful businesswoman. Finally, the youngest is Jia-Ning, a college student who also works at a fast food restaurant. Initially this tradition is portrayed as a tortuous experience which the three daughters dread, but later becomes an important forum for the family’s life-changing announcements. Using food as a medium Lee’s film Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) explores the themes of gender roles, family and globalization.

Some may see the mother trying to live her life through her daughter. She invests time trying to make her daughter a prodigy because she was her last hope. The mother lost two children in China and moves to a new country. Coming to America, she felt that immigrants have to prove that they are as talented as or more talented than Americans. This belief is supposed to be the basis for the determination, that the mother has, for Jing-mei to become a prodigy.

The story “Two kinds” introduces the protagonist 's as young Jing-Mei, and antagonist as her mother. The story’s physical setting takes place in San Francisco, the city Jing-Mei’s parents resided after immigrating from china.

Jook-Liang’s grandmother doesn’t let her become a movie star, because Poh-Poh thinks that Jook-Liang is a girl and that she is useless, she can’t be a movie star, she can do nothing. Conversely, that is just her opinion without any proof, even though Poh-Poh is also a woman. This kind of gender discrimination and ridiculous opinion makes Jook-Liang hate Grandmother. Thirdly, this traditional Chinese thinking makes her think about herself.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan follows multiple Chinese-American women who struggle with their self-identity and creating a balance between American and Chinese culture. Because of their immigration and many hardships in life, many of the women feel like they cannot truly tell who they are anymore, and throughout the novel these women are portrayed as ghosts. Ghosts are used to symbolize these women because they share many parallels including being only a remnant of who they once were, or who they could be. Ying-ying St. Clair is one of the women, who has a daughter named Lena St. Clair, she has had a troubled past in China, which has made her lose her fighting spirit, and her spirit in general. Ying-ying is fully aware of her loss of spirit and is embarrassed because she considers ghosts to be shameful and weak, and wants to save her daughter, Lena, from her fate.

"Good Country People", by Flannery O’Connor, presents us with a look into the monotonous lives of three women living together on a rural farm. All three women are set in their old-fashioned ways, having experienced very little of life, out on the farm. A bible salesman named Manley Pointer, appearing like nothing more than simple, "good country people"(1), pays them a visit one day. It turns out that this simple countryboy is actually a brilliant con artist who scams the pretentious daughter, Hulga (also known as Joy) into removing her wooden leg, which he proceeds to

A Daughter of Han begins with Ning Lao as a young girl. Throughout the telling of her childhood the readers get a glimpse of how life way for the Chinese people in the late 19th century. For example, it is discussed thoroughly how a home is set up:

This is a book called “everyday use” by Alice Walker Your probably wondering what it's about, This is about a mother and her two daughters. Maggie, Dee(Wangero) and mama. Throughout this book you will see a lot of changes. Maggie is the good child in this story, she's nice and respectful. On the other hand Wangero is a little bit different. Both my family and the family in “Everyday Use” are very alike and different.

Even the hotel she stays in looks like "a grander version of the Hyatt Regency" and the Chinese feast she had envisioned was replaced by "hamburgers, french fries, and apple a la mode." It is not until she finally meets her twin sisters, in modern Shanghai, that she realizes that she is Chinese because of "blood" and not face or place. Within this story, however, is her mother's story, set in another time and place. Fleeing from the Japanese invasion, during World War Two in 1944, Jing-Mei's mother is forced to abandon her twin daughters on the road between Kweilin and Chungking. Upon hearing her mother's story Jing-Mei Woo is able to understand a great deal more about her mother and their relationship, as well as her own past.

Abuela Invents the Zero” by Judith Ortiz Cofer is about a girl who is getting visited by her grandmother coming from the islands, their native country. Conny struggles and has a bad relationship with her grandmother being embarrassed at church she is taught a valuable lesson by her grandmother and mother.

This anecdote sets the stage for conflict between the Chinese mothers and their American daughters. The issue of the language barrier is a constant theme in both The Joy Luck Club and The Woman Warrior. In the immigrant narrative, English plays a major role in assimilating into the new world. For Tan, the struggle between Chinese and English haunts both her real life and her fiction. Tan herself stopped speaking Chinese at age five, though she has never lost her first language entirely (Amy). Her mother, Daisy, however, speaks "in a combination [...] of English and Mandarin" (Huntley 3). Tan was taunted in grade school for her mother's heavy Shanghai accent (Huntley 3). Because Daisy never became fluent in English, the linguistic friction merely escalated between the two women (Amy). Tan expresses this tension in her novel when the fictional Jing-mei admits that she has trouble understanding her mother's meaning, and empathizes with her aunties who "see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English" (Tan 40-1). The stresses of a bilingual relationship are further explored when Lena St. Clair finds herself acting as translator between her Chinese mother and English-Irish father, who each refuse to learn the other's language, placing their daughter in the cultural crossfire (Tan