Amy Tan Essay

1. There are two categories that Amy Tan uses for her writing and speaking towards different individuals. For example, one category that Amy Tan uses with her mother is a “broken”, “fractured”, and “limited” english due to her background as a native speaker of Chinese. One example was when Amy and her mother was talking about the price of furnitures and Amy said, “Not waste money that way.” This then shows that her mother isn’t very fluent with English and is lacking in grammar due to her word choice

In the stories, “Fish Cheeks” by Amy Tan and, “How to date a brown girl (black girl, white girl or halfie)” by Junot Diaz both show that they do not like their own culture. Amy is a fourteen-year-old girl who lives in America but is Chinese. Amy wishes that her family could be more American so she can fit in with everyone else. She has a crush on a boy named Robert and is devastated when she finds out that his family was invited to their house for Chinese Christmas Eve dinner. Yunior is a boy who

Cody Churchill Professor Ed Kavanagh English 1080 9-13 Oct 2014 Word Count: 900 Amy Tan: Two Kinds The crisis between Jing-mei and her mother in Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” is a love/hate relationship between mother and daughter which hinges on ideas of identity and abandonment. In this story, the tug of war over Jing-mei’s identity is tragic; for either character to give in will mean a loss for both. Should Jing-mei give in to the fierce determination of her mother and become a prodigy, abandoning any

Amy Tan’s past and biography have a great influence on her story “The Rules of the Game,” because she models the tense relationship between Waverly and her mother after Tan’s own relationship with her mother. Tan and Waverly were both playing a “game” against their mother. Tan gives Waverly many of the same personality traits and difficulties that Tan experienced herself in her youth and this leads to a parallel of their conflicts. Amy Tan’s mother would always push Amy when she was young, just as

When I read Amy Tan’s essay, I couldn’t help but think how much I could relate to her. The phrase that really grabbed my attention and made me feel sympathy towards Tan is when she said, “When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people… to pretend I was she. … I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her” (60). I felt sympathy for Tan because I grew up with parents who didn’t know the English language perfectly and I would have to perform

Finding Yourself Amy Tan is a well-respected author and has experienced great success with her writing. The process of becoming a valued author wasn’t always easy for Tan but her determination kept her going. Tan dealt with the struggle of being called an “ethnic writer” and she had a difficult time embracing that she was Chinese. Tan’s Mother, Daisy, reassures Tan by saying, "you must be proud you different. You only shame is be ashame" (Moore 130). This saying has stayed with Tan and her beliefs

Amy Tan Amy Tan was born in 1952, in Oakland, California to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan. Her family eventually settled in Santa Clara. When Tan was in her early teens, her father and one of her brothers died of brain tumors within months of each other. During this period Tan learned that her mother had been married before, to an abusive husband in China. After divorcing him, her mother fled China during the Communist takeover, leaving three daughters behind who she would not

perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It’s my mother’s tongue,” stated Amy Tan, while expressing her thoughts on how other people view her mother’s speaking habits (Tan 53). The author emphasizes that she was oblivious towards the unusual manner in which her mother spoke English. However, once she recognized the “watered down” edition of English her mother spoke, Tan sought out to write pieces based on what her mother could understand (Tan 56). Her thesis states, “I later decided I should envision a reader

Mother’s and daughter’s don’t always get along. In life, sometimes we get conflicted on whether to pursue a personal desire, or choose to do what is socially acceptable. The story “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan is about the Conflict this young girl has with her mother. Her mother wants her to be a prodigy, while she on the other hand, promised herself she would not become something that she is not. In this essay, I will discuss the conflict of choosing a personal desire and choosing to conform. I think

of opposing influences and contrasting people, sometimes we cannot help but struggle and fight to identify and defend our own unique identity. In Amy Tan’s short story, “Two Kinds,” a young Chinese American girl, Jing-mei, battles over her identity with her Chinese native-born mother who believes “you could be anything you wanted to be in America,” (Tan 1). As Jing-mei’s mother bombards her with silly test from magazines, TV shows, and what seems like unattainably high expectations, the feeling of