American Literature Course Supervised by Professor Pan Zhiming June 2014 Animalization and Return to Nature A Ecological Reading of The Hundred Secret Senses I Introduction Amy Tan, born in 1952, is acclaimed for her lyrically written tales of sensibility and conflicts in Chinese-American mother-daughter relationship, in which generational and cultural divergence is highlighted. Themes of loss and reconciliation, hope and failure
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The passage “Fish Cheeks” written by Amy Tan is a short based on Amy Tan’s personal experience as a typical Asian girl growing up in an American culture. Amy’s only wishes that her and her family were more American so that she could fit the modern American world. She has a huge crush on a boy named Robert, who is the minister’s son and she gets terrified when she finds out Roberts family gets invited her to a traditional Chinese Christmas Eve dinner. Just when Amy thought it couldn’t get any worse
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Maryland was ice skating, snowboarding, and snowball fights all of the time. I didn’t think I would be able to handle that after living in sunny Florida my whole life. I was very nervous and cautious of my new surroundings. In A Pair of Tickets by Amy Tan, Jing-mei visits her mother's homeland of China to meet her twin half-sisters for the first time and to find her Chinese identity. Jing-mei was also nervous and cautious about her trip to China because she had never been there before and only knew
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In China, arranged marriages were very common until the 18th century. This kind of marriage was a negotiation and decision between parents or other elder members of the two families. The children would have no other choice but to passively accept arranged marriages. In the past, the divorce rate was really low. But as time passed, more and more people advocated romantic love, choosing one's own partner began to replace arranged marriage as a social ideal. However, under the love-based marriage, quarrels
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In the Woman Warrior by Maxine Kingston, women are often stereotyped as weak, incapable, and irresponsible; however, the stories told about the young warriors fighting for justice proves these stereotypes to be hypocritical. At this point in the novel Kingston has just relayed a version of the story of Fa Mu Lan, a brave female warrior who disguises herself as a man and leads armies into a courageous battle to defeat an evil emperor. This is in stark contrast to traditional Chinese culture, where
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passage is extremely happy and reading it itself can easily bring tears to one’s face. Amy Tan structures this passage brilliantly, with the carefully chosen words and just how she makes everything bright
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views others and the world is in Amy Tan's Novel Excerpt, "Two Kinds". Across the novel Tan writes about a child trying to fit into a new culture. In the novel it says, "We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple"(Tan, 18). The excerpt shows that Tan's mother tried to make her fit into American culture. Her mother does this by forcing Tan to be a prodigy of Shirley Temple. The second example that displays how culture informs
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In the novel Everyone Leaves by Wendy Guerra, the writing shows the effects of events on the relationships between characters. The book focuses largely on the relationship between Nieve, the protagonist, and her Mother. This relationship is changed throughout the book. The relationship is shown in different ways in the beginning, middle, and end of the book. The main character of the novel is shown to have a really good relationship with her Mom at the beginning of the book. They are connected
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My Time in Israel In the essay “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, Tan claims that the idea that we speak different languages and that we are judged by the way we communicate with each other. She is really amazed by the way other people speak so she decides to use that in her work. When she walks down the street she observes all the different types of English. When she was a child she spoke two different types of English. She spoke proper English and broken English depending on who she was around.
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become different from her, along with her relationship and how out of touch she thinks she is with her daughter, but comes to realize that they are both very similar women and that they both have influenced each other more than they have realized. Tan particularly brings up the women’s noses to use as a symbol of their relationship as mother and daughter. When looking at themselves in the mirror, Lindo recalls a memory of when she broke her nose after arriving
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