Bulging Fish Eyes Different ethnicities and backgrounds due to diverse ideas have made it increasingly difficult to appreciate cultures different from one’s own origin. Thoughts become restricted due to the lack of people not exposed to other cultures. Like the bulging fish eyes that stare at their maker, people in society stare at what is different. Staring shows a person’s attempt at trying to interpret why people act the way they do; however, this could make the person whose different feel like an outcast in the community. “Fish Cheeks,” by Amy Tan, is a personal account of a Christmas dinner during Tan’s childhood, and reveals what it feels like to be embarrassed and to feel shame and despair when the narrator does not accept her Chinese
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All these lessons are represented by diction through word choice and italics, perspective shift, and varying sentence length. Tan’s use of vocabulary like “embarrassment”, “shame”, and “despair” describe the emotions she felt on that Christmas day many years ago. The narrator did not feel comfortable throughout the entire night, and this can be inferred by all of the negative emotions and connotations of vocabulary. “Dinner threw me deeper into despair” (Tan). Tan states dinner was the cause of her everlasting despair. However, it is the narrator’s own fault because she doesn’t accept her culture. Tan sets the word “Chinese” apart by having it italicized in the text. She makes Chinese an outcast in the short story similarly to how she has made herself an outcast. Secondly, Tan states, “I wanted to disappear” (Tan). The …show more content…
To change for someone else and not for oneself is to lose the items that one cares about, which can lead to an unfulfilling life. Readership has exhibited different opinions on whether this piece is meaningful with lessons behind it to learn from or if it is simply just an account of a memory in Amy Tan’s life. This essay has pointed out meticulous details and the complex understanding behind each theme. The readers, with the assumption that “Fish Cheeks” is nearly only an account of Tan’s life, must look deeper at the end of the story where years later the narrator reminisces about the lessons her mom taught her that Christmas evening long ago. If it was simply just a memory without underlying meaning, it would not have dawned on the narrator to “fully appreciate [the mother’s] lesson and the true purpose behind [the] particular menu” (Tan). Uncomfortable occurrences now may feel like it is the world betting against them, but it might be the very thing that needs to ensue to learn something important which is what happened to the
All these lessons are represented by diction through word choice and italics, perspective shift, and varying sentence length. Tan’s use of vocabulary like “embarrassment”, “shame”, and “despair” describe the emotions she felt on that Christmas day many years ago. The narrator did not feel comfortable throughout the entire night, and this can be inferred by all of the negative emotions and connotations of vocabulary. “Dinner threw me deeper into despair” (Tan). Tan states dinner was the cause of her everlasting despair. However, it is the narrator’s own fault because she doesn’t accept her culture. Tan sets the word “Chinese” apart by having it italicized in the text. She makes Chinese an outcast in the short story similarly to how she has made herself an outcast. Secondly, Tan states, “I wanted to disappear” (Tan). The …show more content…
To change for someone else and not for oneself is to lose the items that one cares about, which can lead to an unfulfilling life. Readership has exhibited different opinions on whether this piece is meaningful with lessons behind it to learn from or if it is simply just an account of a memory in Amy Tan’s life. This essay has pointed out meticulous details and the complex understanding behind each theme. The readers, with the assumption that “Fish Cheeks” is nearly only an account of Tan’s life, must look deeper at the end of the story where years later the narrator reminisces about the lessons her mom taught her that Christmas evening long ago. If it was simply just a memory without underlying meaning, it would not have dawned on the narrator to “fully appreciate [the mother’s] lesson and the true purpose behind [the] particular menu” (Tan). Uncomfortable occurrences now may feel like it is the world betting against them, but it might be the very thing that needs to ensue to learn something important which is what happened to the