Joy Luck And Dreaming Of Heroes: A Literary Analysis

In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and in Bissinger's “Dreaming of Heroes” they both had a similar common theme, the children felt pressured to comply to their parents wishes or dreams for them. In these two stories Jing-Mei and Mike sometimes tried and sometimes they didn’t, their parents wanted them to live a better life than they did, and sometimes they didn’t understand. In Tan’s Joy Luck Club Jing-Mei’s expectations and her mother’s were very different. In a way Jing-Mei expected things not to be so hard, but in her mother’s view she was not being her best self. Jing-Mei’s mother had dreams of her being a child prodigy and being well at it too. “Of course you can be child prodigy too.” (Tan 132). She had hope that Jing-Mei would do well in whatever she threw at her, but Jing-Mei thought otherwise. They tests that her mother gave her she just wasn’t good at, and slowly started to lose confidence after seeing her mother’s disappointed face time after time. “After seeing my mother’s disappointed face… something inside of me began to die.” (Tan 134). Jing-Mei and her mom didn’t see eye to eye on almost anything soon after Jing-Mei began to act bored, with her head propped up on one …show more content…
That’s the connection between the stories and the kids, they had different view on what the expectations were. Jing-Mei thought her mother was trying to change her and make her become a totally different person, but that was not the case at all her mother wanted her to be the best at anything she tried to do. Mike wanted to give up on the dream that he had strived for, for a very long time and leave everything behind. His father wanted him to live out the baseball dream that him and Mike both labored for while he was alive. Of course Billy had high expectation he wanted Mike to keep the reputation up and have a better