What Is The Conflict In Who's Irish By Gish Jen

Superior Essays
The Puzzle.
The story “who’s Irish?” by Gish Jen is a story of an elderly Chinese woman, living with her daughter in the United States of America. She takes care of her granddaughter Sophie while her daughter goes to work; as a way of being supportive to her daughter. She does not like how Sophie is wild; she insists that no Chinese girl acts as she does. She ends up disciplining her the way a proper Chinese girl is raised, after she misbehaves which according to her it is through spanking. This brings conflict between the narrator and her daughter, Natalie. The two women argue and the narrator ends up having to move out. Eventually end up spending very little time with each other. Culture defines who we are. Each race encompasses a multitude
…show more content…
The narrator does not like the idea that her daughter gets to go to work while her husband stays at home or goes to the gym. Even after getting a job, john loses it after a while making Natalie the only breadwinner in the family creating conflict since she works hard. “No money left over, because only one income, but lucky enough, got the babysitter for free” (Gish 228). Later, after the narrator moves out of her daughters’ house, the daughter and husband, John, hire a babysitter for their daughter yet the mother is around. My friend a few weeks ago came to my house and started crying. After letting her calm down, she explained to me that she was going through a lot of emotional torture. When African parents get to the United States, some tend to think they are still in Africa. She brought her mother to the United States to visit but before a month was over there was a lot of conflict between them regarding picking up kids from school and babysitting. It reached a point where she had to take her back home just to maintain the respect between them even though she really loved her mother and she could not blame her for her behavior. No one adapts to another culture in a …show more content…
Natalie, the narrators’ daughter had to make her mother move out of their big house in fear of getting a divorce; she is left with no one to turn to. Bess wishes she had a daughter too and does not seem to forget the pain she underwent to raise her four sons. “I did my best on raising those boys. But raising four boys with no father is no picnic” (Gish 229).The narrator is emotionally conflicted due to the fact that john does not get to go to work and she has no idea how her granddaughter will be in future. Divorce in most American homes happens due to lack of establishment of a common ground between the husband and wife. One of my very close friends had to file for a divorce because of the workload she was having and the fact that her husband was not trying to get a job at all. It became worse when he started filing for full custody of their children claiming that she was an unfit mother who was never there for her children. It was painful for me to watch the marriage break up because the real cause of the break up was the disagreement between the two cultures. Her mother-in-law did not like her at all. If the husband had stood up for her maybe something good would have come out of the

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Have you ever had tension between you and your parents because you had different views on a situation? In the short stories of “Confetti Girl” and “Tortilla Sun” the children in both stories have a different view on a situation then their parents. The children believe one thing and feel a certain way. While their parents feel differently and have different thoughts and intention then their children think. With the parents having different point of views then their children during their situation, it causes tension between them.…

    • 868 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Stephani Townes African Americans in the South during Reconstruction After the civil war, the union won and the african americans rapidly moved into Atlanta. Between 1860 and 1870 the black population increased tremendously. It went from 20 percent to 46 percent, from nineteen hundred to merely ten thousand in numbers. Majority if this growing population was black women. Women that had been sold off to slave owners and relocated in different cities, came back to find family members, husbands, and friends.…

    • 970 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the book “Growing Up Ethnic in America”, separation and differences between the mothers and children are focused. Since, American culture and another countries’ cultures are very different. There is difficulty in relationship between them. Therefore, we could specify about conflict that the writers want to tell us. Also, the writer’s way to write this texts are very strictly divided, American culture and parent culture even them personality and skills.…

    • 798 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Maya Angelou’s Champion of the World and Amy Tan’s Fish Cheeks touch on experiences with racial identity. Although Angelou and Tan’s stories share the feeling of young girls who are minorities, they have their differences. For instance, Tan resents her heritage where Angelou embraces it, their figures of admiration differ and the moods in each story differ, where one writer explains her happiness throughout the story the other explains how miserable she is .…

    • 1018 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Who is the bad guy? I believe that John is he bad guy. Because the fact that he is a “Physician” but yet he is keeping his wife who has a depression. John is trying to protect his wife the Narrator from being hurt or getting hurt by locking her away in a room that is closed off and calling her a crazy. John thought that it would help her by moving out into the middle of nowhere and maybe being able to cure her depression.…

    • 606 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Struggles In The Odyssey

    • 1461 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The Struggles of All Single Mothers Can you imagine what it is like to be the ruler of the island while also trying to raise your children alone? Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey shows the life of a single mother, Queen Penelope. She must rule Ithaca while raising her son Telemachus in the absence of her husband. She has no one to rely on, she is on her own, and the responsibility weighed heavily on her. King Odysseus has left for the Trojan War for the past 20 years.…

    • 1461 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Their Eyes Were Watching God book is written by Zora Neale Hurston, a respected African American author in the later 1900s. The setting is an African American community during that time period, specifically about a young woman named Janie. Janie is an independent woman, who found that she wasn’t happy with how women in general were treated, as well as the reasons many people founded their relationships. She always valued love, and throughout her life, she found that marriage wasn’t all that made it. Hurston’s writing was mainly for entertainment, not a motivational writer, but she had a major influence on how the African American community was viewed.…

    • 1595 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The passage, “A Pair of Tickets” is an excerpt from the book, The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan. Tan’s book is a narrative that derives from Tan’s life growing up as a Chinese-American. Jing-Mei “June” Woo is a thirty-six year old woman who has always considered herself to be “American” as she was born and raised in San Francisco, California. June finally travels to her motherland as a result of her recently deceased mother’s desire to reconcile with her long lost daughters. Throughout her journey in China, she connects with her paternal side of the family as well as her half-sisters she’s never met and begins to rediscover and acknowledges both sides of her of herself, her “American” identity and her “Chinese” identity.…

    • 1354 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    To many a mother’s love is an unconditional and an irreplaceable act of kindness. This love is seen to be a guide to growth and a love that helps to shape young children into well rounded adults. Throughout Jamaica Kincaid’s memoir, My Brother, her mom tends to show affection only in times of need when someone is down and does not really provide the leadership most mothers give. Most of the memoir is about intimacy, but a lot it deals with the relationships between mother and her children. Kincaid claims that the love her mother would give would not always be the best for them…

    • 2005 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston, the narrative investigates numerous sides of the immigrant encounters in the United States. The book focuses not only on those who immigrated to the U.S. from China but preferably on the first generation born in this country. Within the woman in question stories the narrator pulls us into her problems of growing up in an immigrant society and her fight with various aspects of her Chinese heritage: her fear of being sold as a slave if she should return to China, her fear of ghosts, her fear of insanity, and her constant fear of being worthless just because she was born female. I believe each of the sections “No Name Woman”, “White Tigers”, “Shaman”, “At the Western…

    • 586 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    The influence of culture dictates the way one acts and the activities one participates in. In “Rules of The Game”, by Amy Tan, MeiMei is brought up in a household based on principles of the Chinese American culture. MeiMei talks to her mom about what Chinese people do, and MeiMei’s mom reflects on the occupations that Chinese people partake in,“Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people.” (Tan, pg. 2)…

    • 244 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Who's Irish Analysis

    • 500 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Analysis of "Who's Irish?" "Who's Irish?", is a story about the differences of Chinese's view and American's view of rising a child and a family. Main characters about the story are grandma, grandma's daughter; Natalie, grandma's son-in-law; John, and John's mother; Bess. The three issues about the story are disciplining of a child, what sons should do for their parents, and how a child should behave as a grandchild.…

    • 500 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Ireland has been a land that has been long forgotten or at least hardly ever touched upon. Most folks forget the countless things that Ireland has given the world such as new forms of technology, science, and transportation. Majority of the people only recognize them as the immigrants that had the potato famine and those who celebrate St. Patricks day. The book In Search of Ancient Ireland by Carmel McCaffrey and Leo Eaton is based on the history of the ancient times in Ireland and how some legacies would come to shape the future country. Though the book, the authors go and explore areas where battles took place or forgotten pagan monuments were or why streets lined up the way they did.…

    • 1621 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Decent Essays

    In Michelle Gaffner Wood, “Negotiating the Geography of Mother-Daughter Relationships “ article The criticism about Tan's works centers on the way that the dialogic nature of talk-story functions either to create or to bridge gaps between bi-cultural, bilingual immigrant mothers and their Americanized second-generation daughters. As seen in Amy Tans, Two kinds the narrative point of view foreseen in the text describes the protagonist as struggling to please and keep her mother happy, as she soon realizes how unhappy it makes her trying to live up to these standards she feels aren't destine to be. Seeking for acceptance but tired of living in that double standard Jing-Mei soon rebeled against her mother and expressed her need for a free will.…

    • 212 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Ireland Research Paper

    • 632 Words
    • 3 Pages

    “There are only two kinds of people in the world, the Irish and those who wish they were.” (Unknown). This is a very common quote to describe the people of Ireland. The people of Ireland have an unique history, culture, religion, meals, living conditions, jobs, and recreation. Ireland is a small, independent country east of Great Britain.…

    • 632 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays