Joy Harjo

Being children born to immigrants comes with many significant struggles, especially culturally. Parents adapting to overwhelming culture shocks, separation from familiarities and children growing up unfamiliar to their own heritage.I felt as if the premise of the novel held many deep and marvelous insights into different stories about being raised in 2 different worlds.Whilst reading through the novel you are able to clearly identify with all the characters feelings.I think the author was able…

The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan is a story about four Chinese mothers and their daughters who have a hard time distinguishing between their Chinese and American culture and following their family traditions. The Joy Luck Club was a group that Suyuan Woo, the mother of Jing-Mei, chose to create in order to give Chinese women who were forced into the America’s a place to come where there would be no negative thoughts or sad stories. It was all fun and laughter around the Mahjong table. When Suyuan…

“The individual” informs the way one views others and the world. In the personal essay “us and Them” by David Sedaris “Here is the boy sitting on a bed, his mouth smeared with chocolate”(87). He doesn't want Tomkey kids to have any candy because they went to the boat house for halloween instead of Trick or Treating. Plus his mother was going to give them his candy that he worked so hard for it, in the end he stuffed his mouth with the candy and he ended up being allergic to it.…

China. Tan had difficulty accepting her Chinese heritage. She wanted to look like an American and wanted to be like an American. Amy Tan wrote, The Joy Luck Club, which contains many of her autobiographical elements from her life. “The Joy Luck Club,” explains the relationship between Amy and her mother. “A Pair of Tickets,” is the last chapter of, “The Joy Luck Club,” novel (Amy Tan Biography).…

found happiness of freedom, seeing her not-dead husband’s face does it all, she has heart attack, dies of horror, and her story ends. Doctors arrive and reveals she has died from too much joy. After all, what else would a women with weak heart die from? Her grief consuming her and the truth was too much, death by joy had to be the reason. Her friends and family knew she loved him, why would they assume anything…

[America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is where people from all over the world come for a fresh start and a better opportunity than they had in their country.] Jing-mei’s mother decides to come to America from China to get away from all the things she had lost including her mother, father, home, husband and twin baby girls. When she came to San Francisco in 1949, she knew that things were going to get better. She decided that her daughter, Jing-mei, is going to be a…

will be focusing on the essential connections between the main characters of three books, and their relation to the course literature, ethnicity and immigration. The title of these books are: The Joy Luck Club, Things Fall Apart and Black Like Me. Let’s begin with the main character of The Joy Luck Club, Jing Mei. Who is Jing Mei? The daughter of Suyuan Woo, Mei is the youngest of her late mother’s three children. When Mei was a child living in China, life was pretty rough because her…

The American Dream means that with hard work and a little luck we can be anything we wanted to. Amy Tan, the author of “Two Kinds”, seems to say that although Jing-Mei’s mom can be bossy, she probably does this to help her daughter succeed. In this short story, “Two Kinds”, the main character, Jing-Mei Woo, also known as June, is forced by her mother, Mrs. Woo on learning how to play the piano and be the ultimate best. Mrs.Woo doesn’t really give Jing-Mei a choice, she wants to be able to brag…

Suyuan is a strong-minded woman, who finds and creates her own happiness even during the hardest times. The very first Joy Luck Club was founded by her in Kweilin, China in 1944. Suyuan and three other women used to gather once a week to play mahjong and to share food in order to cope with the Japanese invasion of China. Unfortunately, the circumstances get worse and worse as the Chinese army loses the war. When the Japanese army marches into the city, Suyun is forced to leave for her and her…

I felt very fortunate to have Ms. Bear as my piano teacher. When I heard my friends talk about their piano teacher, they complained how strict she was. Although I thought some of them were better piano players than me at the time, I did not relate to the pressure they felt when they had to do recitals or when they told stories of their piano teacher yelling at them when they did not play right. Ironically, those friends are the ones that ended up quitting earlier or to my knowledge no longer…