Overseas Chinese

Julie Otsuka’s novel, The Buddha in the Attic, is a communal narrative of the Japanese Picture Brides who immigrate to the US in the early 1900s. While their narrative is about the immigrant experience, concepts from postcolonial theory can be adapted and are applicable to their story. Throughout the novel, the Picture Brides are shown sharing similar symptoms of that of a colonized subject, embodying what Lois Tyson explains as a “colonized consciousness” (249). According to Tyson, “colonial…

Genji’s Future Love Within The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, chapter three titled “Lavender” stands out to encompass many Chinese ideals that help further understand their history and way of life. Throughout the entirety of chapter three, Genji develops a deep interest for a young girl named Murasaki, and the chapter sheds insight on the chase of women and indirectness. In order to fully understand Shikibu’s claims throughout the chapter, it is imperative to unpack the details within the…

Analysis: Kingston recollects her mother’s story telling about heroic Chinese females, similar to Fa Mu Lan, the young lady who went to fight for her father and returned a national legend. Kingston thinks her mother prepares her with the legends of solid women that she could develop into. That is what made Kingston feel that she can be a warrior woman; it is not impossible. In Kingston’s fantasy, she started to follow a bird up into the mounts until she passed by a shelter of an old couples,…

Amy Tan, a Chinese-American freelance writer, is known for her novel The Joy Luck Club, which is mainly based on her and her mother’s life experiences. She was born in 1952 in Oakland, California. However, after her brother and father dead in 1966, her family moved to Switzerland to start a new life. Then she returned to America for college, and finally obtained her doctor degree in linguistics at UC Berkeley. In 1987, when her mother was diagnosed with a severe illness, they came back to China…

community, either a hidden one, as in the case of Nushu script, or the imagined one, as it is discussed in the case of G&L Magazine. Nushu actually signifies "Women's Writing" in Chinese. As the name suggests, Nushu is a composition framework made and utilized solely by ladies as a part of a remote piece of China. Customary Chinese society is male-focused and denies young ladies from any sort of formal training, so Nushu was created in mystery more than hundred of years in the Jiangyong district…

Therefore, in this essay, the focus will land on the cultural differences. Such a bold statement to readers is clear when Amy Tan uses sentences such as " "You look like a Negro Chinese," she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose". The statement made by this specific sentence is that Ni Kan's mother finds the Chinese cultured title important while Ni Kan, on the other hand, doesn't see how important a simple haircut could be to her everyday life. A short…

Luck Club tells the story of four pairs of mothers and daughter connecting with their inner self through the difficulties in culture and family. The novel takes place in pre-revolution China and twentieth century San Francisco. The American- born Chinese daughters, Jing-mei (June) Woo, Rose Hsu, Waverly Jong, Lena St. Clair, their immigrant mothers Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, Ying-ying St. Clair in the novel The Joy Luck Club all have their own identities in each one of their stories.…

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…

Works of literature raise several questions throughout their stories. Each work of art poses a main question that does not quite offer an answer as a critic named Roland Barthes has once stated. Amy Tan illustrates a question that does not completely offer an answer in her novel The Joy Luck Club in which Tan narrates the lives of four different mothers who are part of this club which meets to eat food and discuss things which brought all of them joy. The mothers emigrated from China and those…

Various Life Experiences The origin of our lives, the methods in which we were raised, and the experiences we have come across have shaped us into who we are today and formed our outlooks on society. People that don’t have as many life experiences will keep a general perspective on the world, while others whom experience many more will be bound to have a varied outlook on what’s going on around them. In the short story “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, the mother’s life experiences differ from those of…