Mother Daughter Relationships - Daughter Pushed to the Brink in Amy Tan

A Daughter Pushed to the Brink in Joy Luck Club In Amy Tans novel, Joy Luck Club, the beget of Jing-mei recognizes notwithstanding deuce kinds of filles those that are obedient and those that follow their own mind. Perhaps the reader of this novel may recognize only two types of mothers pushy mothers and patient mothers. The two songs, Pleading Child and Perfectly Contented, which the daughter plays, reinforce the underlying tension in the novel. These songs represent the feelings that the daughter, Jing-mei, has had throughout her life. The mother in this novel is pushy. She wants her daughter to decease a child portent so badly she can practically taste it. She makes Jing-mei perform tests out of magazines to see if she could by some chance be one of those extraordinary children they are always reading about and ceremonial occasion on TV. Jing-mei has no interest in becoming a child prodigy eventually gives up on these tests, and hence her mother gives up on them, too. The mother also pushed Jing-mei to try and be something she wasnt in the way of looks. After watching Shirley Temple on TV, Jing-meis mother took her down to the beauty training school so she could get her copper cut to look homogeneous a Chinese Shirley Temple. Well, like the tests, the haircut failed too. She ended up with an uneven, Peter Pan looking haircut. Jing-meis mother said that she now looked like Negro Chinese as if it was her fault her hair ended up the way it did (Tan 1208). After the first two attempts to make her daughter into a child prodigy, the mother is just about to give up on the idea that her daughter can be better than what she already is, when her last idea hits her. She was watching the Ed Sullivan show, when she saw a girl playin... ...ause her mother pushed her to hard to do things that she simply did not want to do. If her mother had just been a little more relaxed and not so caught up in her daughter becoming a child prodigy, then they would have had a better relationship. If parents push their children to do something they do not want to do, they may end up, like Jing-meis mother, paying for it. Works Cited and Consulted Ghymn, Ester. Images of Asian American Women by Asian American Women Writers. vol. 1. NY Peter Lang 1995. Souris, Stephen. Only Two Kinds of Daughters Inter-Monologue Dialogicity in The Joy Luck Club. Melus 19.2 (Summer 1994)99-123. Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. time of origin Contemporaries. New York A Division of Random House, Inc. 1993. Willard, Nancy. Asian American Women Writers. Ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers, Philadelphia 1997.

Granite :: essays research papers

GraniteVigorously wiping off the dead grass and dandelion petals from the rock, the girls hand brushed a boney edge roughly. As she quickly drew her hand away for examination, she saw what her hand had lain upon. The right upper corner of the babys headstone was disordered off.     She took a moment to contemplate her blood expanding into the crevices and gullies of the edges gap. She scanned the knoll ahead and around it and spotted the chunk. She walked over and picked it up, her knuckles getting whiter every scrap as she clutched the severed edge firmer and firmer. Then she spotted the culprit.     An old rusted mower and a tactless, overweight nimrod with gray hair crowning it. With a whirl of adrenaline, she hurled the stone edge after the tractor. Had this man no respect for the souls he so violently cut over? The stone dropped ten feet short, and the man was unmindful(p) to it.     The girl, innocent and full of rage, dropped to her knees at her deceased brothers headstone. The only way shell ever see him. Only one tear savage the solely night, though. She wasnt as mad as she was blown away at the whole idea that, even though he was her older sibling, hed always be preserved in time, like the granite above him, as a four-day-old infant. She considered this while shifting her vision to the huge slab of white stone upright the left road.     This was the childrens saint, with most of the children buried around it. When her family came to the grave when she was in grade school, she used to love to climb on the smooth stone and teach the sparrows in their tiny trees dotting the plateau of the dead.     She shook this thought off with a cold shiver as the first droplets of a new rain fell tumbling on her jersey. Her eyes showed she was inattentive to it while she kneeled, slowly outlining the word "Joey" with her left pinky.   &nbs p Shed always regretted the fact that she never felt any realistic depression from his death, but how could she? She wasnt even a twinkle in her parents eye when it happened.