That's the adult equivalent of a toddler holding their breath to win an argument. When she was little, Jing-mei was adamant about asserting her right to fall short of expectations and just be who she was. This was an act of both self-realization and self-sabotage:. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and the failed expectations.
Before going to bed that night, I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink and when I saw only my face staring back — and it would always be this ordinary face — I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high-pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror. And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me — because I had never seen that face before.
I looked at my reflection, blinking so I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. This girl and I were the same. Jing-mei herself admitted that she might have become a decent pianist if she had tried.
But instead, she tried very hard not to be a good pianist. However, by eventually creating a bridge between China and America, between mothers and daughters, Jing-mei ultimately reconciles some of these cultural and generational differences, providing hope for the other mother-daughter pairs. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Clair Lena St. Themes Motifs Symbols.
The novel also focuses on the transformation of the Chinese daughters into full-fledged Americans. And, of course, Tan's emphasis on communication — and particularly the lack of communication — between the two generations is always present. The novel, in fact, opens with the concept of communication: Mr.
Woo, June's father, believes that his wife died because she could not express herself. Unvoiced ideas, he says, can literally cause death. A few paragraphs farther on, June alludes to the problems that she and her mother had communicating: "I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place. In "Mother Tongue," an essay in The Threepenny Review, Fall , Tan commented on her problems communicating with her mother: "I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life.
While my English skills were never judged as poor, compared to math, English could not be my strong suit. Tan is too modest. Her novel is rich — especially in figurative language, words and phrases that convey ideas beyond their literal meaning. Tan's most common figures of speech are similes, metaphors, personification, and hyperbole. Many critics have compared her narrative style and her unique voice to the Native American writer Louise Erdrich.
Tan recalls reading Erdrich's Love Medicine in and being "so amazed by her voice. It was different and yet it seemed I could identify with the powerful images, the beautiful language and such moving stories. Her metaphor "the peaks looked like giant fried fish trying to jump out of a vat of oil," for example, uses a common food item eaten regularly within a terrifying context in order to convey the horrors of war and to foreshadow the unbearable events that will befall the mother who is forced to abandon her babies by the side of the road.
This section also introduces the theme of identity and heritage. June is ashamed of her heritage, symbolized by the strange clothes that the mothers wear to the Joy Luck Club; June is uncomfortable looking at the "funny Chinese dresses with stiff stand-up collars and blooming branches of embroidered silk sewn over their breasts. Interestingly, Tan herself and her friends have formed their own version of the Joy Luck Club.
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