![]() ![]() Jing-mei herself admitted that she might have become a decent pianist if she had tried. I won’t let her change me, I promised to myself. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts, or rather thoughts filled with lots of won’ts. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. ![]() I looked at my reflection, blinking so I could see more clearly. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high-pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror.Īnd then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me – because I had never seen that face before. 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. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and the failed expectations. This was an act of both self-realization and self-sabotage:Īnd after seeing my mother’s disappointed face once again, something inside of me began to die. When she was little, Jing-mei was adamant about asserting her right to fall short of expectations and just be who she was. That's the adult equivalent of a toddler holding their breath to win an argument. Jing-mei is strong willed (she got it from her mama) but a lot of that strength of will manifests in the least helpful way possible: Jing-mei undercuts her own successes in life just to show everyone she can. Orientalism, Western feminism, American Dream, and multiculturalism are some of the major discourses whose truthfulness and serenity are shown to be precarious and open to questioning, hence the recuperation of the subaltern’s voice through this contrapuntal reading.Jing-mei (June) Woo Shooting Herself In The Foot Thus, exploring the discursive fissures and ideological ruptures inscribed in the novel, the authors seek to bring to fore how the very mainstream accounts of Chinese culture and orientalist archive of knowledge in which the work is embedded are contested in the third-space enounters between subjects of different cultures. It is argued that Tan’s novel is implicated in unexpected forms of resistance as a result of its placement in the borderland of cultures. This paper sets out to investigate Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, a liminal work written in-between cultures, in the light of Homi Bhabha’s concept of the third space as a site of transformation and transvaluation. The present paper is an attempt to explore how the Chinese mothers resolve the friction caused by dual identities with the assistance of space- geographical, social, cultural, spiritual and personal. The novel divided into sixteen interwoven stories describes the complex relationship between four sets of mothers and daughters, Suyuan Woo and Jing-mei Woo Lindo Jong and Waverly Jong An-mei Hsu and Rose Hsu Jordan and Ying Ying St. The novel explains not only the difficulties enfolding dual cultural identities, specifically Chinese-American but also transcends cultural conflicts by depicting the generational conflicts between mothers and daughters. ![]() Her first novel The Joy Luck Club is a bestseller and has garnered her Commonwealth Club Gold Award for fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for fiction, The American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Through the richness of her artistic innovation and crafting, Tan has explored a new possibility for fiction writing and has enriched the literary tradition in the genre of novel writing in Chinese American literature. Amy Tan warrants a unique place in Chinese American literature as a result of her intriguing storytelling, which enriches the genre of fiction in its explorations of the connection between past and present and her characters’ struggles over family relations and identity construction. ![]()
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