Analysis Of Fish Cheeks By Mary Matsuda Gruenewald

At this very moment, over seven billion human beings live on Earth. While there are similarities among all kinds of people, no two are exactly alike. This means that from the local store owners to well-known celebrities, there are more than seven billion unique faces, unique personalities, and unique identities in the world. Among these seven billion are the authors Amy Tan and Mary Matsuda Gruenewald. In her short story "Fish Cheeks", Tan told her tale of being a Chinese- American girl and the embarrassment that she felt came with it. Grunewald wrote the book Looking Like the Enemy, which detailed her Japanese-American family’s experience during the time period of Japanese internment. Each one revealed the role their identities played in
She goes on to describe how these factors influence one’s place in the world, such as what options are open to them and how they are treated. Examples of each of the elements of identity are pulled from real world issues including the long awaited emancipation of Turkish women, the divisions of Middle Eastern social classes, and the tensions between certain religious groups. Abu-Lughod states that any identity can change due to political reasons, historical events, or simply the context of a situation
Gruenewald and her family faced fear, sacrifice, and even the FBI. Tan, on the other hand, fought the embarrassment she felt and learned to be proud of who she was inside. These authors displayed the elements of their identities by the use of many literary devices. However, even with these elements being made so clear, Tan and Gruenewald do not seem to let them completely define themselves as people. Although Lila Abu-Lughod says that religion, nationalism, ethnicity, mode of livelihood, and gender and family are what define one’s identity, there is so much more to a person than those five categories. Stating that these elements are all that make up a person 's identity is simply making it appear acceptable to stereotype others based on a few, mostly uncontrollable, certain details of their life. To do so is not defining, but judging. In fact, a lot of the factors are commonly used to label others or are turned into derogatory terms. For instance, everyone can imagine the cliché case of a group of teenage "jocks" assuming that the class "nerd" is odd. Many will look at this image and feel that it 's wrong, but identifying others based only on Abu-Lughod 's factors seems to be the adult equivalent of that image. One’s situation should not and does not define their entire being. A person 's gender, family, ethnicity, or religion do not have to