My family of orientation is pretty blended, but stayed the same throughout most of my childhood. My family of orientation consisted of my mother, step father (who I call my dad), my half brother, and half sister. My mother married by step father when I was five years old and he was married to my mom until I was about seventeen years old. I took the Family of origin expressive atmosphere scale test and my score was very high, but that confuses me just a little bit. I feel like my family wasn’t as expressive as I wanted them to be growing up. If they were expressive though, it was only because they were angry at one another. If my siblings and I disagreed with my parents, we would be told we were wrong. My mom, at least, has gotten better at…
Wu Zhao is not only a record setting emperor in the prosperity she brought to china and her gender, but also in her ruthlessness. Wu Zhao is one of the best known emperors of China for a reason. She brought great prosperity. Wu Zhao also was very strategic in plotting her rise to power. She used and manipulated people and then disposed of anyone who got in her way. Wu Zhao did all it took to get to the top, making her successful, but exceptionally controversial.…
The Chinese came to the United States for opportunities, thus they could bring affluence when they return back to their homes. Referring back to the 19th century of China, Qing dynasty, those who had private business or worked for the…
Langston Hughes and W. H. Auden are two highly educated authors, who came from very different cultural backgrounds. Literary contemporaries, contemporaries in that they were both working writers during the same time period, Hughes and Auden are known for literary works which tackle both moral and political issues. Langston Hughes's and W. H. Auden's poems "Ballad of the Landlord" and "Miss Gee" exhibit each author's ability to employ the use of a traditional poetic form to tell a fanciful yet haunting story of characters whose initial qualities are comedic and simple. Both poems are similar in that they are ballads, they rhyme, and they both end in tragedy; however the tragic outcomes for each of the stories characters are as different as the authors who wrote them and the variations on the style they chose to tell these stories.…
She was born on a busy summer night on September 13th 1918 in Brookline, Massachusetts. I always had the feeling that Rosie was a little different from the rest of us. On the day of her birth the midwife arrived late, and my theory is that this action deprived her brain of oxygen. We were proven right when she failed to advance from kindergarten and was deemed to suffer from intellectual disabilities. When this happened our parents began to conceal their third child from society.…
In the article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”, author Amy Chua discusses many of the morals of Chinese parents and what is ultimately behind the decisions they make for their children. She begins by acknowledging the stereotypes of Chinese parents, and she explains that she too fell into this category. The author explains how she did not permit certain activities for her daughters because they were not in their best interest. She further explains how being a Chinese parent applies to more than just those of the Chinese ethnicity, and similarly, how being a Western parent is evident in a variety of cultures. Amy Chua further goes to elaborate on the differences between Chinese versus Western parents. She explains how some of the primary…
It was not until I spent winter break in China, meeting extended family, that I was able to choose my topic. I am the first person in my entire family to be born in the United States of America. As a first generation Chinese American I have always struggled with my dual identity, never really wanting to know much about my heritage, fully immersed in growing up American.…
In the autobiographical book “Chinese Cinderella”, the author, Adeline Yen Mah, goes through a lot of hardships and difficulties with her family and life in general. She is not treated as part of her Fathers family and is sent away to live in a boarding school away from them.…
In Pa Chin’s novel, Family; it revolves around the Gao family and the many obstacles that the three sons have to go through to obtain their freedom. Since the setting for this novel was based in the early 1920’s, there are many conflicts and struggles that the book expresses and there are many situations where now a days it is understandable but during that time period it was really hard for many of China’s youth to be able to endure and accept the facts. The social conflicts that are described mostly in Pa Chin’s novel, Family are the problems of being a filial son/daughter and the importance of being in a higher status.…
The passage and lecture state different opinions about the accuracy of chen’memoir. Despite the lecture, the passage is very skeptical of the accuracy and reliability of what Che has claimed in the memoir. The professor, however, refers to few evidences to prove her point of view.…
How is Adeline described in the book, how is her relationship to the other characters in the book and how do these characters affect Adeline in how she is, how she feels and how she acts.…
The Sorrow of War is a semi-autobiographical novel by Bao Ninh, in which he implements a non-linear narrative structure to tell his story of his survival from the horrible trenches of the Vietnam War. This book is written in a stream of consciousness with frequent shifts of narrative point of views juxtaposed with descriptions of recent events and of the distant past. Plautus, a famous Roman playwright of the old Latin period once said, “Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt.” It is the ‘conscious guilt’ of the fragmented and ‘wretched’ psyche of the protagonist Kien, along with its unique non-sequential writing style that serves as the driving force of the plot. Through the use of this technique, Ninh enables the reader to live through Kien’s sentiments of his longing for the untainted times in his past and feel the effects of survivor’s guilt from the horrors of war on the character's memory (i.e. his inability to live in the present); it is through this non-linear presentation that the author can better convey his feelings, emotions and the pivotal point of his experience to the reader.…
Borges switches between past and present tense to alter the story’s order. Most of the events are told in chronological order, but Yu Tsun’s present thoughts and explanations are given throughout his account. In Tsun’s narrative, he communicates his present commentary in two different ways—parenthetical statements or directly stating. Since the first two pages of his statement were lost, the story begins abruptly with Tsun hanging up on Captain Madden in past tense. The account doesn't change until Tsun talks about the hatred and fear he had for Madden. Tsun inserts a parenthetical statement, “(it means nothing to me now)” which is used to explain how he doesn't have fear anymore because he is about to die (20). Not only does this comment…
Everyone loses someone or something they love at some point in their life. I rummaged through my grandpa’s rundown garage and became sad. All I could remember was the raspy sound of his laugh when we talked. He smoked, not a pack a day, but he had been doing it for so long that it hurt him. I continued to sort out the antiques and garbage for my dad, so he could decide what and what not to keep. I found a poster in the garage. He had two posters in his garage that he would always look at because it became boring just sitting there. They were both wrecked but the one I kept was in better shape. He would always joke with me about the girls on the poster and said to never have a girlfriend because girls are too much work. Then my cousin…
After I read the two stories (The Woman Warrior and the Joy of Luck Club) and the poem (self-help for fellow refugees) I learned about the Chinese Americans life and conflicts. I learned that Chinese Americans have a problem with describing their identity. In the two stories and in the poem the idea of losing identity is mentioned. The three writers said that they can’t categorize themselves either as Chinese since their parents left china and they were born and arise in the USA nor as Americans since they can’t free themselves from their Chinese roots.…