Familia History: Connection

Hardship seem to run in many families, but we all in the end come to realize something important from those hardships. After reading many of my friends' family histories, I saw similarities between their family stories and mine. An example is from Crystal Lau’s blog:

"She wanted to show how there was a time when even attaining the basic necessities became a difficulty and how the modern people are often spoiled by the availability of whatever they need less than minutes away. She wanted us to really reflect on our current lives and see how fortunate we really are to be born in America during this era where we do not have to face the kinds of hardships that she had faced when she was younger at our age."

The hardship that her grandmother faced was a terrible one, but this quote shows that she learned something important from it. She learned that we should be grateful for our lives about living in America during a time where we don't have to face the terrible hardship that her grandmother had to go through.

Another quote that I found is from Jasiu Metkowski's blog:

“Whenever I hear this story, it makes me ask a question. It makes me ask “so am I lucky to be alive?” .if my grandma did not receive that miraculous message, then I would most likely not be here. But if I consider myself lucky to be alive, then that would mean everyone is somewhat lucky. We all experience life threatening situations.”

One important thing that Jasiu realize after hearing about his grandmother's story is that he felt lucky to be alive. He is grateful that his grandmother survived and this show that miraculous things do happen, and that it is true that many people face life threatening situations.

In conclusion, these stories connected to mine because mine was about my great grandfather's hardship. His was about recovering his memories and searching for a new home, and this ultimately taught something really important to me. The thing that I came to realize is the importance of valuing friendship. The hardships that he faced may have been devastating but it taught us how important friendship really is.

Cycles in The Joy Luck Club

There are many important cycles that appeared in the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. One of the most important one that I see is the growth of the daughters throughout the book compared to the experiences that their mothers had in their past. The mothers had their own problem and their daughters seemingly follow them:

“And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.” (Page 215)

This show that the mistakes that the mother had in their past seems to repeat itself through their daughters also. This quote also happen to show another cycle form the book. This cycle is the relationships between mothers and daughters. Like the quote explained, the mothers passed on their fate into their daughters, and eventually those daughters becomes the mothers and pass their fate on to their daughters. It is just one big cycle. Another important cycle that I found is the feelings that the mother had for their daughters. Throughout the book, the mothers are there to teach their daughters and raise them in a way that they hope for their daughters to become better than them and not repeat the same mistake as them:

“'Of course you can be prodigy, too', my mother told me when I was nine. ' You can be best anything.'

(Page 132)

This repeats over and over again. Another cycle is the whole concept of going to America. Many of the mothers in this book came to America because they want to start a new life:

“America was were all my mother's hope lay. She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China...” (Page 132)

They want to leave their past behind them, and look for hope in America. The Joy Luck Club consist of stories after stories about the mother's bad past, but all of them eventually ended up in America.? Why? I think they wanted their daughters to grow up in a place where their daughters could get a chance to become something much more than they are now.

Family History: A Vow of Eternal Friendship

When I was little, my grandfather would tell me all kind of bed time stories. These stories would range from stories about myths about princes rescuing beautiful princesses to stories about our ancestry. One particular type of story that I remembered and liked very much was the stories about his father, my great grandfather. Some nights he would tell me only a portion of great grandfather's story and some other night he would tell me another. Night by night, I learned so much new things about my ancestors that I have never knew before. Night by night, my knowledge on my family history grew more and more. When I was older, these stories eventually stopped. I “grew” tired of them and my grandfather knew this because I would fall asleep before he can even finish a story. So one night, my grandfather decided to tell me one last story about great grandfather. In this blog post, I'm going to share that last story.

This story took place around 60 years ago. My great grandfather was on his ship. This ship was magnificent. It was a beautiful ship with red sails that shine like the sunset. This was no ordinary ship, it was a ship filled with treasure hunters. My great grandfather was one of them. My grandfather told me that when my great grandfather was young, he had this wild dream of traveling the world looking for treasures from everywhere around the globe. My grandfather also explains that great grand father was a type of person that never give up on a dream. And so, my great grandfather bought a ship in Shanghai with the money that his father left for him after dying of illness.

My great grandfather started out with only one person in his crew- his best friend. At the time, everybody thought that my great grandfather was crazy. They thought his ideas and his crazy imagination was going to bring him to great misfortune and eventually to his deathbed. My great grandfather didn't care what everyone said because he knew that there was much more to the world than staying in the village farming every single day. He wanted some excitement and he was not going to let anybody bring his dream down. His mother who was still alive at the time, his deceased father, and his best friend were the only people that believed in him. His best friend was about the same age as him and have known him since childhood. They looked out for one another which is why his best friend stood right beside him when he started his grand adventure.

My great grandfather knew he needed a crew and so he started out his adventure finding people to go along with him. Starting out with only his best friend, the numbers of his crew mates began to add on. One by one, as he traveled to new places, people started to get added on to his crew. Each of these people became one of my great grandfather's greatest treasure. They became a family to him. After many years on adventures with his crew mates and after years of finding all sort of riches and treasures, he decided to head back home. He went to the place where everything began: Shanghai. His crew mates stood by him because none of them wanted to depart from each other so they all decided to go back to Shanghai with my great grandfather before finally departing from one another as a final honorable farewell to my great grandfather. As they were getting close to Shanghai, a giant storm clashed with the ship. My great grandfather soon woke up on a unknown land. That clash with the storm took everything away from him. His ship, his friends, and even his memories.

When my great grandfather woke up, all of his memories were gone. He looked around and saw thousand of scattered parts of a ship's remaining. He couldn't remember anything not even his own name. The only thing that stood by him was a certain thought of mind. A thought of a promise that he made with a group of people. He couldn't remember who these group of people were but somehow he knew that these people were very important to him. He couldn't remember the promise that he made either, but nonetheless he knew it was something important too. After a long while of confusion, people began to show up. They started yelling in their native tongue and soon enough more and more people began to show up. Everybody looked astonished about what had happened by their shoreline. They took my grandfather to their village, and began asking him thousand of questions. Strangely enough, these villagers seem familiar to my great grandfather. He understood perfectly what the villagers were saying. My great grandfather soon began to ask the villagers questions of his own. He asked them where he was and the people replied that he was home. My great grandfather was confused, but somehow he knew that these villagers weren't lying. The village and the houses all looked so familiar and soon a piece of his memory flew back into him. He was in Shanghai. The place where everything began, but that was all he remembered. The villagers soon came to realized that my great grandfather had lost his memories, and so everybody decided to help my great grandfather regain his memories back. Years had passed but nothing new came to my great grandfather. He began living a pretty comfortable life at the village and had a honest living.

Many people that have knew my great grandfather when he was little told him all about who he was. They also mentioned that his mother had passed away a few years after he had left on his ship. My great grandfather stared at them with a confused look on his face. Tears would always start to fall whenever he hear of these stories from the villagers. He wanted his memories back, but nothing helped. My great grandfather remained “broken” for years until he met my great grandmother. She brought life back to my great grandfather and they started a family together. They had a daughter and two sons. One of their son is my grandfather. Day by day, my great grandmother would think of crazy ideas of helping my great grandfather gain his memories back. My grandfather told me when he was little, he can remember that his mother would always come up with weird methods of helping my great grandfather to remember his memory. None of the methods really worked, but grandfather told me that his father was really happy nonetheless because someone was there to entertain him everyday.

One day, great grandfather took his family on a vacation. They were on a big ship filled with many people. That was the day when my great grandfather got his memories back. How did this happened? Well, there was something about being on a ship with the wind breezing by every few second that got to him. My grandfather told me that he remembered on that the day of vacation when my great grandfather entered the ship, he stood really still with his eyes closed. My great grandfather stood there for hours without saying anything. After a long time passed, my grandfather slowly opened his eyes. He looked straight up into the sky. Tears began to fall right from his eyes. He had remembered everything.

From that day on, my great grandfather always go to the the shoreline where his broken ship was and looked out into sea giving out tears into the empty air. One day, my grandfather asked him why he always go there. And so every night, my great grandfather told my grandfather how everything started. Each night, he told him different adventures he had went on. My grandfather would listen intently to his father and memorized every word that my great grandfather had told him. One night, my great grandfather had finish telling my grandfather every story but one. The last one was the day of the tragedy. He told my grandfather what had happened within the ship the day that the ship clashed with the ship that took everything away from him. He told my grandfather that he had made a promise to his friends on the ship that night. Years later, my grandfather told me that great grandfather died with a smile on his face.

At the time when my grandfather was telling me this part of the story himself, I immediately asked him what was my great grandfather's last promise to his crew mates. My grandfather remained silence when I asked him that, and just told me that I already knew the answer. I didn't know what he meant by that when I was young. Now that I'm older, I came to realize that this promise was much more than just a promise. It was a vow of eternal friendship. I knew this now because I know how it felt to be with a group of friends that you see as family. Laughing with them everyday made me realize just how precious the moments that you have with them really is. This story made me realize that my great grandfather was not a ordinary "treasure" hunter of gold and jewelries, but instead a "treasure" hunter of friends that he can consider as “family”.

The way how Asian Mothers Raise Their Daughters

In the book “The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan, I saw many similarities between the book and the article that was about over obsessive Asian mom's parenting that we had to read awhile back. One similarity that I saw is the high expectations of the mothers in the book compare to the one in the article. In the story “Two Kinds”, Jing-Mei Woo has a mother that has huge expectation for her:

“'Of course you can be prodigy too,' my mother told me when I was nine. You can be best anything. What does Aunt Lindo know? Her daughter she is only best tricky” (Page 132)

This show that competition has a lot to do with a mother's nature of parenting. The competition between Wavery's mother and Jing-Mei's mother is a competition to show whose daughter is better and is more successful. They use their daughter to represent themselves and show off. This is what I probably guess the main reason why Asian mothers act the way they do toward their daughters.

Another example of a similarity that I saw in both the book and the article is the relationship between the daughter and the mother. I think the daughter is tire of the mother's way of raising her which have been shown in the book numerous times. In the “Rules of the Game”, there was an argument between Wavery and her mother:

"'I wish you wouldn't do that, telling everybody I'm your daughter.' My mother stopped walking...'Aiii-ya. So shame be with mother?' She grasped my hand even tighter as she glared at me." (Page 99)

This show that even though being a chess champion makes her mother really happy, Wavery is finally fed up with her mother always rubbing her accomplishments in other people's faces. This kinf of similarity also showed in the story “Two Kinds”, Jing-Mei gave out actions of defiant toward the way how her mother is parenting her:

“She yanked me by the arm, pulled me off the floor, snapped off the TV. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me toward the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet."

(Page 141)

In conclusion, the “Joy Luck Club” expresses pretty well the overall strictness and over demanding parenting from the mothers toward their daughters.

The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates Introductory Response

In the “The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan, I think there two main purposes of why she wrote a introductory piece on page 87. One purpose that I think she want from writing this introduction is to introduce a relationship between a Chinese mother and her daughter. This allow the readers to predict that the stories in this section of the book is going to based around that kind of relationship. In the “Rules of the Game”, Amy Tan showed the reader the relationship of Waveryly Jong and her mother:

“I knew it was a mistake to say anything more, but I heard my voice speaking. 'Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess.' My mother's turned into dangerous slits.” (Page 99)

By reading the introductory piece, we can tell that the relationship of the daughter and mother in one of these stories is not going to be a peaceful one. In my personal opinion, I tend to think that it is a wonderful thing for a parents to show off their children like how Waveryly's mother did for her. The reason why I think this is that when a parent show off their child like that, it usually mean that the parent is very proud of their child. Who doesn't want their parent to be proud of their child? I guess Waveryly didn't see it that way which is probably why she said all those things to her mother.

The second main purpose of the introductory piece is give out a foreshadow. There was one part from this section of the book in the “Half and Half” that mentioned The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates which was introduced in the introductory piece:

“My mother had a superstition, in fact, that children were predisposed to certain dangers on certain days, all depending on their Chinese Birth date. It was explained in a little Chinese book called The Twenty-Six Malignant Gate.” (Page 124)

The little Chinese book that was mentioned in the story and the introductory piece both gave out a vibe to the reader that something bad is going to happen and true enough, something bad did happen in one of the stories reflecting on the superstitious Chinese book. In the “Half and Half”, Rose Hsu Jordan was ordered by her mother to watch over Bing who was Rose's little brother at all time because of the superstitious thing that her mother got from The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates. Rose didn't believe in that nonsense and so in the end, the family lost Bing to the tides in the beach because rose was not careful enough.

In conclusion, the introductory pieces that the author give to the reader show connections to later stories. This allow the reader to get a sense of what the upcoming stories are overall about.