8/14/2023 0 Comments Tone in jing mei woo took kindsThis passage “articulates the anguish of the forgotten and obliterated, of not having progeny who would look back at ancestral ties with the past. An-mei exclaims, “Not know your own mother? … How can you say? Your mother is in your bones!” (Tan 31). This admission conveys Jing-mei’s disconnect from her culture and appalls the other mothers because they fear the same attitude is present in their own daughters. She is told about her mother’s quest to find her daughters and that she must carry on this duty and educate them on who their mother was to which Jing-mei replies, “What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything. On top of feeling distanced from the other women, she feels she cannot take her mother’s place in the family. After her mother’s death, Jing-mei is expected to take her place at the Joy Luck Club, and she realizes she is ill equipped to do so. In this section, as Jing-mei comes to terms with the death of her mother, she consequently realizes how far removed she is from her culture and heritage. With the prologue’s depiction of a mother’s fear of cultural disconnect, the chapters comprising “Feathers from a Thousand Li Away” confirm the existence of such fear among the mothers, which in turn establishes the mothers as sympathetic characters and gives an emotional curve by which the reader can judge them. In this sense, the prologue establishes the stereotypical Chinese-born mother and the following set of four chapters elaborates on this model by illustrating both the fear of the mothers for their daughters and their troubled pasts that have led them to pursue better lives for their daughters. This insufficient connection or inability to pass on culture and history to their daughters is what the mothers of the story fear. In the end of the story, the woman is left with only a feather to pass on to her daughter, which calls the reader’s attention to the feeble connection between Chinese-born parents and American-born children. This prologue enlightens an American audience on the dilemmas faced by immigrants in order to garner sympathy for the mothers in the story who could be misinterpreted without this background information. This exhibits the loss of culture that takes place during relocation and identifies the reality facing the Chinese mothers in the book: “Tan’s structural narrative opening marks the way ‘America’ strips the woman of her past, her idealized hopes for the future in the United States, and excludes her from an ‘American’ national identity” (Romagnolo 270). However, the swan is taken from her as she goes through customs, leaving her with only a feather to pass on to her daughter. The swan she is traveling with symbolizes both her life in China and the hope she has for her daughter in the New World. She voices her optimism about America and the wonderful life it will give her daughter. The story in the first prologue recounts a woman’s immigration from China to America. The prologue for “Feathers from a Thousand Li Away” depicts the relocation of a woman to a new country and the resulting cultural problems this type of relocation entails, which turns out to be the main conflict of Tan’s short story collection. Amy Tan uses section prologues to establish viewpoints from which to observe and interpret each section while establishing general conflicts facing the characters in the short story collection the prologues progress from identifying the problem to suggesting the continuance of cultural heritage, they help to bridge the cultural gap between the mothers and daughters in the story. These prologues unite the short story sections and as the prologues themselves come together to form one story, they bring the collection together as a whole to form an in-depth look at Chinese culture’s survival in American society. Each prologue gives the reader a cultural perspective, which allows for better interpretations of the book’s sections. One way she accomplishes this task is through the use of prologues that frame each of the four sections of the book. In describing a culture that is exceedingly different from the American way of life, Tan presents both cultures side by side in order to draw attention to their differences. However, in The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan effectively makes much of Chinese culture comprehensible to American readers. Cultural divides are difficult to overcome in storytelling, because readers must both re-orient their largest cultural assumptions and understand the ideas of specific, unique characters.
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