The story He & I & Double Face - Essay Example

He & I & “Double Face” The story is about a woman narrating her experience of moving from China to American and how she has learnt to have two faces: the American and the Chinese in order to survive. The author narrates about her experience to her daughter and tries to show her how her life has turned out to be just like hers. She says that her daughter life will turn out just like hers as she turned out as her mother. She says that she inherited her looks and circumstances from her mother and has passed these onto her daughter. For instance, she was married to two husbands and her daughter is planning to marry her second husband. The hero in this story is the mother. This paper focuses on the mentor who is the Narrators mother whose insight and motivations guides the hero throughout her life journey and she is surprised to see how her predictions turn to be true over the years. This paper focuses on how the mother of the narrator works as her mentor and why she fits in this archetype. The narrator first mentions her mother when she looks into the reflection of herself and her daughter who looks much alike. This reminds her of her mother back in China and remembers how her mother foretold her future and how her character could either lead her to bad or good circumstances. It was her 10th birthday which was very significant to her life. She said that she was lucky to have her mother’s ears with thick ear lobes. She says that were important as they would make it possible for her to hear when luck was calling. However she had to keen to recognize opportunities when they came her way. She also commented on her nose saying that she was lucky it was straight and thus she would not have money problems. She said that people with crooked are always followed by misfortunes. She also commented on her chin which was neither long nor short meaning that she would live a long life that is not cut short too soon. She also said that her eyes showed that she would be a good daughter –in-law, a good wife and mother. She also said that her high hairline showed that she would go through hardships in her former years but would still not lose her hair. These predictions had a lot of impact on her life as she strived to be more like her mother. However, after she was separated from her mother after the terrible floods, he face transformed over the years and so did her fortune. She says that after moving to America, he mouth started to droop because of her many worries but she did not lose her hair as was predicted by her mother. However, after giving birth to her daughter Waverly, she bumped her nose on a bus as she was going to church to give gratitude for the blessing of a daughter. Her once straight nose was now twisted. We can see that she believes that the twisted nose was the source of her misfortunes as her mother had predicted. This is because she said that people with twisted noses are followed by misfortunes everywhere and also explains why even after living in America for a long time, she was still poor and married to a poor guy. What had changed mostly was her face and her eyes. Her mother had sad that her eyes were honest and did not show any deviousness. However, in order to survive in America, she had to develop another face that made her American. This is why the story is called two faces as she displays both her Chinese face and American face. In a bid to fit in the new culture, she has been forced to lose her honesty and has to lie. She has however learnt to sound and look truthful even when telling a lie. She cites the lies that she told her daughter about coming to America using a slow boat while as a matter of facts she had arrived using a plane. She had also lied about how she met her daughter’s father in the Cathay House while as a matter of fact she was introduced to him through a friend. The narrators talk about the hardships she experiences when she came to America where she could not get a job as a sales girl because she did not know English. She says instead she had to work in a cookie factory a job that involved getting her fingers scotched and did not pay that well. She says that after going through all these hardships she realized that her mother’s prediction of her going through hardships was true. She also went through a traumatizing time when she lost her first born child Winston. She comments that having a crooked nose which bore some significance as predicted by her mother made her change her thinking when her daughter was born. She had named her previous children Winston who was associated with winning money and Vincent whom she though sounded more like “win cent” as she thought they would bring the fortune of wealth to her. However, her crooked nose made her resign in her state of being poor and she wanted her daughter to get the best. She believed that the street she now lived in called Waverly was her permanent home and named the daughter after the street. This is because she believed that although she her life was not going to change in status; she knew that her daughter would leave the street and have a better live. She says that coming to America made her loose her honest Chinese face and says that she has passed this American face to her daughter. She says that it is not possible to both Chinese and American. She says that although she had planned to train her daughter in the Chinese way, she herself had been transformed over the years and what she was i.e., her faults, her circumstances and fortune she had passed to her daughter. This explains why her daughter who is planning to go back to China for her honeymoon would not fit as a Chinese. She did not know the language and had not been brought up to learn the mannerism that set the Chinese people apart from the rest of the world. Although the narrator and her daughter believe that they are Chinese, the American culture has eroded the Chinese culture in her. It can thus be observed that the views that her mother had on her life came to pass as she had predicted. Since her daughter resided in America there was a high chance that she would just end up like her mother and they were alike. Read More