Amy Tans Vision about Relationship with Her Mother - Essay Example

On Amy Tan’s Vision Table of Contents Amy Tan’s Vision 4 Works Cited 13 Amy Tan’s Vision An examination of the underlying themes and preoccupations in the work of Amy Tan reveals that those being a mother, the mother and daughter bond, and family relationships as things that are fundamental and in a way inescapable. For Amy Tan those vital themes sustain life and strongly define a person’s sense of self, to the point that family and relationships, can, taken together, determine the trajectory of a life and the contours and edges of an individual consciousness. It is something vital, in the way that a perspective of the world shaped by one’s vital relationships also determine how one navigates through life and understands one’s place in the universe .It also shapes how one reacts, makes sense, and lives with the most intimate and life-altering milestones of a life, such as motherhood, raising a child, and all that the mother and child relationship dynamic implies: a bond of love that cannot be ultimately put into words, passing on the lessons of one’s life, imparting a vision of the world. Within this interplay of the various interconnected themes listed above Amy Tan continuously dips her writer’s eye, in order to impart too, to her readers, an understanding of how the world is, and how her own musings and struggles form a kind of body of experience that others can hopefully benefit from. The rest of paper attempts to piece together the elements of that vision, and the insights from that vision, through a comparison and contrast of some of her important essays. In this attempt the paper focuses on family and vital relationships, foremost being the relationship between daughter and mother, and how that relationship allows Tan to preserve a rich and deeply nuanced sense of self that evades stereotypes and that allows Tan to find her own place in American society in general (Tan; Tan (b); Tan (c); Kingston). In ‘Saying Thanks to My Ghosts’, Amy Tan builds up to a powerful revelation at the end, where she describes seeing the ghost of her mother, who had just died, in no uncertain terms. Building up to that revelation, however, we see that this story is not just about seeing ghosts. It is anchored on an exploration of the common themes that have been mentioned at the top of this essay. Those are family relationships, Amy Tan’s vital relationship with her mother, who in turn was obsessed with her own relationship with her mother, Amy Tan’s grandmother, who had passed away in Amy Tan’s youth. The belief in ghosts, on the other hand, can be construed as an aspect of Chinese culture, something that the Amy Tan’s mother represented, and tried to inculcate into Amy Tan’s young mind from the get go. This attempt is not all conscious of course. To Amy Tan’s mother the transmission of a culture is just her way of being a mother, and just her way of being, in a world where her own view of the world was passed on to her in her own youth by the dead grandmother. We see in this simple essay about seeing ghosts the intense and deep dynamic of mother-daughter, family, and cultural relationships and anchors defining how Amy herself came to view death, her place in the world, and how she came to experience the depth of the spiritual underpinnings of her relationships with her mother. Throughout the essay an initial disbelief about her ability to see ghosts gave way to a more intuitive admission that maybe her artistic and writing gifts came as gifts from the other side. At the end of the essay, however, culture, the love of her mom and her strong bond to her mother, and her more expanded awareness and acceptance of her spiritual “gifts” all came together to turn her belief in ghosts into a conviction, gained from that fantastic experience of seeing and interacting with the spirit of her just-deceased mother. Upon the experience of her mother’s ghost touching her, she writes: “It took my breath away and filled me with something absolute: love, but also joy and peace- and with that, understanding that love and joy and peace are all the same thing” (Tan). In ‘Fish Cheeks’, meanwhile, we see again the familiar mother and daughter dynamic explored in many of Amy Tan’s other essays, and of the mother acting as one who imparts important life lessons, and of being the oracle for the transmission of important aspects of Chinese culture. The lesson here for Amy, among many in the context of Amy Tan’s Chinese cultural heritage, includes how one is to make one’s way in American society as a Chinese person. One is to be oneself even in the midst of a world that is not like oneself. Amy Tan would not be able to understand this at the time of the Christmas dinner, but she would, like in many of the important life lessons that her mother taught her, come to grasp the true import of the Chinese menu much later in life. In the essay we see Amy Tan again going back to that mother and daughter dynamic, the Chinese heritage that she has set in the backdrop of America and American culture, and the way Amy Tan too acts as a chronicler of that ground zero of the clash between her own Chinese cultural heritage and the American society that they must adapt too. The arena of the clash is her own life. In this essay it is clear that these same themes play out in ways that unearth new and fascinating aspects of that cultural divide and the deep undercurrent of love, cultural tradition, and the imparting of important life lessons that is the recurring theme of the relationship between Amy Tan and her mother. In the end she would understand and take note of the important lesson to be had from this particular “life class”: “...my mother said to me: “You want to be the same as American girls on the outside...But inside you must always be Chinese. You must be proud you are different. Your only shame is to have shame” (Tan (b)). This kind of cultural transmission of important life lessons, rooted in the Chinese culture of the mother, harkens back to similar explorations of such dynamics i other writers of Chinese descent too, such as in the short story ‘No Name Woman’ by Maxine Hong Kingston. In Kingston as in Tan there is an emphasis on the core relationships among family members as the means of the transmission of important life lessons and deeply held family values and norms of behavior In that essay too, as in Amy Tan in this essay, there is the emphasis on being true to a Chinese way of being, and in Kingston that way of being includes admonitions on a kind of Chinese morality in matters of relationships with the opposite sex. (Kingston). In ‘Mother’s Tongue’ we are face to face with a minefield of insights into the nature of Amy Tan’s relationship with her mother, the Chinese culture to which she has one foot standing by virtue of her vital relationship with her mother, and the interplay of Chinese culture, through the language that her mother understood, Amy Tan’s own kinds of English, and the way all of those factor into how mother and daughter communicated and made sense of each other’s views of the world, Amy Tan is quick to point out here that contrary to what others perceive as a fundamental shortcoming in the way Amy Tan’s mother communicated with the world in English, her mother’s English is complete, vital, unique in its own way, and something that she is able to completely understand, with all of its nuances and color. It was a kind of English that she shared with her husband too, and in this sense, language, this particular kind of English, reflects Amy Tan’s strong emphasis on family relationships when she weaves the narrative in those terms. “It’s because over the twenty years we’ve been together I’ve often used the same kind of English with him...It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with” (Tan (c)). In this essay again we see the preoccupation with the same kinds of themes and topics that fascinate Amy Tan on a very personal level: her relationship with her mother, her relationship with Chinese culture and her own Chinese-ness through her mother, the interplay of her own Chinese-ness and American society and culture, and her other vital family relationships, in this case her relationship with her husband. She pulls all of these together through the lens of the different ways that she has come to use English to bond with the people that she loves. In the end we see that by owning up to her different kinds of English, she was owning up to something vital and important, something that is essential to her own sense of self. Her success as a writer and the easy way in which her mother came to understand her book reflect the way everyone came to resonate with her kind of English too, being true to herself (Tan (c)). In the preface to her book ‘The Opposite of Fate’, meanwhile, Amy Tan again roots her ruminations about the themes of her works as she saw them, which are in her mind hope and fate. In those ruminations she mentions the fundamental role that her relationship with her mother played in the way she shaped her views of the world, as resting on the twin pillar of hope and fate. In the way her mother accepted her fate as a writer, and in the way she described her mother as being the representative of hope in their life, Amy Tan goes back to an underlying core theme in most of her work, which is the vital nature of her relationships, especially with her mother, as a wellspring of meaning in her own life (Tan (d)). This vital theme again surfaces in an essay in that book, entitled ‘The Cliffsnotes Version of My Life”. In many of her essays, as in this one, there seems to be that common dynamic where Amy Tan roots her musings and insights about life on some fundamental lesson that her mother taught her. In this latter essay, she roots her thoughts on the nature of her inner strength to something her mother said in that regard: “The truth is, I borrowed that phrase from my mother…”There’s more power in silence” (Tan (d)). To conclude, we see in the essays of Amy Tan that the exploration of recurring themes, primarily about her strong and defining relationship with her mother and with her other vital personal relationships yield very complex and surprising nuances that can be likened to a well that just keeps giving. This is a testament to the power and vitality of those themes. The complexity and richness too, goes against more simplistic and reductionist takes on the life of Chinese Americans, for instance, and the way some of those takes water down the vital aspects of such lives. The constant remembrance of the vital mother and daughter relationship in Tan’s essays is an antidote to the forces that reduce her experience into stereotypes. The explorations of mother and daughter bond by Tan in particular reveal exactly a vision of her life as something complex, multi-faceted, fantastic, and ultimately cannot be reduced and simplified (Tan; Tan (b); Ho 21-27). Works Cited Ho, Wendy. In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American Mother-Daughter Writing. 1999. Rowman & Littlefield/ Google Books. Kingston, Maxine Hong. “No Name Woman”. Genius.2014. Web. 18 December 2014. Tan, Amy. “Saying Thanks to My Ghosts” ThisIBelieve.org. 25 April 2009. Web. 13 December 2014. Tan, Amy (b). “Fish Cheeks” BentonvilleK12.org. n.d.. Web. 13 December 2014. Tan, Amy (c). “Mother Tongue”. Olypen.com. n.d. Web. 13 December 2014. Tan, Amy (d). The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life. 2003, Penguin/Google Books. 13 December 2014. Read More