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LOSS OF SELF. ASSIMILATION OF CHINESE AMERICAN WOMEN. 1898-1930. Stereotypes. Humble & Submissive Sneaky Condescend to other races All know Kung Fu Poor Communicators Greedy Grocery Store Owners. The Joy Luck Club. An-Mei Hsu vs. Rose Hsu Jordan. An-Mei Hsu.
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LOSS OF SELF ASSIMILATION OF CHINESE AMERICAN WOMEN
Stereotypes • Humble & Submissive • Sneaky • Condescend to other races • All know Kung Fu • Poor Communicators • Greedy • Grocery Store Owners
An-Mei Hsu • “A girl in China did not marry for love. She married for position, and my mother’s position, I later learned, was the worst.” (228) • “my mother, she suffered. She lost her face and tried to hide it. She found only greater misery and finally could not hide that. There is nothing more to understand. That was China. That was what people did back then. They had no choice. They could not speak up. They could not run away. That was their fate.” (241) • “…I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitterness.” (215)
Rose Hsu Jordan • “I have to admit that what I initially found attractive in Ted were precisely the things that made him different from my brothers and the Chinese boys I had dated: his brashness; the assuredness in which he asked for things and expected to get them; his opinionated manner; his angular face and lanky body; the thickness of his arms; the fact that his parents immigrated from Tarrytown, New York, not Tientsin, China.” (117) • “Over the years, I learned to choose from the best opinions. Chinese people had Chinese opinions. American people had American opinions. And in almost every case, the American version was much better. It was only later that I discovered there was a serious flaw with the American version. There were too many choices, so it was easy to get confused and pick the wrong thing.” (191)
Lindo Jong • “I missed my family and my stomach felt bad, knowing I had finally arrived where my life said I belonged. But I was also determined to honor my parents’ words, so Huang Taitai could never accuse my mother of losing face.” (55) • “It’s hard to keep your Chinese face in America. At the beginning, before I even arrived, I had to hide my true self.” (258) • “I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it’s no lasting shame. You are fist in line for a scholarship…. In American, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you. “She learned these things, but I couldn’t teach her about Chinese character. How to obey parents and listen to your mother’s mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities, worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best.” (254)
Waverly Jong • ‘What if I blend in so well they think I’m one of them…What if they don’t let me come back to the United States?’ ‘When you go to China,’ I told her, ‘you don’t even need to open your mouth. They already know you are an outsider…Even if you put on their clothes, even if you take off your makeup and hide your fancy jewelry, they know. They know just watching the way you walk, the way you carry your face. They know you do not belong.’” (253) • “Only her skin and her hair are Chinese. Inside—she is all American-made.” (254) • “If you are Chinese you can never let go of China in your mind.” (183)
Ying Ying St. Clair • “For woman is yin…the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lightening our minds.” (81) • “Saint took me to America, where I lived in houses smaller than the one in the country. I wore large American clothes. I did servant’s tasks. I learned the Western ways. I tried to speak with a thick tongue. I raised a daughter, watching her form another shore. I accepted her American ways.’ (251)
Lena St. Clair • “Most people didn’t know I was half Chinese, maybe because my last name is St. Clair. When people first saw me, they thought I looked like my father, English –Irish, big boned and delicate at the same time. But if they looked really close, if they knew that they were there, they could see the Chinese parts.” (104) • “I had stopped eating, not because of Arnold, whom I had long forgotten, but to be fashionably anorexic like all the other thirteen-year-old girls who were dieting and finding other ways to suffer as teenagers.” (153)
Suyan Woo • “And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that’s how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.” (25) • “I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese.” (34)
June Woo • “My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.” (37) • “ ‘What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don't know anything. . . .” The aunties are looking at me as if I had become crazy right before their eyes. . . . And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant. . . . They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese . . . who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.” (40-41)
Stereotypes in Schools • Genius • Great in Math • Uninterested in Fun • 4.0 GPA • Nerdy
Asian Assimilation within the Schools • Desire to be accepted • Loss of language • Loss of culture • Assimilation through sports and clubs
