Family History Connections

After reading numerous stories of my classmates, I found that the social and educational ways and conditions of different families were quite similar in the past, regardless of the country. From Carly's family history about many of her relatives, John's story about his great-grandparents, and Camal's history about his parents, I noticed that the neighborhoods of their elders did not have high education, were poor, and/or the children had to become responsible and take on jobs at a young age.

She gave herself the responsibility of raising her siblings, from when they were babies to adults..."Everyone was equally poor.” The entire country suffered from poverty...the children in the family mostly had elementary school education. (Carly)

Carly's grandma had to take the responsibility of raising her younger siblings at a young age, and as a result, became more like a motherly figure in her family. During the Mao period, everyone was poor, and the entire country suffered from poverty. They didn't have much to eat for meals, and the main meal everyday was always dinner. The children there also did not have a high education, with most children having an elementary school education.

My grandmother's grandparents...where two school teachers who had about a 12th grade education. At that time in Texas for African American people that was considered to be rather high. (John)

John's great-grandparents were different from others in their neighborhood, and had an education around twelfth grade, which was considered to be high. Many of the African Americans in Texas then did not have an education as high as their's.

Not a lot of money flowed in and out of this area so the income level was real low. As a kid, my dad was already given huge responsibilities. (Camal)

Camal's parents lived in poverty in Yemen, and his father had to take on large responsibilities as a child. He would take on many tasks on the family farm to make sure thieves didn't steal and that the farm and cattle were fine by watering and watching them.

Mother-Daughter Relationships (Amy Chua & Amy Tan)

In Amy Chua's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," excerpted from "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," she compares and contrasts the different way Chinese parents raise and restrict their children from the way Western parents do.  

 I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years.(Chua).

To make sure that her daughter learned a piece for a piano recital, Chua threatened her daughter with no food, presents, or parties.  Her daughter wanted to give up on the piano piece and stomped off, but Chua still ordered and forced her to get back to the piano and practice the piece until it was perfect by the next day.  Her parenting technique was to threaten and order her daughter to do what she wanted her to do, or else there would be a consequence that the daughter would not want.  She uses words to make her daughter do things, rather than physical force.

In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, in the second section, "The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates," she explores the topic of mother-daughter relationships, and the way they raise their daughters and things they often do to influence them.  In "Rules of the Game," written from Waverly Jong's perspective, her mother tells her family, 

"We not concerning this girl.  This girl not have concerning for us."

 after Waverly came home at night after running away from her mother because she was angry at her mother for always using her to show off.  Her mother understood it differently, and thought that she was embarrassed to be her mother.  When she got home, her family was sitting at the dinner table, with the remains of a fish on the table, and the mother spoke these words to make Waverly feel guilt through her words, and she chose her words to strike Waverly's emotions, to ensure that something similar wouldn't be likely to happen again.  Because Waverly's mother felt like Waverly didn't care for her family, she told her family to ignore her, since Waverly was so careless towards them, and did not care about them as she should.

The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates Purpose

In the introductory piece to the second section of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, "The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates" a mother told her daughter to not ride her bicycle around the corner, since it was outside the protection of their house, and in a book, The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, all the bad things that could happen out of the protection of the house is written.  The girl doesn't believe her mom and requests to see it, but her mom tells her she cannot read it, since it is in Chinese, and the mom does not tell her daughter the bad things, so she bikes off, and fell before she reached the corner.  The story portrays a complex mother-daughter relationship, and the cultural differences they had between them.

In "Rules of the Game," written from Waverly Jong's character, she encounters a large cultural gap between her and her mother, and both have a strained relationship, the mother having different opinions from her daughter, and trouble communicating with each other clearly.   Waverly's "mother's eyes turned into dangerous black slits.  She had no words for me, just sharp silence" (pg.99) when Waverly told her mother that if she wanted to show off, then she should learn to play chess herself.  Their relationship becomes more difficult when Waverly runs away from her mother, and comes back home late at night.  Her mother tells the family, ""We not concerning this girl.  This girl not have concerning for us'" (pg.100).  Because Waverly did not show that she considered her family and her mother's feelings as much as she cared about her own feelings and opinions, Lindo (her mother) tells her family to not show concern for her, like she did to them.

In "The Voice from the Wall," written by Lena St. Clair, the mother and daughter have cultural differences that divide them.  Lena "could understand the words [her mother said] perfectly, but not the meanings" (pg.106).  Because Lena's mother, Ying-Ying, spoke Mandarin and a little bit of English, she had trouble communicating with her, since she grew up in an American environment with her father, "who spoke only a few canned Chinese expressions" (pg.106)

Quickwrite: Family Honor

Although An-mei's grandma, Popo would agree that "Family and honor should take priority over the rights of the individual family member."  I think that An-mei and her mother would both somewhat agree.  It really depends on the situation, but they probably lean more toward the side that agrees with the statement.

An-mei grew up under the care of her Popo, and Popo's opinion of family and honor being priority greatly shaped the way she grew up.  She grew up learning to not talk about her mother, since it was forbidden.  An-mei's father passed away, and her mother became a widow, but she still chose to marry, and even so, she married a man with a wife, two concubines, and other children.  By speaking her mother's name, she would be shaming her family, and not preserve the honor they still have.  The "big painting [of her father] that hung in the main hall" always showed him as "a large, unsmiling man, unhappy to be so still on the wall" (p.43).  Popo raised An-mei, telling her that the painting of her father watched her for any signs of disrespect, making sure that she was respectful to her family, and upholding their honor.  Family and honor was always emphasized over an individual family member.  When she was young though, she wasn't as educated about her mother's poor choices in her relative's eyes, and chose to (try) to go to her mother, but the soup spilled onto her neck, stopping her.  An-mei understands that even though her mother did not make the best choices, she still held family traditions strong in her heart, and would probably only put her individual needs over her family and honor if it was necessary.

An-mei's mother was considered a traitor to her ancestors to An-mei's Auntie, because she chose to remarry.  Auntie says that An-mei's mother "'...is so beneath others that even the devil must look down to see her'" (p.44).  An-mei's mother broke family tradition, and shamed her family, dishonoring them, when she married the man with another wife, concubines, and other children.  She still upheld her family traditions at the end of the story though, when her mother was dying.  She willingly cut a piece of meat from her arm and put it into the soup.  An-mei's mother "cooked magic in the ancient tradition to try to cure her mother this one last time" (p.48).  She kept the ancient tradition, honoring her mother, and put her mother's needs above her own.

The End.

We have finally reached the last page of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.  It's been quite a long journey since we started reading the book in Part I.  We've traveled with the García girls from the Dominican Republic and their spoiled lives, to America and their humble beginnings.

There has been a lot about sexuality in this book, and for the topics that Julia Alvarez focuses on and emphasizes the most in this book, it actually makes sense at the end of the book for her to write the book in reverse chronological order.  We first read about what the García sisters are like after moving to America, and adapting to the extremely different life that they started here than the Dominican Republic, where they had much power and money.  They had to try much harder in America to fit in, and they changed from being the typical "good girls" that their parents and relatives expect them to be, and start being more risky.  They stay out with boys without a chaperone, and lie to their parents about where they are when they call them to check on them.

The title of the book explains what the story is mostly about; how the García girls lost their accents and a lot of their culture, and became influenced by America.  In the last vignette, "The Drum,"  The kitten that Yolanda found in the shed, seems to symbolize the García sisters.  The four girls left the Dominican Republic far before they had matured enough to fully understand their culture and be able to maintain the culture that their family kept, like the kitten was taken away from its mother before it had matured enough to learn to survive without its mother's support.  They struggled as a result, since they still had to live up to their family's expectations of their success and constant good manners and actions that reflected well in their culture, even though the daughters were embarassed of their thick accents, and wanted to be able to do things the American way, not the Dominican Republic way, which they left far behind.  Because of the quick transition between their life in the Dominican Republic, and life in America, they were somewhat "injured" by the change.  They grew up with their focus on fitting in, rather than the cultural values that their family stressed.

I'm not so lost anymore... it's nice.

I finally made it to the second paper clip; it’s such a relief to know I’m two thirds done with the book.  Part II of How the García Girls Lost their Accents was much easier to read than the first part.  I understand the way Julie Alvarez writes much better, and am able to comprehend what she tries to say in each vignette.  

I was extremely surprised at how much Fifi (Sofía) changed in the six months that she stayed on the Island.  She was so independent and willing to talk back to others, and was in complete control of her own life, but after she stayed there, and her three sisters visited her three months later, she changed so much.  She seemed a lot more picky when they all give her a hug, and warns them not to mess her hair, which she used to never say.  Also, when her sisters see Manuel, and greet him with kisses and hugs, Fifi grows kind of defensive and tells them to get off of him since he was hers, although it wasn’t completely serious and the sisters didn’t stop.  She begins to lose a bit of her trust in her sisters and begins to grow withdrawn and watchful from her sisters’ flirtations with Manuel, and I think that a part of her reminds herself about her sisters’ habits, and she is a bit afraid that they might take Manuel away from her, making it seem like she lost her support branch in the Island to her sisters.  

I was most surprised by Fifi when Manuel took the book she was reading right from her hands, and tells her that she shouldn’t be reading books since they were bad for her and she had more important things to do.  When Fifi talks back to him, the sisters, like me, were glad that the old Fifi they knew was beginning to emerge again, but when he walks out, she calls him and pleads for his forgiveness, and it seems like she has completely been lost to the culture and the world that she has stayed in for half a year.

In our group discussion in class today, Nawara asked us what we thought about why Mami stopped inventing things after Yoyo’s (Yolanda’s) success in poetry.  I think that Mami stopped inventing things like she at one point did somewhat obcessively, because she did not have any support from her family, especially from Yoyo, who questions her and asks her what the point of inventing was.  She showed that she didn’t see any purpose or meaning in what Mami was doing when she invented things, so Mami lost a bit of her enthusiasm for inventing.  Also, with Yoyo’s success, Mami is less interested in taking time to think about things to invent, and much more interested in finding more people that she can brag her daughter’s success to.

Even though the book isn’t too bad, I hope that the next book we read will not be in vignettes (I thought the last one we would read would be House on Mango Street, but apparently not.), and not in reverse chronological order (it makes it more confusing when putting the story together and trying to understand what happened in which order).

The Garcia Girls Confuse Me D;

When our class voted on which book to read, I admit, I didn’t vote to read How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.  When looking through the three selections of books, I found that this book and The Joy Luck Club had the most appealing story line.  I really liked how Julia Alvarez wrote about the topic of how the American culture and life changes a traditional family from the Dominican Republic.  It provides interesting insight into their culture, and compares it to how different it is from the American culture.  

Before I started to read the book, I asked my friends and classmates if they had read it, and I kept on getting similar opinions from them.  They kept on telling me that the book was confusing and boring, so I had prepared myself for the worst, but when Sutherland read the story out loud in class, I found it quite the contrary.  The first vignette wasn’t very confusing, and it was interesting, although I didn’t know anything about most of the characters, except the names of the four sisters.  

I personally think that even though this book may be difficult to read, it helps me grow as a reader, because I have to read a few times to understand what is happening, and this is the most I have ever annotated any book.  I used to always avoid annotating a book last year, and I would just read, then do something else.  With this book though, I need to take time and take it all in, and slowly let it sink in before I can really understand what it means.  

The fact that the book is in reverse chronological order makes it confusing and a pretty hard read.  It’s hard to follow the story, and I am constantly confused by the characters and events that happen.  I understand what happens, but I’m still confused about who is narrating the parts, and what happened to who.

I’m a bit worried and nervous about reading the rest of the book.  Will the book begin to make more sense?  Will Alvarez clarify events and characters more clearly?  I’ll be able to finish Part II of the book by next Tuesday for sure, but understanding what I read is a whole other story.