Fish Cheeks By Amy Tan Essay

Rai RosadeSharon English II Mrs.Hermanson 28th February 2023 Cultural Society in America Throughout American history other cultures have felt that they have to live up to American standards to live in America. Amy Tan, the author of Fish Cheeks, has a B.A., double major in English and Linguistics, and an M.A. in linguistics. Amy Tan directly uses Imagery and simile in her narrative essay Fish Cheeks, Imagery is a vivid language designed to appeal to the five senses, which simile gives compassion between objects.

Antwone Fisher Memoir Essay Finding Fish is a story of a young, unloved boy growing up and overcoming all obstacles and hardships in order to become an amazing man. Antwone Quenton Fisher was born on August 3, 1959, in Cleveland, Ohio. He was born in a prison to Eva Mae Fisher and Eddie Elkins, who was killed before he was born. As a result of this, Antwone grew up in the foster system and he was placed in the unloving home of his foster parents, Mrs. Isabella Pickett and Reverend Ulysses Pickett.

This form of rhetoric, makes the audience see through her eyes of what she had to go through compared to the other rebellious children. Furthermore, this alludes to how her experience made her assume she had to fix herself, affecting how the audience views her situation; which also influences the audience to think differently about how to treat the “others” because of Nguyen’s personal experience of being emotionally self conscious of herself.

This society, in contrast to Vietnamese society where he “was above all just a man,” distortedly assumes his weaknesses, his story, and his past with one quick glance at his body. “To them [his] body offers an exacting, predetermined life story” (214-215) that limits who he can be and leaves him little room for his own input and creation. However, cooking, something that also connects him to his mother, does provide Binh with a vehicle to express a little individuality and allows him to live like “a fish in a barrierless sea” (262). In addition, he initially envies his lover, Lattimore, who he calls “Sweet Sunday Man,” for “the blank sheet of paper that is [his] skin” that Binh thinks allows Sweet Sunday Man to define and introduce himself as whoever he wants to be (214). He realizes, however, that the racial hierarchies that govern society have just as intensely infiltrated Sweet Sunday Man, whose subscription to this racist structure shamefully forces him, as a black man, to pass himself off as white (159) and in turn, open a world of undeniably more abundant opportunities.

Thesis Statement: In the short story, Two Kinds, Amy Tan develops a narrator who as a child seeks her mother’s approval of her, but develops into a child with her own mind, and by the end of the story embodies a woman who realizes that her mother has her own expression of love for her daughter. Thus, Amy Tan depicts a message about Jing-Mei, the narrator, accepting that everyone, especially her mother, has their own expressions of love. This will look different depending on who a person is and their background. Even though Jing-Mei does not always feel her mother loves her, she learns that her mother loves her by reflecting on her childhood and struggles.

Amy Tan uses imagery in the short story “Fish Cheeks” in order to let the reader feel the way Amy felt at the table on Christmas Eve. For example, in the story it states, “ My relatives licked the ends of their chopsticks and reached across the table dipping them into the dozen or so plates of food.” This explains that Amy felt embarrassed that her family wasn’t realizing the fact that they had no manners at the table. Amy was completely embarrassed with the fact that, that was the way her family had acted while they ate. Everyone is put into a situation where they wished their parents or family members had not acted the way they did in front of them, and Amy Tan writing this story makes you remember those times.

“A Rose for Emily” is a dark, suspenseful Gothic tale in which a young girl is put on a pedestal by a town who sees her as haughty and scornful. Miss Emily Grierson’s father controls her and her love life, pushing away all people until he dies and Emily is left alone. As her life goes on the townspeople watch her and judge Emily, almost turning her life into a spectacle to be talked about. At her death, a gruesome sight is unfolded when her lover of over forty years ago is found decomposed in her upstairs room. William Faulkner effectively builds epic suspense in “A Rose for Emily” by the unchronological order of the story, the treatment of Emily’s father towards her, and her family’s history of mental illness.

The family's treacherous journey to Jefferson is filled with danger and excitement, yet Faulkner gives many doses of humor throughout the novel. The characters employ themselves in outrageous acts of irony, from Addie's rejection of her most devoted son, to Anse's concern with his false teeth instead of Addie's death, to Vardaman's calling his mother a fish. This irony would not have been evident if it were not for Faulkner's use of multiple narrators. Faulkner was enchanted by Freudian theories of psychology when he wrote this novel, and recounting the story through various perspectives allows the reader to understand each character's reaction. This enhanced the dark humor throughout the novel because the reader can see into each family member's thoughts on her death.

Laurie Halse Anderson’s historical fiction book, Fever 1793, takes place in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is the story of Matilda Cook (Mattie) and her family, and the hardships they go through in the time period when Yellow Fever had struck. In the book, it teaches that during tough times, it is important to step up and take charge. This can be seen through the impact on the characters and author’s craft.

And the word of Mary “... Sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country - the dirt, the death - I just want to swallow it and have it there inside me.” the expressions that she’ve used was insane, strong metaphor showed how she’ve gone so far from the world. “Mary Anne was still somewhere out there in the dark.

I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, ‘This is Mrs. Tan’”(10). This shows how her mother affected her childhood in the way that she even had to talk for her so that other people would understand and take her seriously. The way Tan includes this quote shows that as a child she had to help her mom in many major ways. With this quote Tan affects the audience in the way that just because she was ashamed of her mother doesn’t mean that she didn’t care for her and that other people should do the same. “My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago.

The presence of advertisements in society influence people into buying, supporting, and inclusively stir them to take action towards a certain object or cause. Among many advertisements that exists, the use of logos, ethos, and pathos exists in order to achieve their purpose. In the advertisement that I chose to analyze the use of logos by the creator creates an amazing impact. Facts such as “one out of every three girls will be sexually assaulted” and “1 out of 7 children are abused” obtains the audience’s attention since such facts cause a shock value among majority of the people. With such surprising sentences the designer is seeking for people to take action and this is mostly seen when the last line of the advertisement is “you can’t afford to ignore it.”

To begin with, both Tan and Crutcher utilize characterization to pursue the shared theme, that a strong sense of self is crucial when under the pressure of the expectation of others. In “Fish Cheeks” by Amy Tan, Amy feels propelled to conform because she feels judged for not being “normal”. Tan states, “What would Robert think of our shabby Chinese Christmas” (2). Also, it’s obvious Amy was self-conscious about the Chinese style of cooking and in this sentence she’s self-conscious because she says, “For Christmas I prayed for this blond-haired boy, and a slim new American nose”(1). In the first quote, she was over thinking and doubting that Robert would not like “our shabby Chinese Christmas” though in the end she was correct about Robert

Amy Tan is a Chinese-American author who was born on February 19, 1952, in Oakland, California. In Tan’s early life she had many struggles because her parents desired for her “to hold onto Chinese traditions and her own longings to become more Americanized” (Encyclopedia). While she wanted to become a writer when she was still young, her parents wanted her to become a neurosurgeon. When she got older and went to college she majored in English then started her career in the 1970’s. She was a technical writer and then started writing fiction stories.

This quote from the narrative showed the author 's realization of the difference in the way that she speaks in different environments. Later Amy grasped that she uses the same type of English with her husband, but she comprehended that it was the language of family talk or the language she grew up with. Tan starts to tell her mother 's story about the gangster that wanted her mother family to adopt him. She states, "You should know that my mother 's expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands" (Tan 1). This part of the narrative inserts that her mother knew what she was talking about even though she spoke improper English.