Communication has been severed between An-mei's mother and Popo just as it was between June Woo and her mother. To honor Popo in the ancient, accepted way, in an attempt to save her from dying, An-mei's mother makes a physical sacrifice. Tan's tapestry of narrative again unfolds yet another picture of uncomfortable identity and traditions of heritage. However, the woman's tenderness toward little An-mei and her uncontrolled wailing at the memory of An-mei's being accidentally burned belie her Western - thus, suspect - appearance. To An-mei, her mother looks strange, "like the missionary ladies." Her face is a dark shadow when An-mei first sees her she seems insolent and bossy, and her foreign clothes and high-heeled shoes suggest evil, suggest a woman worthy of contempt - exactly as Popo and Auntie described her in their many tales about her to An-mei. It is clear that Popo loves her granddaughter, but she doesn't realize that her scary stories about children who do not obey adult authority frighten little An-mei and her brother.įor example, to protect her grandchildren from evil spirits, Popo tells them that they came from unwanted eggs of a stupid goose they came from eggs so valueless that they weren't fit to be "cracked over rice porridge." An-mei believes this tale - literally later, when her mother arrives unexpectedly, An-mei notes that her mother has a long neck "just like the goose that had laid me." Here, Tan extends her original parable of the duck who became more An-mei's long-necked, goose-like mother transformed herself into something quite different - something entirely inappropriate, according to Grandmother Popo. In the flashback, An-mei's father is dead, and Popo wants An-mei to also think of her mother as dead because she brought great disgrace to the family by becoming a number-three concubine. Rather than being cold and uncaring, she deeply loved her small daughter - despite the fact that she abandoned An-mei, and the little girl had to be raised by her grandmother, Popo, her younger brother, and her uncle and aunt in their large, cold house in Ningpo. In a flashback to An-mei's childhood, we see that An-mei's mother was not the "fallen woman" that people told little An-mei that she was. In a similar fashion, this chapter illustrates that the same is true of An-mei, the woman who sits in the south corner of the mah jong game, the woman characterized by June Woo as a "short bent woman in her seventies, with a heavy bosom and thin, shapeless legs." An-mei suffered tragedies of her own, just as did her own mother. To June Woo, the mothers who treasure the evenings that they spend together at the Joy Luck Club seem little more than elderly, middle-class women in their "slacks, bright print blouses, and different versions of sturdy walking shoes." Yet we know now that the life of June's mother, Suyuan, was repeatedly torn by tragedy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |