Comparing Lacy M. Johnson And White Trash Primer By Amy Tan

Lacy M. Johnson and Amy Tan came from two entirely different backgrounds. Johnson came from a rural poor family and Tan coming from a Chinese family living in America. Johnson wrote the short story “White Trash Primer” which is from the book “Trespasses: A Memoir” and Tan’s “Two Kinds” is an excerpt from her book “The Joy Luck Club”. Even though these two authors are entirely different they share similar qualities in their writing skills, message and how they both were outcasts. In Johnson’s “White Trash Primer” she tells the story of a poor family living on a farm and going through hard times, yet she overcomes the obstacles that she had to deal with in her life. This leaves us with the message that, “no matter how life is as long as you

This is an example of descriptive visual imagery that Johnson uses in her story. However, in Tan’s “Two kinds” she uses visual imagery in the line “Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz” (Tan 386). Johnson uses imagery throughout “White Trash Primer” to describe places, such as the sentence “Sometimes you let them take you back to the fancy places where they live and if you have sex with them they take you shopping or to Springfield for the weekend and you thank your luck that they are gullible” (Johnson 829). Whereas, Tan uses imagery not to describe places but to describe how her mother wanted her to achieve the idea of becoming a “prodigy child.” For example, in the line “I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl, about nine years old, with a Peter Pan haircut” (Tan 388). Whenever Tan’s mother seen a Chinese child doing something out of the ordinary Tan would take a part of her, such as “the peter pan hair cut” and put it on the other child to relate herself to that