ipl-logo

The Bonesetter's Daughter Character Analysis

1339 Words6 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Essay on amy tan

Amy Tan is a contemporary American writer born in Oakland, California on February 19, 1954. She was born to Chinese immigrants Daisy and John Tan. Her works explore mother-daughter relationships and Chinese-American experiences. Tan’s best-selling novels were The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Hundred Secret Senses, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement. Chinese American Literature began in the 19th century and flowered in the 20th century. The common themes followed are the challenges, interaction between generation, and identity.
The researcher has chosen, The Bonesetter’s daughter and her focus is on the clashes found within the relationships throughout the novel. Relationships in the novel are …show more content…

The novel compacts with the story of an immigrant Chinese woman and her American-born daughter. The researcher textures that there are two main stories in the novel. The first story moves with Ruth, a Chinese-American woman who lives in San Francisco and her fright about her mother, who is becoming more demented. The second major story is about the letters to Ruth, written by her mother, Lu Ling. The life story of Lu Ling in china has been written by herself. A three generation story has been accumulated by Tan in The Bonesetter’s Daughter. The title of the novel goes in parallel with the main character of the first generation mentioned as Precious Auntie, the daughter of a famous bonesetter. A bonesetter is a person who realigns the disjointed bones. The plot then moves with the second generation daughter, Lu Ling, followed by the third generation American-born women, Ruth. There is a story within the story and Tan has sustained the novel in a flashback …show more content…

In Lu Ling and Ruth’s relationship, the major reason for their misunderstanding and the lack of communication is due to the cultural difference. Unlike the normal mother- daughter relationship, their interaction seems entirely diverse. As Lu Ling grew up in a Chinese setting, she tries to impose Chinese culture and ideology to her daughter, Ruth. Ruth was not ready to accept the actualities by her mother, justifying that she was an American. Lu Ling believes in ghosts, and fears that the ghost has a power to haunt her whole family ruining Ruth’s

Show More
Related
1755 Words | 8 Pages

The major issues in Bastard Out of Carolina include poverty, illegitimacy, and the physical and sexual abuse of a child. The Boatwright’s are shown to be living in poverty by having to many children, the men fighting and drinking, living in run-down houses, wearing hand me down clothes, and how the town treats the them. Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright illegitimacy can also be considered a product of their poverty. Bone’s mother Anney tries her best to procure a birth certificate that doesn’t have illegitimate stamped on it. The main major issue is the physical and sexual abuse of a child.

Read More
797 Words | 4 Pages

Tan that despite its evident differences to Cofer’s memoir is discussing the same trials ethnic, culturally diverse people experience. On page 881, Cofer recounts her first public poetry reading where an older woman mistook the Puerto Rican author for a waitress that ignites passion to the reading, “her lowered eyes told me that she was embarrassed,” [4] at the sheer power and conviction of Cofer enforcing that she is an educated Latin woman that deserves respect for her identity. While academically Tan’s teachers would always direct her to STEM subjects as viable career options which contradict the author's passion for writing despite not being on-par with the typical standard of what’s expected of a Chinese-American girl. However, what sets both pieces apart is that Tan does this examination through her mother and her own experiences as Chinese-Americans, while Cofer’s memoir encapsulates her own struggles that intertwine with the vast Latin woman’s

Read More
575 Words | 3 Pages

"The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" by Jamie Ford is a captivating coming-of-age story that follows the life of Henry Lee, a Chinese-American boy growing up in Seattle during World War II. Throughout the novel, Henry experiences profound personal growth and self-discovery as he navigates the complexities of racial tensions, family expectations, and first love. This essay will explore how four quotes from the book exemplify the transformative journey of Henry's coming of age. Paragraph 1: In the early stages of the novel, a young Henry grapples with his dual identity as an American-born Chinese.

Read More
1409 Words | 6 Pages

For instance, her famous novel ‘The Joy Luck Club’ depicts the Chinese mother and her American daughter relationship where they go through various circumstances trying to understand each other including the evolvement that comes in their relationships as the daughters know more about their mother’s life stories. Secondly, Tan considers the theme of identity in terms of Chinese immigrants and their life experiences as an immigrant in the United States. She reveals how the children born to the immigrants strive in an environment which is a mixture of American and Chinese influence. Moreover, Tan is found to have explored identity issues through her fictive creations and tackled the issue of authorial identity (Becnel, 2010). Similarly, romantic love is another subject included in the literary artworks of Amy Tan which considers the relationships and romance an important aspect of human’s life.

Read More
2269 Words | 10 Pages

Researching more about the Gullah Geechee culture than what it was shown or foreshadow in the text constructs a better argument in the character analysis. The conclusion of the novel is that all three daughters come home after venturing off to live their life and seek personal achievement. Sassafrass gives birth and birth symbolizes a new life. New journeys for all of the daughters conclude that their journey has ended. During their journeys that have found who they were and it is prominent to see that the theme Gullah has been present in their life.

Read More
970 Words | 4 Pages

The main characters mature and come to appreciate how important their families are to them. Each of the main characters is plagued by memories that have their roots in the past and are being brought back by events taking place in the

Read More
430 Words | 2 Pages

Family in Chinese Culture As shown in Amy Tan's short stories A Pair of Tickets, Immortal Heart, and Two Kinds, one can see the importance of family in Chinese culture. In the piece A Pair of Tickets, it is shown how hard Jing-mei's mother Suyuan looks for the twin babies she is forced to leave behind. Her effort is shown when Jing-mei's father recalls the travels, saying, "We went to many different cities, back to Kweilin, to Changsha, as far south as Kunming. She was always looking out of one corner of her eye for twin babies, then little girls" (Tan, A Pair of . . . " 163, 164).

Read More
634 Words | 3 Pages

Amy Tan and Richard Rodriquez both grew up in Northern California, to immigrant families. Amy Tan became famous for her book, “The Joy Luck Club” that later became a movie. Richard wrote “The Hunger of Memory.” Before they became famous though, they both struggled to learn English. In “Mother Tongue.”

Read More
1271 Words | 6 Pages

The experiences related and recorded in the novels The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao, and Obasan by Joy Kogawa give great insight to the internal and external struggles East-Asian immigrants face in the Western World, specifically Chinese-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, and Japanese-Canadians. Although the situations have certainly improved since the mid twentieth century, many of the issues and struggles the characters in the novels face are still real and ever-expanding for over five percent of the U.S. population. To

Read More
863 Words | 4 Pages

The Woman Warrior is a “memoir of a girlhood among ghosts” in which Maxine Hong Kingston recounts her experiences as a second generation immigrant. She tells the story of her childhood by intertwining Chinese talk-story and personal experience, filling in the gaps in her memory with assumptions. The Woman Warrior dismantles the archetype of the typical mother-daughter relationship by suggesting that diaspora redefines archetypes by combining conflicting societal norms. A mother’s typical role in a mother-daughter relationship is one of guidance and leadership. Parents are responsible for teaching a child right from wrong and good from evil.

Read More
674 Words | 3 Pages

How does a third person omniscient narrator affect a story? The Lovely Bones, a novel by Alice Sebold, is about a girl named Susie who is raped and killed. After being killed, Susie goes off to Heaven and we are shown how she adapts to living in heaven. We see her killer continue to live among her family and friends, and we see her family fall apart. Susie knows what everyone does and thinks, and she shares this with the reader.

Read More
737 Words | 3 Pages

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.

Read More
1225 Words | 5 Pages

Cultural barriers prevent communication between people from all around the world, especially between the mothers and the daughters, and not necessarily figuratively. The language barrier between the mothers and the daughters can be symbolic. The lack of understanding and comprehension for one another creates a language barrier between the mothers and the daughters. “These kinds of explanations made me feel my mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did. I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese.”

Read More
1558 Words | 7 Pages

The book and the movie possess similar qualities. First, in both the movie and the book, all the mothers left their old lives in China for a new one in America. ” My mother could sense that the woman of these families also had

Read More
1309 Words | 6 Pages

A Pair of Tickets In “A Pair of Tickets,” Amy Tan described the journey of Jing-Mei Woo, a middle-aged, Chinese-American woman, to China where she experienced a compelling change in herself. The author herself is Chinese-American, which enabled her to use insightful experiences in the story that were similar to her own experiences to better illustrate the emotions that Jing-Mei felt. Reminiscing about her own trip to China, Tan wrote: “As soon as my feet touched China, I become Chinese” (Tan 146). As Jing-Mei made the long travel to her motherland, she experienced a series of events, met her long-lost relatives, reflected on her own memories, and listened to stories about her mother’s past, deepening the connection that she had with her mother

Read More

More about The Bonesetter's Daughter Character Analysis

Related Topics

Open Document