The Joy Luck Club Nonfiction Essay

1083 Words5 Pages

Comparison Application to Nonfiction
A person’s identity is comprised of what they look like, how they act, how they speak, and where they are from. All of these attributes are directly affected by a person’s culture or country. Immigrants and the children of immigrants struggle with this more so than others who live in the country they were born in. In The Joy Luck Club all of the daughter’s in the story struggle with their identity as the child of an immigrant. The girls don’t want to appear Chinese, act Chinese, or think in the Chinese way despite their mother’s protests. Lena tried to make her eyes wider by constantly keeping them open wide, and Jing Mei denied having any Chinese in her. Modern day children of immigrants struggle with the …show more content…

And man is Yang, bright truth lighting our minds” (81).Women have been pushed down, trodden on, and silenced since the beginning of mankind. Today is no different from back then and according to “Modern Sexism”, "Women are free. At least they look free. They even feel free. But in reality women in the western, industrialized world today are like the caged animals in a modern zoo. There are no bars. It appears that cages have been abolished. Yet in practice women are still kept in their place just as firmly as the animals are kept in their enclosures. The barriers which keep them in now are invisible”. In The Joy Luck Club the women and mothers face sexism at almost every turn. An-Mei’s mother is raped and she is forced to marry him, yet it is not shameful for the man since he may do as he pleases. The daughters also accept this sexism, for example Lena agrees to make a fraction of her husband’s salary even though she helped him found the architecture firm and it is unfair to her. In the United States many of these issues still exist that women make less than men, the rape culture, and there have been no female Presidents. Sexism is a problem in The Joy Luck Club and is a problem today as well that needs to be