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Women Of The Silk Mei Li Quotes

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Relationships can have a significant effect on a person's life, how someone can grow or how someone can create memories and moments. Relationships can range from friendships to romantic interests. No matter the type, they can end in loneliness and loss. In the novel Women Of the Silk, by Gail Tsukiyama, she expresses powerful connections through relationships. Mei-Li and Hong’s relationship starts as a strong romantic bond that ends in the loss of the relationship and Mei-Li. This is also shown through Pei and Lin’s relationship as best friends throughout the novel until the end, once Lin passes away. These relationships both demonstrate how love inevitably ends in loss. In Women of the Silk, the relationships between Mei-Li and Hong as well …show more content…

Mei-Li and Hong’s relationship starts happy and healthy, and everyone around can see. An example is shown, “At other times, when Mei-Li returned from her walks, there was a glow in her eyes that did not die for days” (108). During the beginning of their relationship, while Pei and Mei-Li were living in Auntie Yee’s girl’s house, Mei-Li would secretly take walks to meet with Hong. Mei-Li would always come home happy, and that happiness stuck with her. Mei-Li was in love with Hong. As time passes, Hong starts to lose feelings for Mei-Li. It could be observed, “I love you!’ Mei-Li blurted out”...”But I do not love you’ Hong said”(118). Hong did not love Mei-Li, while Mei-Li was overly in love with him. Mei-Li would sneak out and go out of her way to see Hong, which was for nothing. Mei-Li was heartbroken, and she did not know what to do. She could not handle the burden of her loss; she wanted to feel at peace. Mei-Li was then found dead in the river, a suicide. Hong and Mei-Li’s relationship starts as happy and healthy, though it ends once Hong tells his true feelings. Mei-Li and Hong lose their relationship as well as losing …show more content…

Lin quickly got Pei’s attention during their first interaction. She has never seen a girl like Lin before. Pei states, “The girl's gentle smile met her frightened gaze, clear dark eyes staring with kindness out of a pale, slender face. Pei had never seen a face so smooth and delicate before” (30). Upon Pei's arrival at Auntie Yee’s girl's house, she is frightened, confused and alone, surrounded by unfamiliar faces. One face in particular, Lins, sticks out to Pei. Lin is the first person Pei meets. She then comforts Pei and informs her about life in silkwork, and they instantly connect and their relationship only gets stronger over time. Pei and Lin are inseparable; you would never see Pei not by Lin's side. However, all of Pei’s happiness and love towards Lin quickly ends when Lin unexpectedly passes away. Pei feels lost, and the following can show that, “Pei lost her voice after Lin died. Words felt useless and flat against the great dark wall that surrounded her.”.. “Pei was paralyzed with something she had never felt since her childhood: loneliness”(265). Pei had spent every moment she could with Lin, going on trips and working with her; they loved each other's company. Now, Pei was alone with no best friend by her side. Pei had a lonely childhood, which was replaced by Lin's love. The relationship created between Pei and Lin begins quickly as a

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Ever since Lee-Kung arrived at the Dragon Cafe, Su-Jen’s mother became closer and closer to her Step-Son. They spent time talking together, sitting on the fire escape, and being very friendly with each other. Su-Jen exclaimed to herself while looking in Lee-Kung’s bedroom window, “Lying together in the moonlight on his bed, my long, dark brother on top of my pale, slender mother, their naked bodies coiled around each other like snakes” (110). This was a truly heart wrenching thing for a young Su-Jen to see, as now she had to keep the secret from her family to stay true to her family's beliefs. This is also the point where Su-Jen turns more away from her mother and towards her father, as she now sees the type of person that her mother is.

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The author can interest any reader because her writing style is very easy and full of rich vocabulary. Ji-li Jiang is a girl in her teens that lives in an apartment with her Grandma, Mom, Dad and her two younger siblings,

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This disagreement quickly became a source of resentment and anger for both of them, but Jing-Mei and her mother were unable to resolve this conflict because of their different backgrounds and experiences. The story showcases how relationships between mothers and daughters can be strained because of differences in culture and a lack of communication. One of the difficulties between Jing-Mei and her mother is their different cultural backgrounds, which is supported by two points from the story. Firstly, Jing-Mei and her mother both disagreed on the opportunities that existed in America. According to Singer, Amy Tan uses “two entirely

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Children rely on their parents to give them a strong and safe place to grow into the people that they are meant to be. Throughout the memoir you can see all of the sacrifices Loung’s father made for the sake of his family and the love Loung had for him. This begs the question how did Loung’s relationship with her

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First falling in love with a man from a dream, who she later learns to be Liu Mengmei, Du Li-niang awakes with a broken heart and a crippling longing for her lover. Feeling oppressed and with few options to resolve the situation and bring her and Liu Mengmei together, Du Li-niang consciously allows her depression and broken heart to consume and kill her. This conscious decision to die is significant in the way that it actively contradicts what the audience would expect the passive and hopeless beauty of the Caizi-Jiaren model to do. As opposed to wallowing around in pain, waiting for the hero to arrive, Du Li-niang’s decisive actions in dying juxtapose the audience’s assumptions with the performance’s realities.

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dying”(106-107) and represents how Lin’s ties to her Chinese culture are fading. When we see Lin being forced to feed her grandmother dinner, she tells us that she is “disgusted and guilty and [she] doesn’t know why”(108). Lin feels guilty because at one point in her life, Lin was very close with her grandmother. Lin proceeds to reminisce about the past, when she would go to Chinatown with her grandmother.

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At first Jing-Mei grew in her dreams and desirers to be perfect for her family; “In all of my imaginings

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As a child An-mei was taught to be stoic and conceal her pain but later on learns so speak up for herself. She is afraid she passed on her passiveness to her daughter Rose and pressure her is speak her mind including in the affairs regarding Rose’s husband. Rose always let her husband make the decisions and An-mei believes this is what caused the divorce between the pair. Ying-ying was an independent young woman but grew to became passive as she grew older notices she passes on this compliance to her daughter Lena. Due to her passiveness, Ying-ying’s husband Clifford often mistranslated her

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She then uses these “new thoughts” and ideas to state that she “won’t let her [mother] change” her into the person she seeks her daughter to be. When Jing-Mei experiences a realization that she is her own person and not simply another part of her mother, she can embrace the comfort of knowing that she will not change for anyone, and is simply extraordinary for having her own thoughts and feelings. This reflects how Amy Tan can understand her thoughts and feelings about the hardships in her relationship with her mother as a way to connect more closely to her characters and make them more realistic in her writing (“How Amy Tan’s family stories made her a

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Lee Chang-dong directs a film that focuses on a relationship that seems impossible for many reasons, although the protagonists make it work, in a way. The film 's strongest point lies with the depiction of the characters and their realationship, which is by no

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Jing Mei, while portrayed as an obedient child, is only willing to listen to her mother to a certain extent. Throughout the story, it is consistently hinted that Jing Mei would eventually explode against her mother as an attempt to free herself from her mother’s chains. In addition, after the fiasco at the piano recital, she eventually derives further from her mother’s wishes as she “didn 't get straight A...didn 't become class president...didn 't get into Stanford...dropped out of college.” (54). On the flip side, Jing Mei’s mother is a stereotypical Chinese parent who is fully determined to ensure her daughter’s success in a new environment.

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The fall of Hong Kong gives this couple some spaces to live together, to have an ordinary life. As the poem from the Book of Song says, humans are not able to control all the events, "but through natural turns of events and against all expectations" (Louie 23), the couple holds each other 's hands and gets married. Chang gives the story rather a happy ending, Fan Liuyuan is able to marry the woman he loves, and Liusu gets remarried, she gains back her social status. However, many scholars question that if wealth and social status are all Liusu desires. She achieves what the society expects of her, but maybe this is not what she desires in her deepest heart.

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In the words of Jing-Mei in the last line of the story, “Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish” (Tan 159). Throughout her life, Suyuan, their mother, held onto the hope that she would see her daughters again. In this hope, she named Jing-Mei in connection to her sisters, keeping the “long-cherished wish” that someday her daughters would reconcile and complete their family circle. The occasion that

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