Jing Mei Woo Symbolism

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How well do you know your own mother? The author, Amy Tan uses symbolism to demonstrate the generational and cultural misunderstanding of appreciation between Jing Mei Woo and her mother, Suyuan Woo. A mother and her daughter are genetically related, yet they could seem like complete strangers. In Suyuan and Jing Mei's relationship, it is suffused with conflict and cultural differences because of the paradoxical environments they grew up in and what they experienced. The lack of understanding and communication concerning each other's feelings and beliefs are certainly accountable to all of their disputes and arguments in their relationships. Back in China, Suyuan had to leave behind two babies and her whole family was killed in the war so she relinquishes all of this and emigrates to San Francisco where she hopes for the better. In result, Suyuan wants her daughter to have all the privileges that she could not have had back in China so she constantly attempts to dominate and control her daughter's life, but only because she wants the very best for…show more content…
Therefore, she had never become the daughter her mother has always wanted her to be. “You want me to be someone that I’m not!” (142). Jing Mei has adopted an American name, June, and while she is being spoken to in Chinese, she responds in English. She slowly gives up on the culture that she had never viewed as any importance and stops trying even though her mother persists. She also loses interest of her mother's dream of being a prodigy like she said she could become. Asserting her own will and freedom to be who she wants and not her mother wants her to be, she continually disappoints her mother. She did not get straight A's, did not become class president, get accepted into Stanford, nor she even completed college and has dropped

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