As I read Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks” and Maya Angelou’s “Champion of the world” I have discerned several similarities. With the help of my peers, I have noticed that they both are minorities, young, and female. They both also struggle with being minorities, overcome shame, accept being different, celebrate with their people, and even the way they tell their stories seem alike.
The most obvious similarity would be the fact that they are both young females. I assume that Angelou was around the age of ten at the time, seeing as the book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” ends with her being 16 and the passage is only chapter 19 in this 36 chapter book. Tan states her age to be 14 in the very first sentence of “Fish Cheeks.”
Angelou being African American and Tan being Chinese, they were both considered minorities and dealt with the struggles that came with it. Angelou lived in a time where, though slavery was abolished, they were treated as “only a little higher than apes.” Tan’s Chinese culture is unusual compared to what Americans are used to, so that event may have seemed weird to the minister and his family, judging by how they reacted to it.…show more content… After many years Tan understood what her mother meant when she said “Your only shame is to have shame” and realized that she should be proud of her race, there was nothing wrong with being different. In “Champion of the World” the fight brought hope, proving that they weren’t lowly, that they are human just like the whites and deserved to be treated