Asian American Experience

Asian American Dreams - Week 6 Lecture

The shift to Asian American Dreams is also a shift westward, including the "Pacific Rim" which serves as the bridge connecting "Asian and American political and economic interests" (Asian 2). While Asian Americans have fared better in socio-economic terms than African Americans or Hispanic Americans, conflict and struggle for identity within Asian culture between generations seems to be a major focus of Asian American interpretations of the American Dream. Superstition in older generations of Asians and ancestors serve as "ghosts" for many Asian Americans like Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, ghosts which must often be exorcised by younger generations of Asians to take their place and mark their identity as Asians, Americans and as Asian Americans. Such memories and stories often constrain and inspire younger generations as they achieve their own, distinct, identity in American culture.

Wayne Wang's "The Joy Luck Club"

Wayne Wang's film version of Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club shows the struggles of young Asian Americans and older generations as they come to terms with forging an identity in mainstream American culture. Freedom for young Asian Americans often entails breaking free of the past and the rigid control of an older generation. In the stories of four women who migrated from pre-revolutionary China to San Francisco, we see how the past becomes what is in the present. June is a daughter o

Related Essays

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cted on Kingston's ancestors as those in Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Her aunt is suspected of adultery and forced to give birth in a "pigsty," but she drowns herself and her baby in a well (Kingston 5). Actually, she was the victim of rape but in Chinese society the woman takes the brunt of shame, so the aunt is never spoken of and becomes, literally, a woman with "no name" who Kingston's father disowns (Kingston 3). Kingston tells us it was a "spite suicide," but her aunt's dreams "grow and fade" despite this act of self-expression and defiance against patriarchal hypocrisy (Kingston 14). It is such stories as these that not only haunt Kingston but also help her forge her own, independent and strong identity as she tries to make her way in a totally different time and culture. The struggles of her ancestors both constrain and inspire her in a way that is quite similar to the impact of these forces on June in "The Joy Luck Club." Genny Lim's "Winter Place" Genny Lim's poem "Winter Place" is a painful assessment of American life for cultural minorities. Living in "fishhole ally," the speaker observes all the "MTV couples" that walk the streets looking at their own "store bought" reflections, the "sun

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