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Asian American Struggles for Identity: Asian American Dreams

One of the most significant lessons learned about Asian American perspectives of the American Dream comes from previous study that enables me to connect the Asian experience to those of Native Americans, African Americans and Hispanics. More like Hispanics and less like Native or African Americans, Asian American struggles for identity and achievement appear to be most hampered by struggles within Asian culture rather than external forces. While prejudice and discrimination against Asian Americans exist, it is the hopes of the older generation that seems to most haunt and confine the identity and dreams of a younger generation. However, the hopes of an older generation serve as both restraint and inspiration for many Asian Americans like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Wayne Wang, Genny Lim, and Frances Chung. This analysis will use the works of these Asian Americans to demonstrate this lesson and others learned from study of the Asian American experience.

The Asian American experience is one that often pits an older generation against the younger, with hopes and dreams of an older generation serving as both constraint and inspiration for members of the younger generation who are more "Americanized." We see this clearly in the works of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. In the film of Tan's The Joy Luck Club, directed by Wayne Wang, and in Kingston's novel The Warrior Woman, the female narrators seem haunted by ghosts of the past, most of them connected to the experiences of their parents and ancestors in their native lands. In "The Joy Luck Club," as four Chinese mah jong partners lament the American ways of their daughters, we discover why their control of their daughters might be so rigid from their own experiences in china, where women were devalued and often the victims of abuse. In The Warrior Woman, children are taken from their mothers, women are devalued and abused, and one of the mah jong players aba...

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Asian American Struggles for Identity: Asian American Dreams. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:32, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2001224.html