Amy Tan and Functionalism Essay

This essay will explore the real life of Amy Tan and the translation of her life through her large body of work. The research will not only involve biographical information but quotes from her books as they relate to her life and the influence of Asian culture on those works as well as her life. The works that will be focused on in this essay will The Joy Luck Club and other others. The main development of the essay will be based upon the comparing qualities found in The Joy Luck Club. This essay will be partly analytical and partly research based in its design. Amy Tan’s work, though broad in theme will usually bear the relationship of the mother-daughter paradigm in the weight of the story incorporating a functionalist theory. Cognitive processes performed by the brain allow for construction of an internal model of reality from the sensory data. This also coincides with consensual reality or perceived reality which is the function of the normal processes of the brain. Sensory perception is a crux by which cognitive science develops its theories. As such, the mind is in a continuous learning equation. The brain chronically categorizes representations of reality (objects, feelings, events, etc) and learns how to problem solve, and compute these different sensory receptions. This is a self-organizing process by which the mind acts like a computer and stores information from sensory events into a coded mechanism. Amy Tan writes about the way in which an Asian woman grows up in a Western culture and the effects of this on the mother-daughter relationship. Thus, not only is the theme of the familial relationship relevant but also the theme of the first generation Asian American important. Especially in the novel The Joy Luck Club the view of Asian values as they are pitted against Western culture is examined, just as in Amy Tan’s life, such issues were relevant. Tan’s novels peak with relevance to the negotiation of the characters toward their assimilation into Western society †¦Asian American culture emerges out of the contradictions of Asian immigration, which in the last century and a half of Asian entry into the United States have placed Asians within the United States nation-state, its workplaces, and its markets, yet linguistically, culturally and racially marked Asians as foreign and outside the national polity. Under such contradictions, late nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants labored in mining agriculture, and railroad construction but were excluded from citizenship and political participations in the state†¦By insisting on Asian American formation as contradictory, and therefore as dialectical and critical†¦while immigration has been the locus of legal and political restriction of Asians as the other in America, immigration has simultaneously been the site fro the emergence of critical negations of the nation-state for which those legislations are the expression†¦The national institutionalization of unity becomes the measure of the nation’s condition of heterogeneity. If the nation proposes American culture as the key site for ht resolution of inequalities and stratifications that cannot be resoled on the political terrain of representative democracy, then that culture performs that reconciliation by naturalizing a universality that exempts the non-American from its history or aestheticizes ethnic differences as if they could be separated form history (Lowe 11). Asian Americans are prone to negotiation and this interaction between cultures as well as between generations is especially prevalent in The Joy Luck Club as it relates to Tan’s life. In the context of this process is the history of Tan’s own life. She was a first generation Asian American born in Oakland California. Her parents were Chinese immigrants. Her father was a Baptist minister and her mother was a Shanghai nurse. When Tan was fourteen years old, her father as well as her elder brother died of brain tumors. After the death of the figurehead of the family and the brother, Tan, her mother Daisy and the younger brother Peter moved to Montreux, Switzerland. As Tan grew older she began to realize the great gap that existed between herself and her mother due to their difference in culture. As Tan grew up she realized that there was much tension between herself and her mother. Tan eventually moved away from home and gained her master’s degree in linguistics at San Jose State University. Tan’s first job was as a children’s speech therapist. Within the context of Tan’s writing there exists these elements of her life; integration, acceptance, alienation both in terms of culture and through this culture of familial ties. The ideal behind the immigration to America is extrapolated in her novels as a way of achieving the American dream. This issue is brought subtly to the foreground by way of the parents’ expectations of their children and the children’s noncompliance to these wishes, a sort of shucking off of the parents’ ideal for the children’s own interest, Although ‘Asian values’ have continued to define the material success of Asian Americans in American culture and society since the 1980’s, these values have equally been deployed to suggest the inability of Asian Americans to embrace the American Dream, a problem that would culminate in the myth of ‘perpetual foreigner. ’†¦the history of Asians in America can be fully understood only if we regard them as both immigrants and members of nonwhite minority groups precisely because Asian Americans have never been completely absorbed into American society and its body politic (Shu 93). Thus, Tan’s novels, as juxtaposed with her life emphasize the alienation first generation Asian Americans deal with as being ostracized from either culture, Culture is the medium of the present—the imagined equivalences and identifications through which the individual invents lived relationship with the national collective. But it is simultaneously the site that mediates the past, through whih history is grasped as difference, as fragments, shocks, and flashes of disjunction. It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as American. It is likewise in culture that individuals and collectivities struggle and remember, and in that difficult remembering, imagine and practice both subject and community differently (Lowe 10). In Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club the main attraction for readers resides in the focus of the four main Chinese-American families. These families unite in the club they formed called The Joy Luck Club in which the mothers, and towards the end of the novel the daughters play the Chinese game Mahjong for money while also partaking of a myriad of Chinese dishes. In fact, Tan brings a lot of Chinese culture into her stories through food. The novel is written in a vignettes style in which the characters lives are portrayed in sixteen chapters divided into four sections where the narrative is dedicated to both the mother and the daughter. The beginning of the novel begins with Jing-Mei or ‘June’ who has at this point lost her mother Suyuan to an aneurysm. The Joy Luck Club requests that June take the place of her mother at their game. This begins the novel in a fashion of exploration and a journey in which June discovers who her mother was and thereby finds her own identity through her mother on behalf of the information gleaned from Suyuan’s friends. This topic of finding the self through the mother relates to Tan’s own life and her relationship with her mother. This is also a cultural issue in which the daughter denies her heritage, in this case both Tan and June, and only through this journey of discovering who the mother is does the daughter begin to understand her own self, In contrast, the cultural productions emerging out of the contradictions of immigrant marginality displace the fiction of reconciliation, disrupt the myth of national identity by revealing its gaps and fissures, an intervene in the narrative of national development that would illegitimately locate the immigrant before history, or exempt the immigrant from history. The universals proposed by the political and cultural forms of the nation precisely generate the critical acts that negate those universals. These acts compose the agency of Asian immigrants and Asian Americas: the acts of labor, resistance, memory, and survival as well as the politicized cultural work that emerges from dislocation and disidentification. Asian immigrants and Asian Americans have not only been subject to immigration exclusion and restriction, but have also been subjects of the migration process and are agents of political change, cultural expression, and social transformation (Lowe 11-12). Tan’s novels also focus on the American dream as it is reinterpreted by her characters. Tan’s use of culture as it applies to the characters is also applicable through the identity of being an immigrant. The loss of self through the loss of culture becomes a very viable source of depression for the characters in the novel just as Tan wrote that her own family suffered from this disease. Depression is prevalent with the daughters of the novel in struggling to find their identity and for June in finding out who her mother was as a person and as a mother. The novel deals greatly in behind the scene actions and events that are not revealed to the protagonist until the right time toward the end of the novel. In a way the old adage of a woman not becoming a woman until the death of her mother plays a specific role in this novel just as it does for Tan’s life. When June’s mother dies June must take on her mother’s responsibilities in the Joy Luck Club and in a way become her mother for these women. It is in this position that June learns of Suyuan’s life before being a mother just as much as she is an identity as a mother. Tan stated that her mother Daisy witnessed her mother’s suicide. This theme was emphasized in The Bonesetter’s Daughter when the mother tried to contact Precious Auntie. The form of contact that June clutches to in The Joy Luck Club is found in Suyuan’s circle of friends My father has asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club. I am to replace my mother whose seat at the mah jong table has been empty since she died two months ago. My father thinks she was killed by her own thoughts†¦My mother could sense that the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies they left behind in China and hopes they couldn’t begin to express in their fragile English. Or at least, my mother recognized the numbness in these women’s faces. And she saw how quickly their eyes moved as she told them her idea for the Joy Luck Club (Tan 19-20). The pressure that mother insists upon the daughter is prevalent in Tan’s live as well as it is presented in the lives of her characters, especially June. There is a theme concurrent with this idea of memory, escape and eventual recognition in The Joy Luck Club which persists with the image and symbolism of the piano. Jing-mei’s mother Mrs. Woo insists that Jing-mei is a musical prodigy but during her debut recital both mother and daughter realize how bad she is at playing the instrument. As a result of this terrible recital Jing-mei shouts at her mother that she wishes she had never been born, that she were dead like those twins Mrs. Woo had to abandon. The mother then backs off and allows Jing-mei to forget about the piano. Later in the story the piano is given to Jing-mei as a thirtieth birthday presents and in this gift Jing-mei realizes that her mother only wanted her to find something worthwhile in her life. The gift of the piano reminds Jing-mei of the daughters that her mother had to leave behind, however, it is only after her mother’s death that Jing-mei can come to accept the gift of the piano. As she plays the piano Tan’s underlying theme becomes refocused on the American Dream translated into Chinese culture. Jing-mei’s mother wanted her to make something of herself, hence the piano. In Jing-mei’s ugly comment about wanting to be dead like her twin sisters the reader realizes that this is a metaphorical death, that Jing-mei is realizing that she is the product of a Chinese household but with ever growing dreams persuade by Western culture. Jing-mei eventually goes to China to meet with her twin sisters and in so doing she becomes reunited with her mother in the stories that she must give them, but all is revealed in that initial hug between the sisters. The mother’s children unite thereby uniting the family after so many years dislocated. In this way Tan’s focus is one of Diaspora, in the lack of home and the journey emotionally, spiritually and physically that each character in The Joy Luck Club must undertake to come to recognition with their identity, as Asian Americans, immigrants, products of a cultural dichotomy and as daughters and mothers, Tan also explores the effect of popular culture on the immigrant. Mrs. Woo gets her ideas from television and popular magazines. She does not question the validity of these sources. The magazines range from the bizarre—Ripley’s Believe It or Not—to the commonplace—Good Housekeeping and Reader’s Digest. Everything has been predigested for mass consumption (Shu 93). This predigested concept elicits for Tan the idea of self as seen through culture. The mother in this passage is seeking to redefine and assimilate into a culture for which she is ill designed. The theme then, as it was for Tan who was a first generation Asian American who later moved to Switzerland and then back to the San Francisco Bay area, is this idea of relocation, Diaspora. Through this concept of Diaspora through Tan’s novels it is easy to understand the psyche of her characters in relation to her own sentiments about life, immigration, identity as they in turn relate back, each of them, to the mother and daughter relationship. These forced concepts of becoming a woman and struggling with identity as it pertains to these outside forces is a daunting realization for each other Tan’s characters as it must have been difficult for her to define her life growing up a first generation Asian American. Amy Tan’s talent for writing is based on her affiliation with true life events which is a very functionalist way to write. Thus, when she writes her fiction novels she is also writing in part her biography as the thoughts of the characters are revealed to be strikingly similar to the sentiments that Tan must have felt growing up and finding out the history of her own mother who witnessed her mother’s suicide. Through the incorporation of these personal thoughts there is also the element in this way of thinking that focuses on Asian culture. The concept of the immigrant as it applies to Western culture is inclusive of being ostracized. Thus, the characters in Tan’s novels are in search of identity; identity as it relates to the dichotomy of Asian and Western culture, mother-daughter relationships, and the self. Through the arrival of the mother’s past revealed to the daughters in each of Tan’s novel, the daughter comes to an epiphany. The daughter realizes that she is her mother in part, and that is where her home is found. Thus, Tan is able to transfer this personal quest of self in the novel, as well as her real life, into the notion of the self being identified through the struggle of the mother for the daughter and the sacrifice therein. This concept is proved especially with June’s character, but for Tan , the idea of the mother defining the daughter is constant. Work Cited Lowe, Lisa. â€Å"The Power of Culture†. Journal of Asian American Studies. Vol. 1, No. 1. 1996. Shu, Yuan. â€Å"Globalization and ‘Asian Values’: Teaching and Theorizing Asian American Literature. † College Literature. Vol. 32, No. 1. Winter 2005. Tan, Amy. â€Å"The Joy Luck Club†. Putnam. 1989. Tan, Amy. â€Å"The Bonesetter’s Daughter. † Putnam. 2001.