In the Joy Luck Club, but Amy Tang, a short vignette is presented in the beginning of each section of the novel. Each vignette represents a theme, a forecast of what is going to happen. In the first section, feathers from a thousand li way. The first short vignette talked about an old woman, who brought a swan from Shanghai to America. However, her swan was pulled away from her, leaving the woman with only one swan feather for a memory. She wished to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her that it carried with all her hope, her dreams, her intentions. The first vignette carried hope. In the first section, Jing-mei has taken her mother’s place in playing mahjong and opening the San Francisco “Joy Luck Club”. In the second section, the “The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates”, the mother told the girl not to ride her bicycle around the corner. However, the stubborn young girl got on her bike and fell at the corner. The rest of the story revolved around “mother and daughter” relationships. The clash of different culture, the teachings of the mother and how the daughter responds to it. The short vignette of “American Translation” showed the belief in superstitions and again, the clash of the different culture between the mother and the daughter. The last vignette in “Queen mother of the western skies”, shows the idea of inheritance and the belief in superstitions once again. The idea is that many lessons and ideas does not come naturally and must be passed on to the daughter. The character An-mei, learns her lesson from the teachings of her mother. The old generation learns from the younger generation, and the younger generation learns from the even younger generation. As you can, each vignettes represented a theme of the chapter that they introduce.
Although I am a Chinese, I heard a lot of stereotypes of Chinese culture from different people around the globe. “All Chinese people smart and good at math”, that’s one of the most common thing that I