Did JLC really affect AAFs that much?

[toml]

I was at a dinner party tonight and met some new people. What stood out was that all the AAFs there were 2nd-gen, loved Joy Luck Club and other of Tanís works, and yet, they were extremely well adjusted.

They date AMs, participate in AA events, and not a single one displayed any CCBism.

Most of my close Asian friends are all 1.5 gen, so they donít really read US books, but I did have one close AAF friend that did, and I always thought she was an anomaly. She grew up in a pretty white-bred place and her only outside connection to her Asian-ness was Tanís books, and in fact she attributes her love for her Chinese background based on Tanís books!

One thing to note is that this new group is considerably younger (average age was like 23) so perhaps JLC and Tanís impact isnít as strong anymore?

Or did it simply not affect that many AFs in the 80s?

[little mixed girl]

just as a female reading tan's books, i liked them because there was a lot about mother/daughter struggles and relationships.

maybe those girls are the same?
maybe the mother/daughter relationships stood out more than who was or wasn't with a white guy.

if someone older read the books, maybe they identified with the characters for different reasons than ppl who are reading them now?

to be fair i read them once in high school and i haven't read them since, so i can't remember all the scenes...and i only knew there was a white guy in it after coming to these types of forums.

[xian]

Yeah, my mom was already married for a couple decades when the book came out.

What she loved about the book was the mother-daughter relationships. She identified with the distance from the father characters.

She wasn't seeking to generalize to AM, only seeking to find some literature that matched her experience. I think part of the hatred for Tan (and I have no love for her) is the generation gap. We don't believe that things were really like that, but things have changed to some degree.

I would like for Tan to explore different aspects of the Asian American experience. I would like her to be more thoughtful when interviewed. But the fact that her books are used for racial stereotyping has a lot more to do with mainstream America's desire to search for stereotypes of ethnic others and less to do with the exact content.

If one of us Angry AMs wrote a novel, and the mainstream publishing community allowed it to be successful on a major level, it would like fall into many stereotypes even if we were pretty thoughtful in our portrayals. If that wasn't possible, I doubt anyone would release it widely anyway.

[awong]

i didnt even know what jlc was until I read sites like this

[blockthebox]

^ Haha :P Well, you're not missing anything. I was forced to read this book in high school by a "progressive" lit teacher. I didn't understand it then and I certainly don't now. If I had to identify with one character, it'd be the girl who always took the worst shrimp or whatever. 'Cause I'm totally unselfish like that, bitches.

[Ike]

I read JLC in an English lit class in high school, and my Irish immigrant teacher told us that a criticism of the book was that it depicted AMs negatively -- and I didn't believe him and wrote an essay about how the narrator's father is the most positive male character in the book. If he hadn't been the kind of teacher who values critical thinking more than being right, I probably would have failed that assignment. :)

[monkey king]

Most people read without comprehending.

[Yolanka]

Oh yeah, I would say so! Well, I would say it was an uplift for CCB's anyway. Prior to this you had this type of stuff to deal with (and still do of course)

http://store.acousticsounds.com/images/as201JPG/ACOL-34329.jpg

Dear mr. record executives,

I want to thank you for honour of representing Asian advancement in media. And to have my face shown to millions worldwide.

[ZhuBaJie]

unless you read that book with a critical mind, you're not going to come out of it thinking it bashed Asian men, because the book is not about Asian men. it's more light-reading than anything else. a lot of Asian people do like that book because, you have to understand, when it came out, it was the only Asian American fictional literature around that was new and modern. there were probably works you could find in academia, but nothing you could just go to a bookstore and buy to read just for personal reading. like it or not, that book actually opened up the door for more Asian American fictional works (ironically, now i think Asian American fictional works are too inundated with these themes about general-cultural conflicts with immigrant parents).

i read that book when i was in high school, after i saw the movie. and i also read a couple of her other books that were published after. i stopped reading her, i think after her third book, because i got tired of all the mythical mumble jumble that she tried to portray Chinese culture with. in the end, i think Amy Tan writes for a white or mainstream readership.

one thing i should point out is that it's not nearly as apparent in the book itself, versus the movie, that there were a lot of bad Asian male portrayals in the story. some things were changed and some things were left out in the movie.