In today's world, households face a variety of challenges and issues. There are various disagreements and arguments about topics that may be classified as permissible or unacceptable. This world is defined by numerous societies, and norms prevail within these cultures. Both Alice Walker's Daily Usage and Amy Tan's Two Kinds define how families cope with cultural and norms constraints. The stories help people get a better view of life and the circumstances that impact them on their path of growth and development. This paper would concentrate on the subject of family relationships as seen by the mother-daughter characters in both books. Both Alice’s and Amy’s stories make a depiction of the importance family relations and their relation to social values. From the stories, the dissimilarities between values and relations are demonstrated through the issues faced by the mothers and daughters in both stories. To begin with, the Two Kinds story revolves around a Chinese girl named Jing-Mei. Jing-Mei is trying to deal with a conservative mother in a modern society. Her mother is strongly subscribed to Chinese traditions that she observed while in China and wants the daughter to do so in the United States. This frustrates their relationship as Jing-Mei is reluctant to confine her behavior and beliefs to her mother's traditional parameters. She is constantly obstructive to ideas given to her by the mother and she also disobeys and rebels her orders. Jing Mei’s mother had grown up under difficult circumstances before moving to America. This made her feel justified to imposing ideas on the daughter. She believed that there were only two kinds of daughters; the obedient and those who follow their mind. From Jing-Mei behavior, it seems the progressive American traditions had become more influential compared to the conservative Chinese traditions (Fujii, 2016).
Similar family friction is seen in the story Everyday Use. This story narrates how a mother makes a discovery about her two daughters. Unlike in the other story, the persona is the mother. Mrs. Johnson narrates a story on how she is trying to understand the behavior of her daughters. She was not focused on their disobedience but was concerned about their moral conduct and stands. The story depicts a relationship between identity, morals, heritage, and pride. The story revolves around the aspect of individuality as Mrs. Johnson tries to make her daughters, Maggie and Dee, to take a stand. Each of the daughters has distinct and contrasting views regarding their past, present, and future. This becomes the basis for Mrs. Johnson confrontation with one of the daughters.
According to Mrs. Johnson, Maggie had a very low self-esteem, shy, uneducated, and envious of hers sister. However, she upheld her heritage with pride and even wanted to retain and to be referred to by her traditional name ‘Wangero’. At the other hand, Dee was less proud of her heritage, educated, and good looking. Unlike Maggie, she tried to abandon her traditional name and wanted to only associate herself with things from her past that held significant value. She prides herself with her accomplishments and wanted a new name to match that success. The dispute comes about when the two daughters were fighting over the inheritance of quilts from her grandmother. Maggie wanted the quilts for everyday use while Dee wanted to hang them for sentimental value. Mrs. Johnson sided with Maggie and believed that the quilts were supposed to be used and not just hanged. In the story, Dee is seen as the rebel of the family as she is interested in changing and breaking away from the past norms, just like Jing-Mei in Two Kinds (Gale, 2015).
Conclusion
There is a major conflict that is brought about the break-away from past traditions and norms. These two stories depict this conflict and how it affects family relations. Both mothers in the stories represent the older conservative members of the community who most of the time have a hard time making the younger generation to believe in what they themselves believe in. The world today is moving towards a less traditional society. Young people such as Jing-Mei and Dee associate and come up with what is considered to be socially acceptable. Traditional beliefs and customs are becoming depleted and being taken over by universal modern norms. This, in turn, brings about dissimilarities in opinion between family members and hence creating a strain to family relations. As portrayed in these stories, there are rarely mutual agreements within families regarding various situations. Family conflicts are quite common given that culture, relationships, and families differ in opinion. Rebellion and simple disagreement will arise from this difference in opinion. These stories validate and simplify this fact.
References
Fujii, S. (2016). Cultural Translation and Representation of Mother-Daughter Relationships: A Study of Works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Fae Myenne Ng, and Mei Ng.
Gale, C. L. (2015). A Study Guide to Alice Walker's Everyday Use. Gale, Cengage Learning.
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