The extract "The Bonesetter's daughter", written by Tan explores how an American born Chinese girl deals with her cross cultural identity.
In the text, Ruth is a girl who is totally influenced by the western culture, but she had a very traditional mother who keeps trying to instill the Chinese tradition in her. Ruth grows up in America, she too does not experience or feel many of the things that her mother have experienced, and she does not feel the need to understand the Chinese culture, maybe even so because she feel that she belongs to the western culture, not the Chinese culture. In fact, I feel that I am like her in many ways, for example, I grew up in this westernized world which exposed me to a lot of western perspectives and views due to globalization, and I could no longer relate to the Chinese culture as well as those who grew up in a totally traditional Chinese environment.
Chinese Brush for Writing Calligraphy
Flickr Chinese Dragon Year Statue
Sunset of the Forbidden City, Beijing (northwest c...But yet, maybe I am still not as westernized as her, for here in Singapore, we experience a mixture of both cultures so I still have lots of exposure to the Chinese culture.
Luling, Ruth's mother is a traditional Chinese woman who loves the Chinese culture very much to an extent that she could feel or see so much in just a few characters or words. She can see Chinese characters as beams of light of something from the heavens, godly, feelings, history. I have never thought of Chinese as something so spiritual, maybe this is what you feel when you have a true passion for it. I do not hold that passion for the Chinese culture as Luling does. Maybe it's because that I also only see the Chinese language as a form of writing, very mechanical, and...