preview

Sandra Cisneros And Amy Tan Short Story

Decent Essays

Growing up with parents who are immigrants can present many obstacles for the children of those immigrants. There are many problems people face that we do not even realize. Things happen behind closed doors that we might not even be aware of. Writers Sandra Cisneros and Amy Tan help us become aware of these problems. Both of these authors express those hardships in their stories about growing up with foreign parents. Although their most apparent hardships are about different struggles, both of their stories have a similar underlying theme.

Sandra Cisneros writes about growing up as the only daughter in a Mexican household with six brothers. This presents many difficulties for her growing up because she constantly yearned for the approval of her father; a father who believed her only purpose in this world was to get married and start a family. Throughout her whole life she sought to please him, and when she told him she had plans to go to college, what she did not realize what that her “father thought college was good for girls—good for finding a husband.” To go a step further, her father would constantly tell people about his “seven sons,” as though it were some kind of merit. This clearly and understandably bothered Cisneros because she said that she would “tug [her] father’s sleeve and whisper: ‘Not seven sons. Six! and one daughter.’” Despite all of these hardships, she finally was able to impress her father. After she had gone to college, become a successful author, and had a story published and translated to Spanish, she presented the story to her father. He was clearly very impressed with her work and she finished by saying that out of all the great things that have happened to her, this moment was by far the greatest.

On the other hand, Amy Tan brings up similar hardships, however, the way she explains them may imply that they are not at all “hardships” in her opinion. She grew up the daughter of Chinese immigrants. To other people, they hear her mother speak English and automatically consider it “broken” or “fractured” English. Tan expresses that she does not consider it broken at all. She begins to explain that when she is speaking to her mother, being the successful writer she

Get Access