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| Name: _________________________ | Period: ___________________ |
This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.
Short Answer Questions
1. A man on the street leers and acts threatening to Lena's mother. Her mother feels this happened because ______________________________.
2. Rose's mother recorded Bing's death _______________________.
3. The child finally decides to ______________________.
4. Suyuan Woo packed all of her belongings into a _________________.
5. Waverly Jong's mother taught her early about ____________________________.
Short Essay Questions
1. How could a woman with twin babies leave them at the side of the road?
2. Discuss why the current members of the Joy Luck Club have invested their winnings in the stock market.
3. The Moon Lady says woman is the dark yin, and man is the bright truth of yang. How did this kind of thinking affect the characters in this book over their lifetimes?
4. Jing-Mei Woo's mother and Waverly Jong's mother compete through their daughters' failures and successes. Are the two women friends?
5. Lindo Jong became the property of her husband's family long before she went to live with them. Discuss how this changed the way her mother perceived her and treated her.
6. Discuss why the woman has never told her daughter about the single feather she kept from the swan.
7. Waverly Place Jong is named after the street she lives on in San Francisco. Discuss other instances where children are named after localities, ideas or unusual things.
8. What triggers Ying-Ying's early memory of her traumatic fall from the family boat?
9. Discuss how it is that the Italian girl next door provides a sense of peace for Lena.
10. June Woo started the American Joy Luck Club because she sensed the grief in the other Chinese people she met here. How does the club help June Woo deal with her own tragic memories?
Essay Topics
Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:
Essay Topic 1
The older Chinese women in this story experienced certain aspects of severe female oppression while in China. At the heart of this story is the message of how our own past is imprinted on our children, regardless of how different their lives are. Write an essay about how the experiences of each of the older Chinese women in the story purposely, or inadvertently, passed on certain attitudes and viewpoints about women and their roles to their American daughters. Discuss the impact on their daughters, as well.
Essay Topic 2
Do a thorough re-read of The Joy Luck Club and scan for recurring devices that make the story come alive. They are subtle, but you will notice that Amy Tan meticulously plants them in the right places to give her story consistency and to give her readers a real sense of her culture. One example is how she uses "smells" throughout the story - the smells from the sewer in Kweilin, Lindo learning to smell the toilets to be sure they were clean and being able to detect the amount of salt in a soup by its smell, the cat putting a stink on Suyuan's door, the smelly crab -- these are just a few instances.
Essay Topic 3
Write an essay on Chinese festivals and annual rituals, their origins, their meanings, whether they are still practiced. Can any of them be compared to certain beliefs and practices in the United States? If so, contrast and compare.
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This section contains 1,193 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) |
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