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    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "Fish Cheeks"
    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "Fish Cheeks"
    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "Fish Cheeks"
    Ebook33 pages23 minutes

    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "Fish Cheeks"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "Fish Cheeks", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781535846080
    A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "Fish Cheeks"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Amy Tan's "Fish Cheeks" - Gale

      18

      Fish Cheeks

      Amy Tan

      1987

      Introduction

      Written in the first person, Amy Tan's Fish Cheeks is a short short story of a little over five hundred words. The reader knows the story is autobiographical because of its inclusion in The Opposite of Fate, a 2003 book of essays and other writings about the many facets of Tan's own life. She does not hide that it is she who is the fourteen-year-old girl in Fish Cheeks; the girl's name is Amy. Fish Cheeks was one of Tan's earliest writings, resulting from her time in a writing workshop she took beginning in 1985 as a way to balance her workaholic lifestyle. In 1987, Fish Cheeks was published in Seventeen, a magazine for teenage girls. The story's universal appeal is supported by the fact that there are no time references in the story, and it could easily take place in 1987, 2003, or today.

      The story is about a Christmas Eve dinner that is deeply embarrassing to fourteen-year-old Amy, even though she seems to be the only one who is bothered. She has a crush on the son of the family who comes to dinner, and she is very uncomfortable with how different her Chinese family and life are from the American family and life of the boy she likes. Young Amy blames her mother almost entirely for her perceived struggle and embarrassment. These themes of cultural tug-of-wars with the children of Chinese immigrants and the particular difficulties of the mother-daughter relationships in these families are themes that run throughout Tan's fiction. While Tan first began to explore those themes with this short short story, she likely could not have imagined how they would shape her body of work.

      Author Biography

      Tan was born in Oakland, California, on February 19, 1952, to John Yuehhan (an electrical engineer and Baptist minister) and Daisy Tu Ching Tan (a nurse). John immigrated to

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