Background Gary Soto was born on April 12, 1952, in the farming community of Fresno, California, to Mexican-American parents. In his essay "Being Mean" he talks of how his father and grandfather worked at the Sun Maid Raisin Factory and his mother peeled potatoes at Reddispud. Soto'...

There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent. ~ T.S. Eliot Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they s...

Motherhood and Fatherhood and the Family Every human being is socialized to behave in certain sets of behaviors and meanings. These behaviors and meanings will vary from culture to culture and there will even be variations within a culture. A major determining factor in how an individual might...

If there was one occurrence that befell every mother in "The Joy Luck Club," it would be the loss of a child and the after effect it had on their relationships with their living children. This lead to a misunderstanding between mother and daughter, and the climax of their separation before the pro...

PEARL'S SECRET Neil Henry's Pearl's Secret is a fascinating autobiographical journey of an African American man's search for his racial identity. Henry is a light-skinned African American man who tries to piece together a few scraps passed down in his family and many years of...

James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1909, the son of a postal worker who was killed in an automobile accident. The loss of his father marked James Agee both short term and long term(James Agee p.30). Thirty years later it would form the basis of the novel which is the cornerstone of his f...

As the train pulled up to the station in Xin He, I marveled at the changes that a couple of years had wrought in Xin Jiang. It was the summer of 1999 and I had just graduated from High School. I was on a trip with my mother to Xin Jiang, the northwestern-est province in China, to visit friends an...

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner is the story of a man who outraged the land that then turned and destroyed the man's family (Serafin 356). Growing up as a poor mountain white, Thomas Sutpen yearns for more than what he has ever had. He marries a young woman and fathers a son, bu...

The most exciting event in contemporary Chinese cinema was the emergence of the Fifth Generation filmmakers in the early 1980s. These young filmmakers, who graduated from Beijing Film Academy when it reopened after the Cultural Revolution, were given the opportunity to make films at minor studios in...

Coming of age is a time of trials and triumphs in a young adolescent's life. It involves many obstacles that need to be over come in order to become an adult. However obstacles are not the only things that a youth will encounter. Through the journey they will happen upon successes and trium...