Ghost Shadows (audio demo)

Ghost Shadows lyrics

Ghost Shadows

Silent nights that

you drove away,

sailed right by like ships on a breeze—

Ghost shadows—

leave a haunting wake

trailing into the unforeseen,

overcast,

dark weather.

A voracious sky consumes then pleads

for you to stay,

with your wandering fleets

heading out for the blaze in the east:

Don’t set on me.

High ridges line

the broken coast.

A beacon casts its waving arm,

bending light

through the howling wind,

steering ships away from harm.

Full moon

climbing high in the night;

a warning sounds its red alarm;

Your fleets scatter

their masts at bay,

collected, harbored, and withdrawn;

docked, fouled, and frayed.

Writhing Severed Electrical Cord - A Wash of Glowing Sparks

Swathes of Lunar Ecstasy

Two Kinds

I'm a little more than half way through reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club in preparation for my fall 2009 semester of student teaching at Masuk High School in Monroe, Connecticut. I'm very excited about this tremendous opportunity with which I plan to continue learning about life through literature as I help others.

* * *

Jing-Mei Woo

"Two Kinds"

The narrator of the chapter that I just finished reading, "Two Kinds," is Jing-Mei Woo, American daughter of Suyuan Woo.

There is significance behind the title of the chapter Amy Tan has chosen for Jing-Mei's second of four narrations. And the name of the title supports and strengthens themes, or universal meanings that run throughout the book. Notice the similarity between the title of Jing-Mei's chapter “Two Kinds,” and the title of the previous chapter, "Half and Half", which is narrated by her American-born cousin, Rose Hsu Jordan. Both of these titles suggest that there are two parts to one whole; two sides to the characters in Tan's book. The daughters, for example, who are first-generation Americans, have two main facets to their identities, and identity is indeed one of the most powerful themes in this book. Each daughter is a first-generation, natural-born American citizen. Each daughter is Chinese American, rather than being simply one or the other. She is both, and she struggles to construct her own identity accordingly. She must find a balance between the modern American values that she encounters in society and the more traditional Chinese values that her mother imbues through child-rearing. The fact that the daughters are first-generation Americans makes them pioneers of a sort, being the first wave of women in their families to discover what it means to be American, blazing the way for the generations to come. The titles of these two chapters in particular reflect the need for each daughter to construct two kinds of identity, part Chinese and part American, roughly half and half, that unify to create one whole and complex, round character. Spark Notes online supplementary readers' guide calls this theme “the inescapable duality of immigrant identity.” But identity, for brevity's sake, is the main idea here, a theme common in literature of multiple genres. Identity is a particularly common theme in coming of age stories, young adult literature, and multicultural literature. Acceptance and hope vs. despair are motifs present throughout the book that I encountered also while reading this chapter.

Works Cited:

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Penguin Group, 1989.

Northampton Wools at BAR in New Haven, CT

About Me

I'm a student at UB studying to become an English teacher at the secondary level.