fish cheeks by amy tan theme essay

A Summary and Analysis of Amy Tan’s ‘Fish Cheeks’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Fish Cheeks’ is a short autobiographical narrative by the American writer Amy Tan (born 1952). Tan is probably best-known for The Joy Luck Club , her 1989 novel containing a series of interwoven short stories told by a number of Chinese-American women who are members of the titular club; but ‘Fish Cheeks’ was published two years before that novel appeared: it was first published in Seventeen magazine in 1987.

This short narrative is about a fourteen-year-old girl named Amy who is ashamed of her family.

Plot summary

The narrator of ‘Fish Cheeks’ is Amy, whom we may consider to bear some resemblance to Amy Tan, the author of the essay. Indeed, ‘Fish Cheeks’ is often analysed as an autobiographical text.

In the story (if we can call it by such a name), Amy is a fourteen-year-old girl living in the United States, born to Chinese parents who are immigrants to the country. She begins her narrative by telling us that, when she was fourteen, she fell in love with the minister’s son, an American boy with blond hair, named Robert.

Amy found out that her parents had invited Robert and his family round to their home for dinner on Christmas Eve. Amy was so upset about what Robert would think of the family’s ‘shabby’ Chinese meal that she cried. She anticipated that he would be shocked by the food they ate and their lack of ‘American’ manners at the dinner table.

Sure enough, Amy’s fears were hardly allayed when she saw the food her mother was preparing for the meal, which included ‘fleshy prawns’ and ‘slimy’ fish with bulging eyes. The tofu, meanwhile, resembles ‘rubbery white sponges’ and the squid look like bicycle tyres.

When the minister arrived with his family – including, of course, his son Robert – both families had dinner together, and Amy watches in despair as her family display a lack of table manners in front of their guests. When the fish was brought out, Robert pulled a face which Amy interpreted as distaste, but Amy’s father offer his daughter some fish cheek, pointing out that it’s her favourite.

Amy wanted to disappear, and things weren’t helped when her father burped loudly at the end of the meal, to signal to Amy’s mother that he had enjoyed the meal she had cooked. He then explained to their guests that this was a ‘polite Chinese custom’, and in response, Robert’s father burped quietly out of politeness.

When the minister and his family had left, Amy’s mother remarked that her daughter wanted to be like American girls, and handed Amy an early Christmas present of a miniskirt. But she tells her that she can only wear it if she promises to remain Chinese on the inside , and proud of her heritage.

Amy concludes her narrative by saying that it took her ‘many years’ to appreciate what her mother had meant when she said that to her all those years ago. And she realised that her mother had chosen to cook all of Amy’s favourite foods, but Amy had been so preoccupied with what Robert would think of them that she hadn’t appreciated them.

Although this short text is more non-fiction than a short story, it can be scrutinised and analysed as closely and carefully as any of the stories included in Tan’s The Joy Luck Club . Indeed, it prefigures a number of the most prominent themes of that novel: the daughter who wishes to become more fully integrated into American society, the Chinese mother who wants her daughter to succeed but also wants her to be true to her Chinese heritage, and the social embarrassment which teenagers endure thanks to their parents’ behaviour.

But of course, the moral lesson of ‘Fish Cheeks’ – if we can call it ‘moral’ – is that Amy’s embarrassment, whilst understandable, is misplaced. There are plenty of reasons for a teenage girl to feel socially awkward when the boy she has a crush on meets her parents for the first time, but Amy is peculiarly fixated on the Chinese aspects of her parents’ behaviour and cooking, which mark them out as different from their American guests.

Robert, who has blond hair and is a minister’s son, is thus a ‘traditional’ American archetype: of European descent, from a Christian family, and therefore (we are invited to infer) civilised and well-mannered, with a good moral framework, owing to his father’s vocation. However, there is little in Amy’s account of the families’ dinner together to suggest he is worthy of her veneration: according to her, he grimaces when the Chinese fish is brought out, suggesting that she was right to fear his response to her mother’s food.

Furthermore, Amy acts cold and uninterested when he grunts hello at her when he and his family arrive, playing it cool, and attempting to hide her true feelings towards him. But in reality, she is also suppressing her ‘Chineseness’, too: she is, consciously or unconsciously, mirroring his disdainful and laid-back attitude in the hope that he will become more keen on her, and she is even prepared to conceal her fondness for her mother’s Chinese cooking – a key part of her culture and her family life – in order to do so.

And it is significant that Tan titles her autobiographical text ‘Fish Cheeks’ in homage to her mother’s traditional Chinese food, and, more specifically, her own favourite dish at the time: the very food she had affected to disown when trying to impress her American crush.

This reminds us that the narrator of the fragment is not fourteen any longer: as the final paragraph makes clear, Amy is now a grown woman and is looking back on that Christmas Eve meal from a position of hindsight and maturity. She is now able to assess her own conduct and attitudes and realise that her mother was right. What’s more, her ‘crush’ on Robert was just that: a passing phase.

By contrast, her Chinese identity, her sense of herself, remains. ‘Fish Cheeks’ is, in the last analysis, an essay about family and about cultural belonging which hovers somewhere between autobiographical non-fiction and short story, or fiction. We cannot tell how much of the story is based on real events and how much is Tan exercising artistic licence and her own imagination.

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Fish Cheeks

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Essay Analysis

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Fish Cheeks (Food)

The titular object of Tan’s essay, the fish cheek, is a poignant symbol of Tan’s cultural heritage. It also serves to explore the themes of shame and the desire to assimilate. The centerpiece of the family’s meal that evening is the steamed fish, including the fish cheeks. In Chinese culture, fish cheeks are considered a delicacy, a soft and enticing part of the fish; more than this, though, fish cheeks are one of Tan’s favorite foods at 14. Tan’s rejection of this food represents her rejection of her heritage and her shame at her Chinese identity. In this way, Tan’s focus on fish cheeks becomes a symbol for the cultural clash she experiences as she struggles to embrace her Chinese heritage while living in an American environment. It is not until the end of the essay, and at a point much later in time, that Tan recalls the food of that evening fondly, realizing that her mother had prepared all her favorite foods. Therefore, the food, and particularly the fish cheeks, act as a reminder that her cultural heritage should bring pride, rather than shame.

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Pride & Shame

Strong Cultural Identity Importance in Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks” Essay (Critical Writing)

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Rhetorical techniques are used in every genre of literature to ignite the reader’s interest, address a particular problem and structure the text in a precise and appealing manner. In “Fish Cheeks”, Amy Tan describes a particular autobiographical moment in her life: a Christmas Eve celebration that her parents invited the minister’s family over, while she was in love with the minister’s son, Robert. The essay explores a thought-provoking theme of being ashamed of one’s own traditions and customs in the context of a current multicultural society.

The text, possessing quite a simple style of narrative, still has rhetorical techniques that illustrate the mindset the author was in at the time of the story. Tan uses a lot of analogies and descriptive language specifically to show the way her younger self viewed the situation, as well as irony to educate her audience about the absurdity of being ashamed of one’s culture.

The problem of cultural identity in the US has always been a pressing issue. In her essay, Tan does not gravitate towards moralizing lessons as to why one should act and think a certain way and should never do the other. She illustrates how the destructive mindset of a Chinese immigrant works on her own example, telling a story about her 14-year-old self. Through the eyes of his Chinese girl, the way the Chinese celebrate Christmas Eve is “shabby”, her Chinese relatives are “noisy” and lack “proper American manners” (Tan).

The context of the narrative is clearly defined by this girl’s frame of perception. The celebration is a such dreadful event for her because everything that her Chinese relatives might do can be judged or misunderstood by the American minister’s family. This conveys the feeling that the author wants the reader to understand the intense dissonance between who she actually is and who she fervently desires to seem.

Tan’s message is supported by her stylistic choices in the text. For instance, she purposefully uses unappetizing epithets for Chinese food items. To her, tofu is “stacked wedges of rubbery”, the cod is “slimy”, a plate of squid “resembling bicycle tires”, while the whole kitchen is “littered with appalling mounds of raw food” (Tan). The author also explicitly underlines the fact that her extended family behaves in an unmannerly way, with the culmination of her despair being at the end of the dinner, when her father, according to a “polite Chinese custom”, belched loudly. Here, the author addresses the concept of cultural misunderstanding – and how great the perceptions of one ethnic group may differ from the ones of the other.

Growing up a Chinese girl in the American society, she wants to blend in and perceives her differences as unwanted. The only moralizing phrase in the essay is the advice her mother gives young Amy Tan “your only shame is to have shame” (Tan). This is the apex of the story, the moment that signals the message Tan wants to communicate – how absurd it is to be ashamed of who you are.

The purpose Amy Tan chose for her essay is truly a noble one – she wishes to aid young readers in understanding and establishing their cultural identity, without spending years figuring it out experientially. She communicates with her audience in a playful manner, with the use of rhetorical techniques such as irony and hilarious analogies, to better illustrate her point. She intricately operates with rhetoric which results in her succeeding in her aim – there is a greater possibility for the reader to learn the lesson when it is provided in such a simple, but smart way.

Tan, Amy. “ Fish Cheeks ”. CommonLit . 2021. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, September 29). Strong Cultural Identity Importance in Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks”. https://ivypanda.com/essays/strong-cultural-identity-importance-in-amy-tans-fish-cheeks/

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“Fish Cheeks” by Amy Tan

In Amy Tan’s Fish Cheeks, the difficulty of immigrants in adapting to the American culture is explored. The story follows an American-Chinese teenager who is ashamed of her Chinese heritage and prefers to be American. Her embarrassment is further aggravated during a Christmas dinner with her relatives, who exhibit behavior that she deems uncivilized. However, her mother teaches her an important lesson that one should not be ashamed of their identity. The theme of the story is to be proud of one’s identity and not to pretend to be someone else. The story conveys that it is better to be different but proud rather than trying to blend in with a culture that is not truly yours.

Using details and quotations from Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks”, explain, discuss and evaluate the theme of the story.

One of the difficulties that immigrants face when they come to live in America is dealing with the differences between the cultures of their old home to that of the new one. It is even harder for the succeeding generation who cannot fully understand the culture of their parents because they grow up exposed with the American culture of their peers. They are caught in a dilemma: to be proud with how different they are or to try to blend in and be as American as they possibly can. Amy Tan’s story, “Fish Cheeks” explores the growth to maturity of an American-Chinese teenager who learns through an episode in her past, how to be proud instead of ashamed of her familial heritage.

The protagonist obviously hates her being Chinese. She prefers all things American. She prays for a “blonde-haired boy (with) a slim American nose”. She is ashamed of her Chinese family she describes her relatives as “noisy (and) lacked proper American manners” . She calls their Christmas dinner as “shabby” and a “terrible disappointment” because it does not include turkey and sweet potatoes. Her relatives aggravate her shame further by being themselves at the dinner table: licking their chopsticks, reaching across the table and belching loudly, a “polite Chinese custom to show you’re satisfied”—all while in the attendance of her crush and his family who were invited guests to the dinner.

In the end, however, her mother makes her understand. She admonishes her that one’s “only shame is to have shame” because whether she likes it or not, she is Chinese. She can speak and dress up like an ordinary American but even her physical features will betray her. The story tells its readers that it is far better to be different but proud rather than to go through life deluding one’s self, pretending to be what one is actually not.

Tan, Amy. “Fish Cheeks”.

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Essays on Fish Cheeks

"fish cheeks" essays: prompt examples, identity and cultural conflicts.

Explore the theme of cultural identity and the internal conflicts faced by the narrator in "Fish Cheeks."

The Influence of Family on Identity

Analyze the role of family in shaping the narrator's sense of self and cultural identity in the essay.

Communication Across Cultures

Discuss the challenges and misunderstandings that arise when individuals from different cultural backgrounds try to communicate, as depicted in "Fish Cheeks."

Assimilation and Acceptance

Examine how the narrator grapples with the desire to fit in and be accepted by her American peers while maintaining her cultural heritage.

Symbolism of the Christmas Dinner

Interpret the symbolism of the traditional Chinese dinner in contrast to the American celebration of Christmas and its significance in the essay.

Character Development in "Fish Cheeks"

Trace the narrator's emotional growth and self-acceptance throughout the course of the essay, especially in relation to her crush on Robert.

Cultural Pride and Embarrassment

Discuss how cultural pride and moments of embarrassment are depicted in the essay and their impact on the narrator's self-esteem.

Writing Style and Narrative Techniques

Analyze Amy Tan's writing style and the narrative techniques she employs to convey the themes and emotions in "Fish Cheeks."

Universal Themes in a Personal Narrative

Explore how the personal experiences and struggles of the narrator in "Fish Cheeks" reflect universal themes of identity, belonging, and self-discovery.

The Power of Food in Literature

Examine the symbolic role of food in the essay and how it serves as a bridge between cultures and a means of expression.

Amy Tan's "Fish Cheeks" Analysis

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The Autobiographical Narrative in Fish Cheeks by Amy Tan

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December 6, 1987 by Amy Tan

Narrative Essay

Creative Nonfiction

Amy Tan is the author and main character of the essay. Other characters include her parents, her aunt, and Robert.

San Francisco, California in the 1970s.

The essay deals with the themes of identity and belonging. Tan writes about her experiences as a first-generation Chinese American girl and how she struggled to find her place in both the Chinese and American cultures.

Fish cheek (symbol of being Chinese), miniskirt (symbol of being American)

• The essay was subsequently published as a part of The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings.
• The work has been compared to a similar work by American chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton, "Killing Dinner".

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