Beginning of Essay
Fasting of the Heart: Mother-Tradition and Sacred Systems in Amy Tan's "Concentrate your will. Hear not with your ears but with your mind; not with your mind, but with your spirit . . . blank, passively responsive to externals. In such open receptivity only can T ....

Middle of Essay
.... life. Tan may weave elements of Taoism into the narrative to locate the "invisible core" of Chinese women's culture, of the immigrant family--and of the novel itself--within apparent conflicts or ambiguities. Tan's use of Confucianism may reveal her hypothesis of how a women's version of that patriarchal ethico-moral-ritual tradition might be passed down from mother to daughter and carried to America. Just as in the Confucian ritual system, very little of the mother-tradition in the text is told explicitly from mother to daughter: ritual actions are supposed to be observed, absorbed, read, and understood in order to be transformed, preserved and han ....