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Fasting of the Heart: Mother-Tradition and Sacred Systems in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club "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 recep ....

Middle of Essay
.... invisible core of 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, ....