Being A Minority Writer example essay topic

The two stories "In the Canon, For All the Wrong Reasons" by Amy Tan and "The Black Writer and the Southern Experience" by Alice Walker were stories that I thought connected to each other very well. But, they also were different in a few ways too. I will compare and contrast these two stories in the following paper. Both writers came from a very tough child hood judging by what they wrote about. Amy Tan grew up having to deal with the deaths of her father and her brother. After that her mom was always talking about killing herself.

Alice Walker had a tough childhood also. While not having to deal with deaths in her family she grew up in a very poor neighborhood dealing with being looked down on and not given the same opportunities as the white children around her. She gives and example of this in her story when she says that her mom went to town to get flower from the Red Cross. She was wearing a new dress that she had received from a friend. The white lady handing out the flower wouldn't give her any because she was wearing too nice of clothing.

She thought that Walker's mom was trying to show her up by wearing nice clothes. Another similarity in these two stories is the fact that both authors are minorities. They both had to deal with the hardships of that alone growing up. Being a minority writer makes it hard to keep everybody happy.

Amy Tan says in her story, "Well, you can't please everyone, can you?" (578) Walker had the same type of problem being a African American, but this is the way she looks at it. She says in her story, "The richness of the black writer's experience in the South can be remarkable, though some people might not think so". (649) Even though things were tough on her being a minority she looked at the upside of most things. Making the best of what was given to her. Both writers turned out very well for what they had to deal with in both their childhoods, and being minorities. While these two writers and stories are similar in some ways they also differ from each other too.

The biggest thing that I found different was how recognized one seemed more than the other. Amy Tan talks a lot about how there are requests for her permission to let her writings be put into college textbooks and multi cultural anthologies. This may be the reason that Amy Tan is also a more criticized author too. A fellow Asian American writer once called her, "a running dog whore sucking on the tit of the imperialist white pigs". (578) In Alice Walker's writing she doesn't talk about her accomplishments as much as Tan does.

She just lets her writing speak for itself. Tan seems like the kind of person that does something good or receives an award and she has to tell the whole world. Throughout my reading of these two pieces it seemed a lot easier to find similarities between the two rather than differences. It seems that because they are both minorities and are so much alike that they would relate well to each other rather than be confrontational.