Comparison Essay Sample: Fish Cheeks and Blue-Sky Home

📌Category: Literature, Tale
📌Words: 396
📌Pages: 2
📌Published: 16 March 2022

Fish Cheeks and Blue-sky home are similar stories exploring themes of heritage, cultural identity and acceptance, with powerful characters who grapple with their insecurities and learn to overcome them. 

Pheobe, from Blue-sky and Amy from Fish Cheeks experience feelings of disconnection and exclusion when interacting with their heritage and aspects of their culture at the beginning of the story.  

Amy feels disgusted that her family decides to celebrate Christmas in a Chinese way, inviting the minister’s family to join them. She is ashamed and downhearted when she sees her mother has prepared a Chinese cuisine for their American guests to enjoy, viewing it as alien to what she believes to be ideal, primarily a western menu. She also feels embarrassed by culinary customs her relatives showcase to the grimacing guests, such as burping in appreciation of what has been cooked and licking chopsticks to relish flavor. 

Phoebe is touring Greece, her native country, with her grandfather. She, like Amy, associates herself with being American, and finds Greece’s bright blue skies and toilet design foreign and strange. Mostly, she feels bad that her grandfather can easily communicate in Greek with natives, while she cannot,  

Both the girls’ guardians want them to appreciate their heritage more.  

Amy’s mother understands Amy’s desire to fit in with other American girls, yet prepares Chinese food for the Christmas party, perhaps with the belief that Amy would feel proud of the food she secretly loves but pretends to hate due to her conflicted feelings about how she finds her culture odd. Amy feels distressed when the guests see the food, but the experience helped Amy to confront her wrong feelings. At the end of the story, her mom tells her not to forget about her own Chinese culture. Her mother’s helpful advice and lesson help Amy to be happy with her heritage as she grows up. 

Pheobe’s grandfather took her to Greece for the same reason and disliked it when Pheobe said she wasn’t truly Greek, she was American. He scoffed and claimed “what is it to be American?” It can be inferred that he believes being American isn’t as “great” as being Greek. He also shows her a traditionally styled house where his friend lives, to get her to love “the real Greece” like he does.  

Amy and Phoebe slowly learn to value their heritage. For Amy, she takes her what her mother says to heart to change herself for the better. Once Pheobe’s grandfather begins to accept her, she feels less like an outsider in Greece.

+
x
Remember! This is just a sample.

You can order a custom paper by our expert writers

Order now
By clicking “Receive Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails.