This is evident in Franz Kafka's piece, "Letter to His Father", and in Maxine Hong Kingston's piece, "No Name Woman". Franz Kafka's relationship with his father wasn't a good one. As he ages, he decides to write a letter to his father expressing his emotions toward him. He writes, "At that time, and at that time everywhere, I would have needed encouragement."(92) He feels that his father wasn't there to encourage him, feeling that he was less than him. It is also seen in this quote, "In keeping with that, furthermore, was your intellectual domination."(92) This quote Kafka degrades himself feeling that his intellect was in superior to his fathers. In Maxine Hong Kingston's piece it was a difference in the type of negative relationship between the parents and their daughter. The story starts with the daughter asking about her aunt who was shunned by the family because she became pregnant out of wedlock. (Becoming pregnant was a horrible thing when the baby is out of wedlock in their culture.) The father "forgot" about his sister and the mother did not want to talk about it. But the parents instilled fear on their daughter, telling her how bad it was to become pregnant out of wedlock and of the consequences that would follow. This is seen in the quote, "Don't let your father know that I told you. He denies her. Now that you started to menstruate, what happened to her can happen to you. Don't humiliate us."(13) The mother tells the daughter that her father believes that he never had a sister and by becoming pregnant she would humiliate the family. This relationship between the daughter and the parents is more fear based the loving based. What the mother basically says is that they love her because she hasn't "humiliated the family". If she does they feel that they cannot love her anymore, and deny that she even existed. In these two cases, very different but very much alike; it showed that a negative relationship between a parent and their child can have a very negative effect on the child's life.
