Dave Berry once said, “There 's nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater,you realize that you 've been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent..” By the outside, someone may look like they fit in, while the adversities one deals with internally are hidden on the inside. The struggles one goes through needs to really be brought up to attention and the attempt to understand what one goes through day to day must happen. In From Silence to Words Writing as a Struggle, Min-Zhan Lu explains the struggles experienced growing up in China and the influences of …show more content…
Her greatest fear in this struggles was the ability to lose control over the influences school versus home played in writing. She would always go back and second guess herself in making sure that her views were not conflicting with the other so much that it stood out, which would confuse her. She grew up learning that these conflicts of interest in political views should not happen. Min-Zhan Lu says “Despite my parents ' and teachers ' attempts to keep home and school discrete, the internal conflict between the two discourses continued whenever I read or wrote. Although I tried to suppress the voice of one discourse in the name of the other, having to speak aloud in the voice I had just silenced each time I crossed the boundary kept both voices active in my mind. (446) This quote really stands out to me in the passage. Lu talks about no matter at what attempts his parents or teachers tried to do to keep the two conflicting languages conflicts away, it would still emerge and that in his attempt to only think about one language, it would conflict with the other one and they would eventually compromise and both languages would be thought of. Growing up, she compares her literacy to an electronic tool and the ability to switch it on and off whenever she was in her natural place, which was home, and her alien place, which was school. This was the main struggle because it leads to the avoidance of writing with …show more content…
It came to dominate my understanding of the discussion on the social and historical scene and to restrict my ability to participate in that discussion.(444) If we go back and use the reference again of the electronic tool we can see the struggle of being at home and communicating with her family and having an influence of capitalistic viewpoints and living the life of a capitalist, then immediately having to communicate in a different language at school and being surrounded by socialistic views and living the life of a socialist. Her thoughts were constantly flip-flopping and this became very frustrating for her. If we bring all these struggles into one main purpose, Min-Zhan Lu’s mother falls into silence two months before her death and Min-Zhan Lu attempts to “fill up that silence with words that I have since come to by reflecting on my earlier experience as a student in China.(437) The struggles that she faced growing up in China as a student and her past experiences have really helped her overcome life obstacles and develop her as a better reader and writer. In result, she now has the ability to fill up that silence with words and puts us in the point of view of her experiences she faced in
This story that Suyuan Woo tells her daughter shows how deeply the Japanese invasion of China affected the identity of many Chinese people. They were forced to flee their homes and their lives with only a few of their valuables, but eventually they had to give up those up too. Those few items were all that they had left to define themselves and remind them who they were so when they lost them they lost a significant part of who they were. Suyuan Woo lost more than just her past identity, she actually had to leave her twin babies on the side of the road in the hopes that someone could save them. This shaped her identity because throughout the remainder of her life she had to wonder if leaving them behind was the right choice and if they were
Since Hsun-ching lived through China’s cultural revolution, his everyday life was a political issue. One prominent part of his story was his ordeal with the Red Guard. Although Salzman did not go into an extremely detailed description of Hsun-ching’s time with the Red Soldiers, he made the Cultural Revolution’s terrifying effect on China obvious. “In the week he had spent with Li and his followers, he had seen them drag teachers out of school and beat them mercilessly for no reason at all… The pheasants in that commune are starving largely because of the madness created by the Red Guards.”
She goes on to explain how this awareness affected and influenced her and Hewitt’s
Rachel Carson wrote about her experiences while at the sea. There is a whole exciting world at the sea which is fascinating. The reader can see this world from the perspective of Carson. This is because she is successful in conveying the true picture of the place. Carson uses ethos, pathos and logos as well as, definitions, simile, cause and consequence to tell about her experiences at the sea.
This all leads us to the fact that her voice helps to make the story all the more interesting as it withholds information, forcing us to think more about it. The story also has a clear conflict that helps us to figure out some of the withheld
Interpretation: By reading, readers may notice that the narrator prefers to go on tangents, he goes from dubbing Germany barbaric and comparing an English man to a renowned German writer, to planning his escape from Madden. He masks his disdain for being a German spy with the intent to prove to an unidentified Leader that people of his race are capable of success. Written in 1940 during World War I, the Literature Function of Representation is used to represent the racial tensions that occurred. Dr. Tsun’s account not only describes how the war affected women and soldier men, by those he saw on the platform, but also the poor treatment that People of Color, particularly the Chinese, had during the war. The fact, that he begins the passage with “I am a coward,” also indicates that although he wants to bravely represent his people, he is fearful.
On the other hand, it leaves a kind of profound thinking about the typical ordinary Chinese ideology and how great is the impact of such a decision on people’s
This is a video of the world’s oldest Bornean Orangutan named Gypsy Chan, who resides in a zoo in Japan. Gypsy is now 62 years old, but in this video taken in 2009 she was only 56 years old. The video starts out with a beautiful orangutan holding a pink brush staring at it intently. She then takes the brush and begins to brush her forehead. She quickly brushes her forehead once, and immediately looks at the brush, inspecting it diligently.
She has learned to express her emotions, as well as talk about her feelings with others. Physically
Along with their abundance of land and moving into the “great house,” Wang Lung’s children grew up in an environment very different from what their father had experienced in his childhood. This difference led to some unfortunate changes. In The
As possible as it was for them to have different experiences it was also possible for them to somewhat have similar experiences. Due to them both being in China, although in slightly different times, it is easy to compare their travel accounts. A similarity that occurred in both of their travel accounts is that they both wrote from what they knew. All that they had observed was mainly because of the way and where they had been raised and how that triggered their train of thought. Another similarity is that in both travel accounts religion was discussed.
On July 18, 1964, The New Yorker published a short story entitled “The Swimmer” (Wilhite 215). Edited thoroughly and heavily compacted from its original form, “The Swimmer” represents John Cheever 's most acclaimed and recognized work. The protagonist of the famous and momentous short story, Neddy Merrill, undergoes a watery journey of self-exploration, acceptance, and tragedy while swimming in various pools as he makes his way home from a party. Slyly and allegorically, the short story dramatically demonstrates the possible density of the literary technique called characterization. Containing many cliffhangers open to the reader 's individual self-interpretation, the short story effectively uses the strong power of language to illuminate
“Two Kinds,” by Amy Tan, essentially revolves around the struggle of Jing Mei and her constant conflict with her mother. Throughout her life, she is forced into living a life that is not hers, but rather her mom’s vision of a perfect child; because her mother lost everything, which included her parents and kids, so her only hope was through Jing Mei. Jing Mei’s mom watches TV shows such as the Ed Sullivan Show, which gives her inspiration that her daughter should be like the people and actors. First her mom saw how on the television a three-year-old boy can name all the capitals of the states and foreign countries and would even pronounce it correctly. Her mom would quiz Jing Mei on capitals of certain places, only to discover that
O-lan's most defining characteristic is her silence. She doesn't talk, she just does things. Wang Lung describes her like this: "[S]he never talked, this woman, except for the brief necessities of life. Wang Lung, watching her move steadily and slowly about the rooms on her big feet, watching secretly the stolid, square face, the unexpressed, half-fearful look of her eyes, made nothing of her" (2.16). Just like that description says, people ignore O-lan because she's silent.
The most influential Chinese poets, Du Fu, grew up motherless. Although he didn’t have a complete family, but he used this as the motivation in his poem. He had provided creditable poems by his early teens that had been widely spread through the nation. However, during his later years, he was suffering from illness, and financial problems that he needed to face by himself. Arthur Cooper, interested in Chinese Culture and history, translated Night Thoughts Afloat.