About the Author

Anyi Wang was born in 1954 and is still alive today. Her place of birth was Nanjing, China. She was born to a writer by the name of Ru Zhijuan. She attended college at the University of Iowa as part of their international writing program. She is an active member of the Chinese Association of Writers and she remains an active novelist that has written a number of screenplays and short fiction. She engages in a circuit of lectures in both China and the United States. Her credits include a rather large volume of works including The Rain Patters On, Liushi, Huanghe Gudao Ren and others. She is also a consistent and current writer for the magazine known as Childhood (Encyclopedia).

Even the lesser known facts about the author are rather intriguing. She is indeed one of the more prominent voices that exists in an era that is after the presence of Mao. Much of her fiction is based on growing up both before and during the Cultural Revolution that occurred in China. Her mother, the aforementioned Ru Zhijuan, was a famous writer herself. Her father had rather right-wing views and was commonly pilloried for having them. Wang became a cellist and joined a state-sponsored group to do the same. In 1976, when she was age nineteen, Wang egam publishing her stories. Indeed, this came after the Cultural Revolution and the fall of what was known as the "Gang of Four" (Encyclopedia).

This is not true of all of her work but a lot of what she has written has been published in English. Of course, Granny is one of those pieces and that work will be analyzed throughout the rest of this report. However, there have been other works such as Yu, sha sha sha and others that have also been translated. Baotwon is a short novel that was also brought to American audiences. One of her works caused a bit of a scandal in 1980's China. He work was deemed to be provocative to the point that some people called it "pornographic (Encyclopedia).

Presentation

While reading the work Granny, there is obviously a common theme and pattern to what is said, done and experienced per the narrator in the story. It is clear that so much of her life and the people around here are driven by culture, family, place of origin, where they live and the language they speak. Even Fu Ping herself... There is even a revelation near the end of the story that is quite telling in terms of who Granny really is to Fu Ping. While everyone deals with cultural norms and trends in their own way, Fu Ping clearly contributed her own behaviors and patterns to the cliquish and cultural snobbery of her time and day.

Reactions

Of course, behavior that is focused on race, ethnicity, language, class and so forth is nothing new. It was prevalent in the time period represented in Granny and this remains the case. The examples of this in Granny are prevalent and common. They manifest from the people around Fu Ping as well as from Fu Ping herself. As for her personally, her insistence on only working for clients along a certain street and they were natives to a certain area was telling. Also telling was the commonly method that was used to identify and flesh out who the nannies were in the area. One would think that Fu Ping would be a little different given her orphan status as a child and her eventual relocation to a woman who had lost her sons. Something that is eye-opening about that is the eye-opening connection between Granny and Fu Ping that is revealed near the end of the story. In any event, the examples cited above are just examples and mere morsels of what can generally be aside about environments like those that Fu Ping inhabited (Wang).

Evidence of Argument

To buttress and supplement the argument made already, the author of this response does not use the word "snobbery" casually. Generally speaking, people do not want to feel as if they are worthless or cast aside due to their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or lineage. Indeed, such poor treatment of people along those lines is not a good thing in any respects. Even so, even subtle and more basic manifestations of this are not good either. Even if maltreatment and snobbery is not overt and unmistakable, it is still not a good thing and should be reacted to as such. Indeed, even if Fu Ping was not herself guilty of being an overt bigot, racist or oppressor, she manifested some behaviors and points of analysis that are less than flattering to her. This is true despite the fact that there were times…