Placing its events during the war between North and South, Gone with the Wind is just another story of the way in which the racist and cultural confrontations affect the inner lives of the individuals involved in it.
Tran is inspired by it and starts writing for a local newspaper, owned by Giang, under a pseudonym, so as not to be discovered by the authorities. However, this does happen eventually, and Tran finds herself on trial for her writing and for hiding her identity.
It is thus obvious that the marks left by the political oppression on personal life are very great: Tran is compelled to hide her identity so as to protect herself, and this is even more significant since the identity she must protect is that of the author, of the free mind that should be able to speak its own thoughts and opinions.
Thus, both of the short stories discussed above give a painful and complex account of identity loss, displacement and racial discrimination in the lives of their characters. However, while Jen's story focuses on the more...
This shows up most poignantly in her relationship with her granddaughter, the "mixed" child who causes the comment at the start of the story and who basically drives the plot of the story forward. The narrator has difficulty understanding her granddaughter Sophie's behavior, but only partially blames this on the way she is raised. Instead, the grandmother sees this mainly as a function of Sophie's mixed ethnic identity, saying
For his wife, John is a "depressed" man, who needed constant assurance of his security as husband and father of the family; for the Mother, however, John is simply her vision of the typical male who depended on the women of his life for survival. When the Mother commented, "If John lived in China, he would be very happy," she meant that John is like other males that she
Persons who do not know about his traditional, middle class, White bread upbringing in upstate New York call upon him to represent the 'Asian viewpoint' when he is asked, for instance, to be a talking head or commentator on a scandal relating to America's relationship with China. Liu has decided he is Asian-American, almost by default -- because he is seen as Asian in America, he is an Asian-American,
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