Her portrayal of her mother calling white people 'ghosts,' and her decision to name her mother Brave Orchid, seem to reflect cultural construction of Oriental women and Asians in general as superstitious and somewhat primitive in their understanding of the world. But there are always intrusions of the modern world that satirize the tendency to render China as exotic and Oriental. The fact that Kingston calls her mother 'Brave Orchid' and her aunt 'Moon Orchid' are less important than the cultural clash that transpires between their ways of life.
The characters in Kingston's work are always recognizably human in the manner in which they illustrate the immigrant experience. Moon Orchid is shown marveling at as well as being horrified by American ways and manners, but much of the dialogue between the two sisters could take between any women, from any culture. The two sisters have contrasting personalities: one is strong, the other is yielding. Moon Orchid is a fragile woman, unable to fend for herself in the West. But although Moon Orchid's former husband tells both her and her sister she belongs to a far-away culture and place, Brave Orchid is steely enough to work long hours in a Laundromat at age sixty-eight, in hundred and eleven degree heat. There is no singular Chinese immigrant experience. Even Moon Orchid's struggles to make a new life for herself, her fear of other immigrants, and eventual institutionalization are not surreal and folkloric, but show how decisions like her husband's bigamous remarriage can have real and tragic consequences.
It is true that Kingston uses aspects of the stories of her family symbolically, and some of her stories have an unreal quality to them. But by assigning the characters fantastic names and admitting she has heard so many of their stories second and third-hand, even when resorting to fantasy she does not speak...
Unknown Cultural Revolution In most of the literature, China's Cultural Revolution gets a bad rap. It is considered a time of social turmoil that eventually led to an economic disaster for the country. There are accounts of intellectuals being persecuted as well as violence in many communities. However, the author, Dongping Han, gives a different account of this period. In many cases, history is written by the winners. Therefore, the capitalistic
In the course of the Cultural Revolution, the communist leader Mao Zedong proclaimed particular cultural requirements for both art and writings in China. This was a period that was filled with violence and harsh realisms for the people within the society. Authors such as Bei Dao, Gu Cheng and Yu Hua can be considered to be misty poets, whose works endeavored to shift from an inactive response to active formation.
Chinese Cultural Revolution, which began in the early 1960's and endured until the death of Mao Tse-tung, drastically altered the cultural arena of China from an agrarian system to one of modernity and acceptance by Western nations. Yet the Cultural Revolution was in effect based on communist principles which affected its ability to transcend the needs of the majority at the expense of the needs of the individual, meaning
Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was started by Mao Tse-tung in 1966 and did not conclude until after his death in 1976, is referred to officially by the current government of China as haojie; as GAO Mobo notes that "haojie is ambiguous because it can be a modern term for 'holocaust' or a traditional term to mean 'great calamity' or 'catastrophe'." (Gao 15). To some extent, those who lived through the
Autographic style book by Dr. Li Zhisui ( the private life of chairman mao pp433-546), and the short stories by Chen Jo-hsi, and the movie The Blue Kites, are all about these authors' and director's experiences of the tumultuous year of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. In what way do you think their works (book and movie) are valuable as historical documents? The Communist Revolution in China was fighting against
It was a new means of defining a control over the cultural aspects of the society. Mao had envisaged a cultural background that would rise from the middle class, the social level on which the Communist Party based its electoral and strength. Given the tight control exercised by the communist party through all its regional, local, and national mechanisms, a new sense of fear and submission affected the society.
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