Cultural Collision In The Good Earth
Jong’s family of five resided on Waverly Place in San Francisco’s China town on a warm, clean two bedroom house that sat above a small Chinese bakery (Tan). She further describes a sandlot playground located at the end of their two block alley,
It’s early twentieth-century China. The vast majority of the citizenry is poor dirt farmers, growing and harvesting a meager living off of the land. Contrary to the general public, a farmer named Wang Lung has managed to rise from dirt to gold, poverty to wealth. When he has sons, however, they end up no longer respecting their elders, no longer farming the land, and no longer honoring the gods or giving them credit for their family’s success. In The Good Earth, Wang Lung’s children are raised in an atmosphere of privilege, leading them away from their family’s traditional values.
Family by Pa Chin is a captivating novel that describes what life in China was like in the twentieth century. Confucianism, a big religion in China at the time, was heavily focused on filial piety. Filial piety is the relationship of obedience, in which the elders are to be respected by the younger generation (Wu, lecture notes, 2015). This religion was one of the main structures on how the society was ran. Chin represents how the younger generation was upset with how the old traditions of the Confucian system were ran and that they were ready to change it.
The novel The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, takes place in the early 1900s, in pre-revolutionary China. In the novel, the main character, Wang-Lung, sustains his family and land through both favorable and difficult events. During this time period, men were always considered the superior to women and elders the superior to young people. Those who treated women as equal or did not practice filial piety were looked upon with disdain. Most Chinese people believed in Gods that watched over the land and punished dishonorable men.
This was a really interesting and informative chapter to read because I had no idea how big of a role the Chinese played in American History. I wasn’t surprised when I was reading about how “white” laborers demanded that certain companies to not hire any Chinese people. I though to myself “here we go again”, but I was happily surprised when I read about what the President of the Central Pacific Railroad had to say about these demands. The President of the company Leland Stanford had nothing but positive things to say about his Chinese workers. He often referred to them as quiet, peaceful, reliable, and willing to learn all the different kinds of work.
Jin is faced with being one of the very few Asians at his Junior High School, while everyone else is American. Of course Jin is going to feel out of sorts, especially when his teacher introduces him to the class as “Jin Jang”, and saying “He and his family moved to our neighborhood all the way from China”, when Jin’s real name is Jin Wang and his family moved from San Francisco (30). Gene Luen Yang uses this humility to display that it takes a considerable amount of open
Cultural collisions can have a negative or positive effect on people. Trying to change such a big part of you and the way you have always lived can be very hard on people. Others will choose to embrace it. Nwoye’s sense of identity was challenged with the introduction of Western ideas into the Ibo culture. Nwoye started out the novel sensitive and confused, but the cultural collision of the British colonists and Ibo people affected Nwoye, positively to the point of changing cultures and leaving his clan.
June May visits China to fulfill her mother’s desire of finding her long abandoned twins thus identifying what it means to be born into two nationalities. June is a young American born Asian and like most Americans June desires acceptance and popularity to fit in. May being a child of two Immigrants often found that her skin tone was a severe limitation when trying to assimilate, stating, “I was fifteen and had vigorously denied that I had any Chinese whatsoever below my skin” (Tan 190). Being of two nationalities May demonstrates her struggle to adapt to an American society because of her Chinese decent clouding
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.
In the book, “A Long Walk to Water,” by Linda Sue Park, the thing that affects the characters the most is their culture. In this book, Nya has to walk to the pond and back every day to get water for her family. Eventually, her village has a well dug by people from another tribe, the project being led by Salva. First, the way people are raised by their parents heavily affects who they are in the future. “Salva had three brothers and two sisters.
The novel’s fictional version of China is sometimes an unfairly bleak portrayal of the country, and its most shocking scenes cohere with false Orientalist narratives of Western imperialism and Asian inferiority. However, for an American author, Buck writes with unique authority; few Westerners in her era could match her breadth of knowledge about China, and even fewer could match her dedication to the advancement of cultural empathy with China. Despite the inescapable influences of dominant Orientalist narratives, Buck was able to craft a socially truthful, yet relatable text for Western audiences. Looking back at the outsize impact of The Good Earth, it becomes clear that it defies conventional definitions of Orientalism. Rather than assigning the ‘Orientalist’ label as a veiled accusation of racism and ignorance, scholars should instead recognize that—with the appropriate author intentionality and real-world impact—certain Orientalist works could be culturally acceptable, if not valuable
Persepolis doesn 't portray just one theme, but multiple. Including the themes such as revolution, imperialism, and nationalism. There were also other themes such as loss of innocence and danger. The main character isn’t just another girl who lived in Iran during the war. She was 10 years old when the war began, but unlike a common 10 year old, she cared about what was going on in her country.
The book and the movie possess similar qualities. First, in both the movie and the book, all the mothers left their old lives in China for a new one in America. ” My mother could sense that the woman of these families also had
Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo are both known for being the world’s greatest long distance travelers, however, because of their different backgrounds it had influenced the way in which each traveler wrote about their experiences in China. This contrast is dominantly believed to have been influenced by their different religious backgrounds, and how each had viewed the world. This was ultimately is influenced by ones cultural and religious background. In this essay I will examine the different experiences that both Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo had experienced during their visits in China. Ibn Battuta, a well-educated Islamic scholar born and raised by a wealthy family in Tangier, Morocco, he had begun his journey at the age of 21.
The natural features of geography protected the Chinese and influenced the way they lived through rivers that provided rich soil for growing crops, mountainous regions providing protection/isolation and the growth of a new crop to China, deserts veering off invaders and a major ocean border. The first natural feature of geography that influenced the Chinese way of life is the Yellow River, or Huang He, a river that travelled across the agricultural land of China, collecting rich and fertile soil along the way. This soil, loess, would sink to the riverbed, creating a thick layer of silt that would allow Chinese people to grow staple foods and catch fish. In the North the staple was wheat and in the south, rice. An example of the Yellow River influencing the way the Chinese people lived is in the map in source 1, drawn by cartographer Cha Yun in 1861-1875, as it shows the river with roots coming out in all directions of the land, conveying how the river provided food and life to the Chinese people.
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