Response to The Woman Warrior
In the short story collection, The Woman Warrior, I read a lot of stories of different women striving for lives in the United States. These women, regardless of their different situations and personalities, share a mutual quality: nationality. They’re all Chinese. Traditional Chinese women, actually. Not saying their wearing or anything about appearance like that, but talking about their values is exactly as traditional as could be imagined as Chinese women.
An immigrant’s story
My uncle and my aunt are an immigrant couple. They moved individually from Taiwan to America when they were young. Their families didn’t move there with them. Instead, my uncle moved there alone for his asthma problem, as the mild climate of California helps hold his health condition a lot, and my aunt moved there alone as her family seemed not to be self sufficient enough to supply her.
In the article in “Ways of Seeing” we read in the class, the paragraph our small group read was about how different advertisements are designed and displayed as it used to and at present. The advertisements in the past were pretty much closer to reality and true, while the ones nowadays tend to be made in a more exaggerating way. One of the sentences in the paragraph mentioned, “She is not purely the creature of others’ envy – which is how, for example, Andy Warhol presents Marilyn Monroe.” This sentence points out the core spirit of this paragraph: Advertisements nowadays are so shallow sometimes that their audience get attracted or even influenced afterwards.
“When I was young,” my mom says, “I was labeled by the teachers at school as a rebel, since I never obeyed their instructions.” “But as a matter of fact, I consider myself as a person who just had too many different ideas from most other students in class, and therefore did not feel the need to do things in the teachers’ ways. I felt it was necessary for me to do things in the ways I thought to be more efficient to achieve the goal.”
“But as time went by, I found my relationships with people around me were much more terrible than I had realized myself. Teachers picked me out in class because I seemed to be the one who always break the peace and order during their lectures, as I often asked questions which I were confused about, or stated my opinions which were opposite to theirs, or even criticized their points of view. They saw me as nothing but a trouble maker.”
There’s a man who devotes all his time and efforts without a complaint in my family. He is my father, Jay.
My father is a businessman who imports compressors from Germany to Taiwan. He studied there in Berlin during his Master’s Degree on Engineering, and that’s the reason why the biggest compressor company in Germany asked him to work for them - he speaks their language and knows everything about how compressors and fans related stuff work. Only a few people spoke German back then in my father’s days.
Plot
The film, Beloved, is a film based on Toni Morrison’s eponymous Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel. The entire story takes place during the time of Civil War, and is steered around a difficult struggle of a colored woman who had been slaved, sexually assaulted, escaped but still suffered with her daughter in their cursed, haunted house and their embarrassing status in the village. The colored obstinate woman, who was called Sethe, was visited by an old friend, Paul D., who was also from her hometown, the place she escaped from. Sethe invited Paul D into her haunted house and Paul D. stood his ground and drove the spirit away. The relationship between Sethe and Paul was sharply increased, and Sethe agreed on Paul’s proposal to live together and strike out a life together.
An eighteen year old girl who just started her new life in college. A girl who has a great passion for music, and also loves arts(literature, paintings, sculptures and other related included). Admiring arts and composing them are two of the most wonderful things in the world. Indulging herself in music and playing/displaying it for people are awesome for her, too.
I’m not that kind of girl who still lives in her dreamy fairy tale imagination and waits for some Prince Charm to come to “save” me. I’m a pretty down-to-earth person. And because I have been through some difficult situations which most people don’t have the experiences of, I think I can say that I am pretty much a tough girl who is mentally independent and is able to make my own decisions and take the responsibilities for them.
Walking in the streets
It’s a brilliant sunny day in first spring. I’m walking along in the campus, on the wooden sidewalk beside the green, green grass field and Hundred-Flower Stream Path. I see families having great fun in their different kinds of ways. Frisbees are thrown back and forth between kids and seniors in some of the families. Pieces of clothes being comfortably lain upon by people are unfolded and laid smoothly on the ground. Under the tree shades, some families are sitting laid-back on the benches, sharing their lives with big, relaxed smiles on their faces. There’s no walls between them. Balls fly high up in the clear blue sky without a cloud - just like their crystal-clear joyous minds at the moment.
