Empress Orchid Analysis

It also shows that Tai-Yu is possibly against certain feudal restraints when it comes to love and

For over 2000 years, China had operated under strict Confucian doctrines. In Confucianism, women are seen as inferior to men and the sexism that was rife in China can be clearly seen in the traditional characters of Chinese, where the characters for “greedy” (貪婪) , “dislike” (嫌), “evil” (妖) and “slave” (奴隸) all include the character for “female” (女). In 2000 years, 20 imperial dynasties and 557 emperors, only three women have ruled; Empress Lu in the 2nd century BC, Empress Wu in the 7thcentury AD and Empress Dowager Cixi in the 19th century AD. Like Empress Dowager Cixi, Empress Wu experienced extreme vilification after her death. Alicia Little of The Times believed that “future ages will hold the Empress Dowager in even greater horror than Empress Wu”.

Xiong uses battles, executions, assassinations, and scandals to appeal to readers of any genre. Once a reader gets into the book they are hooked in the epic events of the book and the deep look into the ruling class. Unfortunately, Xiong’s novel might somewhat difficult to get into for many readers with no experience in Chinese history. Xiong also attempts to utilize dialogue that often comes off as underdeveloped or simplistic.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, written by Dai Sijie, is set in 1971 during the China’s Cultural Revolution. The book starts with two boys, unnamed narrator and his friend Luo being sent from their hometown Chengdu to a small village in Phoenix Mountain to be “re-educated”. The book continues with them skillfully living through the harsh village life with their talent of storytelling and their western knowledge gained from books. Throughout the novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie illustrates different types of literature and how it transforms the character’s life, action and their personalities in both good and bad way. This book is one unique novel about two boys and one little girl’s transformation by the magical

The novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a novel by Dai Sijie set during the Cultural Revolution in China which lasted from 1966 until 1976. Even though the author’s main focus is not opposing Mao’s rule, acts of oppression and the strict control practiced by the government can often be observed in the book. The author focuses on the process of re-education which includes sending urban youth to rural areas. Sijie depicts the mental and physical development of two boys who are being re-educated on the Phoenix Mountain of the Sky. The novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress challenges the concept of re-education and the aspects of the Chinese government by contrasting the Communist ideology to the dynamic character of the narrator, by using symbolism to complement the transformation of the major characters and by including the picaresque story of the Little Seamstress narrated by herself.

“Her actions remind me that, even under unbearable circumstances, one can still believe in justice,” in David Henry Hwang’s foreword, in Ji-Li Jiang’s memoir Red Scarf Girl, commemorated even during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution anyone can overcome adversity (9). Ji-Li Jiang was a young teenager at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and living through a very political time in China’s history made Ji-Li into the person she is today. Ji-Li’s intelligence, her choices, and family devotion made her into the headstrong and successful person she is today. Even when Ji-li thought she was unintelligent, others saw she was wise. There were many moments when Ji-Li was reminded she was very smart.

In the book Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, the author talks about the stories of her grandmother and mother as well as herself during their journeys as women in China. The book discusses how gender roles, political ideology, and economic ideology in China change over time. During the entirety of Chinese history, many changes and continuities transpired and had crucial impacts on China. However, a great amount of change occurred during the time period from the 1900s to present day. These changes and continuities incorporate happenings in areas concerning the treatment of women, political structure, and economic capacity.

In a first place, it is important to understand the importance of property in that period to maintain elite status: the dowries of young brides often determined whether a woman entered her marriage as a principal wife or as a simple concubine. The new law protected the inheritance rights to daughters under various conditions, they also protect wife’s properties during marriage and after widowhood. Another important factor is the spread of literacy and printing of law books which allied people to got to courts more easily. Some records shows that female of all ages and social classes initiating lawsuits related to property rights during the Song

Jiacheng Liu Final paper (a)summary Citizen Barlow a young African-American, arrives in Pittsburgh and is part of the freed slaves. While working at the local mill, Citizen steals a can of nails. Another man is accused and choose suicide rather than face arrest and a life in which it is unfairly identified as a thief. Citizen wants to redeem his guilt for causing the death of one person and looking at Aunt Ester, whose healing powers are legendary. A 285-year-old aunt Esther lives in a house with Eli, his friend and protector, and Black Maria, a young woman wearing the clothes for a living and who Aunt Esther hopes to pass his powers.

Telling the story of 1587, Huang displays the year in a similar fashion to Sima Qian’s The First Emperor. Like Sima Qian, this telling of history focuses on one specific character for each chapter. It is chronological for each chapter, but each chapter overlaps, in part, with the ones before and following it in a more cyclical format. This means that this book has less of a western and, therefore,

Child abuse was, unfortunately, very common in China during the mid-1900s. Adeline, a young Chinese girl whom this book is about, was often abused during her childhood. Chinese Cinderella, a novel by Adeline Yen Mah, is about young Adeline’s life, which seems to be extremely depressing. Throughout the story, Adeline is constantly abused, ignored, and treated cruelly. Throughout Chinese Cinderella, Adeline is abused by her parents and siblings.

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.

A Pair of Tickets In “A Pair of Tickets,” Amy Tan described the journey of Jing-Mei Woo, a middle-aged, Chinese-American woman, to China where she experienced a compelling change in herself. The author herself is Chinese-American, which enabled her to use insightful experiences in the story that were similar to her own experiences to better illustrate the emotions that Jing-Mei felt. Reminiscing about her own trip to China, Tan wrote: “As soon as my feet touched China, I become Chinese” (Tan 146). As Jing-Mei made the long travel to her motherland, she experienced a series of events, met her long-lost relatives, reflected on her own memories, and listened to stories about her mother’s past, deepening the connection that she had with her mother

Economic, political, both domestic and international, social and cultural factors all had various levels of impact and repercussions on the Qing regime, with chapters also dedicated to the formation and organisation of the Qing government, giving the reader context to the period. He traces the changes and continuity in these themes and argues against the orthodox interpretation of Qing history that the watershed in the Qing dynasty was the 1839-1842 First opium war and the resulting Treaty of Nanking. Instead, he argues that when the Western powers first came to assert their influence and dominance over the Qing, the Qing was already poorly equipped with the means of dealing with them and the Western powers, and later, Japan, simply proved too much for the Qing to handle. One specific reason behind this argument is the relationship between the Qing government and the people. Rowe explains the Qing approach to governing its huge empire as an attempt to conduct “government on the cheap”, referring to their principles of benevolent rule inclusive of light taxes and minimal direct involvement in local society, a pseudo laissez faire model through under governed China.

In the essay “The No Name Woman” by Maxine Hong Kingston, the story of living in a traditionally male-dominated Chinese society with a very dysfunctional family structure is told. The villages would look upon the men as useful, and women as useless to their society. Kingston, the main character, learns this first hand from how her aunt was treated. Kingston’s aunt, The No Name Woman, is victimized by a male-dominated society by being shunned for an illegitimate child. As a woman, the odds were automatically against you in their society.