How Does Sally Stanley Use Flashbacks In Spilled Water

Setting is one of the many way we learn about character. In Amy Tan’s “A Pair of Tickets,” June May, the protagonist, at the age of fifteen denied that she had any Chines whatsoever in her. Now at the age of thirty-six June May is on way to China carry her mother’s dream of going back home, with her seventy two year old father, Canning Woo. Their first stop will be Guangzhou, to visit Canning Woo aunt who he had not seen since he was ten years

her mother (narrator) saw her. Through her reverie, we feel the mother's pain that her

China is and always will be a land seen as mysterious to those with roots in Western culture. And in its own way, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie is what can happen when Western and Far Eastern culture interact. Outside of the cultural revolution, headed by Mao Zedong, which makes the whole novel possible, and was a push back against Western involvement in China, the novel includes many other ideas of cultural interaction. However, it also prominently provides complex emotions and changes within the characters who are followed throughout the novel. In fact, one passage in particular reveals much character change and development in the narrator of the story (who will simply be known as narrator for the entirety of this essay), and it occurs on the pages of 166 to 169. The passage is a daydream of the narrator’s after having taken a beating by a band of hooligans and potential suitors of the Little Seamstress. In it, readers can see the narrator develop to the same sort of manhood as Luo: the satisfaction of changing something and reaching independence. However, after reaching this stage, he also realizes the drawbacks to having done so, causing him to feel remorse for his actions. This is achieved by the narrator’s expression of hidden desires he developed over time and what lustful feelings and desperation accompany them.

Just imagine this, you are walking down the street one day and you see a statue of a soldier. After your walk, you do some research and figure out why he had a statue erected in his name and the importance of this man. Flashbacks are similar, you may see a deeper meaning after the flashback and realize what the author was trying to tell you. You may also understand why a certain character has a conflict with another, a flashback could explain the original fuel that fueled the fire.

First, when characters indulge in their rich cultural background, specific distant cultural characteristics can resurface and bring out a whole new version of oneself. In the short story ‘A Pair of Tickets’ by Amy Tan, Jing-Mei Woo travels to China to visit her half-sisters, to break the news of their mother’s death. When she arrives in China, she gains a whole new perspective. She begins to feel her Chinese cultural heritage coming back to her. “My mother was right. I am becoming Chinese” (Tan 179). When Woo arrives at the terminal, she sees her sisters and through them she sees the part of her that is Chinese. All it took was being in the right location, China, and meeting her half-sisters for the first time to redeem her Chinese qualities.

Let’s rewind back in time to 1996, Peter Hessler’s River Town is a graphic account of his experiences as a waiguoren (foreigner) in an ancient country. His crisp, content-rich and attention to detail style of writing keeps the reader mesmerized. Peter Hessler, a.k.a Ho Wei, volunteers as a Peace Corps officer who spends 2 years of his life in a city called Fuling, a Yangtze River town in China. The Peace Corps have assigned him to teach English and Literature in class to students who have never seen a foreigner let alone spoke English. This classroom becomes the portal from which Peter enters the Chinese culture and traditions. It combines his personal development as a recent college graduate with the development of China into the outer world. To understand the complicated Chinese languages and its ancient culture, it proves to be more daunting then to teach them about American culture. It’s a journey into history and a difficult one. Peter must cope with China’s centuries-old isolationism and distrust of an outsider.

2. To explain how the position of a woman against a man among the people where they live, especially in Chinese society, and can see the reason of Chinese culture, which is pressing her.

The narration of Sinking presents itself in a objective narrative way, that emphasizes the absurdity of the protagonist’s self-image. The protagonist states his sense of hostility toward his Japanese classmates, yet at the same time, his relationship with his Chinese classmates is equally as bad. This undercuts the protagonist’s statement that his isolation is due to racism or prejudice. He projects his desires onto the bodies of Japanese women, yet at the same time, despairs in his resentment and hostility toward the Japanese. In this very way, Yu Dafu’s method of writing helps the readers doubt the protagonist’s self-perception.

The importance of Toni Morrison using flashbacks for technique is great to build up the character's personality and how they develop.

To my mind, this tragic story is to bring forth the travesty of system and a quirk of fate; it is a quirk of fate because, just to fulfill her wife’s desire to have her coming baby born in Chine, they went to China without an idea that this decision would lead them in such a miserable situation. In my understandings, the story is packed and interwoven. The author so well presented the ordeal and plight the Chinese origin American couple had to undergo that it is hard to contain tears of sadness. The mental state of the distraught mother and her vegetative existence after her dissociation with her child have been so craftily portrayed with words that, I think, it is hard for anyone not to be moved . The story has not only marvelously presented

“Yes.” It reached for me. “Come with me, child.” It was a woman now, her voice like syrup and honey and her touch like warmth after frost. “See your life.”

Prior to analysis, I have to admit my own limitation. This story is included in Chinese textbook, where footnotes explain comprehensively vocabulary that even college students without extensive studies in Chinese would not understand. Therefore, I lack an accurate sense of the accessibility of the text as a nowadays average Chinese reader, as much as an average literate reader back to the time when this story is published.

As always there is more to this internal othering then meets the eye, but what actually meets the eye does also need to be taken into account. The ethnic minorities in China were mostly represented by femininity. In connecting femaleness with this other, femaleness got connected with rural backwardness, non-Han cultures and also relative youth (Schein, 1997). This presentation is not made by the others themselves, hereby this representation says more about the presenter than about ‘what’ is actually presented. The images of minority women, presented opposed to urban elite culture bares both the longing for modernity and the nostalgia, often accompanied with this progress of change. Interpreting the presentation reveals the position the presenters construct for themselves in relation to ethnic minority cultures but also within Chinese society as a whole (Schein, 1997). In the constructed oppositions the modern, urban and civilized opposes the backward, rural wild. The women as presenters of the rural and the wild, are with this connected to nature. Where women are born with the ability to produce nature through birth, men are free or forced to produce culturally (Yuval-Davis, 1997). In everyday life people everywhere seem to rank their own cultural products above the natural realm, with this suggesting the mostly higher ranking of men above women all over the world (Yuval-Davis, 1997).

For section two of the book, the author purposely dedicated chapter 5 to “U.S-China Misunderstandings”. The author breaks the chapters up into different questions from the general view point Americans get wrong about China to more in-depth issues such as ethnicity, religion, and governing system. It is clear that the focus of the chapter is about the misunderstandings that some Americans may have of China, thus it could be difficult for some non-American readers to relate to this specific chapter.

The technique of flashbacks serves as a means to piece together a story, but in this story, it also helps to build up a sense of anticipation. The eagerness of wanting to know why she is leaving, helps to maintain the reader’s attention. We know where she is coming from, and we know where she is going, but why she is leaving, is slowly revealed throughout the story.