Summary Of ' Nothing Happened '

Throughout Li Cunxin’s memoir, Mao’s Last Dancer, Li immerses the readers into the complex, restrictive and challenging lifestyle he lived through various prose techniques, which engage the audience into the cultural values of his life. Some examples of this is when he was living in communist China, in a commune, going to a Beijing dance Academy, going to Houston and finally moving to Australia. Through these experiences, culture is portrayed as being both limiting and liberating. Culture could be limiting because it is was so restrictive because of Mao’s rules but it was also liberating because Chinese people are meant to be loyal to their country and since their country is communist, they believed that it was the most free nation in the world. This is shown in the story of the blind rabbit, where Li is taught that nothing comes easily, allegiance to country surpasses that to family and to keep pride in the family name.

In the fall of 2006, a lonely girl by the name of Jessica Jiang sits in the corner of a noisy classroom in Shanghai, China with a unique journey that dates all the way back in a hospital at Edmonton, Canada in the blizzard winter storm of 1999. The faces of the childhood friends flows through my mind, as well as the curiosity of the new things coming into my life. This all started from when I came to China from the United States at a age of 7 years old.

Have you ever visited a place and just felt a connection Jing-Mei did when she visited China for the first time in remembrance of her mother. Jing-Mei’s story is told in Amy Tan’s book “The Joy Luck Club” in the section called “A Pair of Tickets.” Tan uses elements in the setting to develop the story of Jing-Mei, she uses the Locale and the Atmosphere to create emotional tension and resolution. The beginning of “A Pair of Tickets” is about Jing-Mei and her father traveling to China to meet her long-lost half sisters who her mother had to abandon because of the war that was going on in China.

Four Chinese mothers have migrated to America. Each hope for their daughter’s success and pray that they will not experience the hardships faced in China. One mother, Suyuan, imparts her knowledge on her daughter through stories. The American culture influences her daughter, Jing Mei, to such a degree that it is hard for Jing Mei to understand her mother's culture and life lessons. Yet it is not until Jing Mei realizes that the key to understanding who her

Matteo Ricci was a born in Italy in 1552. He became a Jesuit and went a mission to China in 1583. He lived out the rest of his twenty seven years in China, bringing in Western culture and technology, while learning about what China had to offer. In his novel, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Jonathan Spence retells Ricci’s life story, while also adding information about the world at the time. Spence tells Ricci’s story in an interesting way, by assigning Chinese characters and images that he believes Ricci would have used in his memory palace, a fictional tool to remember what that took place during his life. The memory palace works by assigning memories to a character or image, so when you think of the image, you can remember the memories associated with it. Spence then breaks up the chapters separately by each image or character and talks about the history and story from Ricci’s life associated with the image or character. This essay will primarily focus on chapter four of the novel, though a summary of the themes of chapter six is included as well. In chapter four Spence largely discusses the three main religions of the Western world, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and then draws parallels with the three largest religions in China at the time, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. However, these examples are not the only instances where a trio of three religions and belief systems are present. At the end of the Warring States period in China, around 350 BCE, China was

In George Orwell’s novel, 1984, O’Brien drills the idea into Winston’s mind that reality is only truly present in the human mind. The Chinese government tries to establish this within the media, the internet, and the people of China. William Lutz’s essay, “No One Died in Tiananmen Square” reflects Orwell’s 1984 and the thoughts of the Party, such as re-education, and reality control.

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.

' 'You want to do what?! What the hell is going on here ' ' exclaimed Iris the second she entered the cortex with her brother right behind, right in the middle of a heated conversation between Joe, Cisco and Caitlin.

His insight into this Inner China cultural conflict is just a taste of the reality at the time, but even this small yet detailed taste is quite bitter.

“It was not easy to live in Shanghai” (Anyi 137). This line, echoed throughout Wang Anyi 's short piece “The Destination” is the glowing heartbeat of the story. A refrain filled with both longing and sadness, it hints at the many struggles faced by thousands upon thousands trying to get by in the city of Shanghai. One of these lost souls, the protagonist, Chen Xin, was one of the many youths taken from his family and sent to live the in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Ten years after the fact, Chen Xin views the repercussions of the Cultural Revolution internally and externally as he processes the changes that both he, and his hometown have over-gone in the past ten years. Devastatingly, he comes to the conclusion that there is no going back to the time of his childhood, and his fond memories of Shanghai exist solely in memory. This is in large part is due to the changes brought on by the Cultural Revolution. These effects of the Cultural Revolution are a central theme to the story; with repercussions seen on a cultural level, as well as a personal one.

Earlier this week, on Memorial Day, police officers in Roseville, California arrested a gang of seven men for allegedly touching several young girls inappropriately at a local waterpark. Curiously, though, the various media outlets that have reported on the incident have all effectively covered up what sort of people would target 14-year-old girls in a group and then abuse them like they did by leaving out some key information about the suspects’ backgrounds.

De-Hong helps clean up the carnage cause by all the civil war. When the communists take over the town, they do not pillage, rape, or extort as all the other groups of people had done before them. Many are courteous and kind and

In a demonstration of solidarity, more than one hundred and thirty NFL players have chosen to sit, kneel, or raise a fist during the national anthem. This is a movement that began last season when 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick chose to take a knee to protest police brutality against people of color. Although Kaepernick didn’t have much support from fellow players at the time, a recent turn of events has changed things. President Donald Trump’s recent commentary calling out those who chose to protest created contempt for him in the NFL community. In Megan Garber’s 2017 article entitled “They Took a Knee,” she examines exactly what Trump said and considers the impact of his words. It is indisputable that both the NFL players and our President

In The Man Awakened from Dreams, Henrietta Harrison describes the life of Liu Dapeng through his diary entries. Highlighting one man’s story allowed the author “to focus on the details of everyday life” in order to “see how social structures and ideologies interacted in practice” (7). Liu lived from 1857 to 1942 and began his diary in 1891, so information about Liu’s childhood and education is dependent on his memories from that time. Harrison depicts Liu as a conservative scholar and argues that his education and Confucian beliefs provided him opportunities even among the modernization changes of China. Harrison also explores the negative impact of modernization on rural areas by recounting the economic and

She considers that “some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil.” (Kingston 6). Kingston writes her initial version of the “No Name Woman,” who was raped, raided, and died an outcast, but Kingston determines that this telling does not fit her understanding of China. Therefore, Kingston entertains another hypothetical, that her aunt took a lover and saved him from shame by giving “silent birth” and not revealing the lover’s identity (Kingston 11). Here, Kingston critically examines the inherited talk-story of her mother to determine the meaning she should obtain from the death of her aunt. Her mother’s conclusion is that she must not become pregnant, but Kingston is uncertain about the simplicity of her mother’s story. In the “No Name Woman,” Kingston introduces the fictitious memoir structure that she utilizes through the variety of interpretations of her aunt’s story. Consistently through the memoir, Kingston writes contrasting accounts of the same stories and imagines the stories of others to further her themes about silence, authenticity, and identity formation.