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The Adopted Chinese Daughters Rebellion

Decent Essays

This study will define the importance of the postmodern protagonist in Crazy (2005) by Jean-Marc Vallée, What We All Long For by Dionne Brand, and “The Adopted Chinese Daughters' Rebellion” by Zsuzsi Gartner. Postmodernity in these three differing mediums define the rejection of modernist ideologies of “[progress” and social norms that illustrate the reality of diversity in Canadian society. Vallee’s film defines the protagonist through Zac’s homosexuality as a means in which to alienate his homophobic father. Zac’s characterization as post-modern protagonist expresses his “otherness” as a means in which find sexual liberation from his father’s bigotry and bias in the post-WWII era. This is also true of the Vietnamese protagonist, Tuyen, who rejects her parent’s choice of the upper-middle class lifestyle in Dionne brand’s novel What We All Long For. Tuyen chooses to live in a lower class apartment complex to find the freedom from the capitalist lifestyle as a form of rejection the “modernism” of progress and social mobility for immigrant populations in Canada. More so, in “The Adopted Chinese Daughters' Rebellion” white Canadians attempt to adopt Chinese orphans and raise them in accordance with traditional Chinese traditions, but they soon discover that they want to adapt postmodern lifestyles in the western/European mode. …show more content…

In essence, these postmodern protagonists define the important allure of post-modern values and diversity that present a unique vision of Canadian life that defies an easy categorization in the modernist

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