To Live Movie Essay

About a year later, Mr. Chong and Jing-mei's mother wanted her to play in a talent show that was going to be held at the church. Jing-mei was going to play a piece called "Pleading Child." Her parents invited just about everyone they knew to come and watch their daughter in her moment of glory. When Jing-mei's time came to play her piece, she was so proud of the way she looked that she wasn't even worried about how she was going to sound. She walked up to the bench, sat down, and just started playing away. Then it hit her. She didn't know the piece, and just about every note she hit was wrong.

When Jing Mei recognizes the similarities between her mother and herself she begins to understand not only her mother but herself as well. There are subtle connections and likenesses from the beginning between Jing Mei and her mother that Jing Mei does not see. The book commences with Jing Mei taking her mother's place at the mah jong table, creating a similarity between them from the beginning. Suyuan dies two months before the start of the book, and therefore is not able to tell the stories. Jing Mei has learned and must tell her stories in her place, forming another parallelism between mother and daughter. Because Suyuan is dead, Jing Mei must act in place of her mother when she goes to meet her Chinese sisters in China. Throughout the book Jing Mei takes the place of Suyuan, showing she and her mother

What were Edwin S. Porter's significant contributions to the development of early narrative film? In what sense did Porter build upon the innovations of contemporaneous filmmakers, and for what purposes?

China and Jeremy with a dream so big and suddenly this huge occurrence disaster in their life made the choice they regret for years to come. “I want to see our daughter’s grave.” That froze him inside. He tried to picture her—her now, China, the love of his life—and he couldn’t. What did she look like? What was her face like, her nose, her hair, her eyes and breasts and the slit between her legs? He drew a blank. There was no way to summon her the way she used to be or even the way she was in court, because all he could remember was the thing that had come out of her, four limbs and the equipment of a female, shoulders rigid and eyes shut tight, as if she were a mummy in a tomb. Jeremy nor China did not want the outcome of the situation. It was unexpected result of in fact this two couple never thought this could happen to them. The fact that they held in their mind a bright future both going to college and finishing what they started at high school, they did not have any alternatives beside

Even with her previous experiences at Beijing University and at Big Joy Farm, Wong still held some belief that the Chinese system wasn’t as bad as it was sometimes made out to be. This event proved to her that it was. “The enormity of the massacre hit home…Although it had been years since I was a Maoist, I still had harbored some small hope for China. Now even that was gone” (259). As a reporter Wong was able to view the progression of the protests in leading up to the massacre, and in viewing it understood that the Chinese people were much more independent than they had previously demonstrated over the past 50 years. She had continuously seen the Chinese people following what they were told between learning in school or with physical labor, yet this protest was one of the first large scale displays of the unacceptance of the regime by the people, and the government did not know what to do with it. But because of this, Wong was able to recognize that the people were not reliant on this way of life that they had previously been bound to, but truly could lead for themselves and take control. The massacre awakened Wong both to the reality that the government was not acting to benefit the people, and that the people were more than capable of acting for

The movie thirteen touched many important factors of adolescent’s development. Some of the ones I want to concentrate in this paper are: family system, developmental tasks, and peer pressure.

In the movie A Better Life, the Main Character Carlos Galindo is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who started working as a day labor worker when he first arrived in the country, however he has had steady work from Blasco Martinez who owns a gardening business which he tries to convince Carlos to buy from him as he says he is moving. The idea of being self employed is very appealing to Carlos but he knows he can never afford to do so and the risk of getting caught and deported is very high. Carlos has a son Luis who is reluctant to go to school on a daily basis and gets into trouble as he is influenced by his friends who are part of the

To do so, Fugui attempts to maintain his ‘face’ in the commune by donating the most steel and telling his son to work rather than sleep. Consequently, like the very puppets that he holds, Fugui becomes another puppet in the communist authoritarian rule. His effort to uphold social standing ultimately contributes to the death of his son.

De-hong asks to be a part of the communist movement but she’s found too young. A short time later, she begins distributing Communist literature. The economic situation is so bad that the family has no savings and Dr. Xia, now nearly eighty, is worried about what will happen when he dies. Extortion is rampant, food is scarce, and the money that does exist has almost no value. De-hong becomes friendly with a Kuomintang general. Using his military freedom, they travel outside the walled city occasionally and De-hong leaves messages for her Communist counterparts.. The Communists then start regular bombardment of the city, including one dud shell that crashes into the home of De-hong's family.

As she recalls back on this time by telling her daughter what she calls her Kweilin story, Suyuan describes her feeling during this horrible time as “And inside I was no longer hungry for the cabbage or the turnips of the hanging rock garden. I could only see the dripping bowels of an ancient hill that might collapse on top of me. Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?” (22) At this point in her life Suyuan was separated from her husband who is in the military and eventually is forced to abandon her two young daughters. This aspect of Suyuan’s life parallels the life of Amy Tan’s mother. Daisy tan was also married to a military man during the Chinese Civil War and like Suyuan was forced to abandon her two daughters in Shanghai. This was an experience that would affect her mother for the rest of her life and a story she would continue to tell and never forget. The life of Amy Tan is also a parallel to the life of Jing-Mei Woo of “June”. As a young girl June was forced to play the piano and practice constantly to become the best like Amy Tan was as a child. Along with playing the piano Suyuan also had high expectations for June as far as her future. She wanted her daughter to be the best in her class and go off to medical school to become a well educated doctor, the same expectation’s Amy Tan’s mother had for her. Both daughters decided to follow their dreams and

Jing-Mei finds a new person that was determined to fight against her mother. Moreover, Jing Mei

When Han, China is invaded by Shan Yu and the Huns, the Chinese emperor calls for the mobilization of soldiers, enlisting the aid of one man from each family. After discovering her elderly father; Fa Zhou, has been drafted into the Chinese army; Fa Mulan, disguises herself as a man in order to take his place. Once her family becomes aware of her departure; Mulan's grandmother prays to their ancestors in an attempt to provide her with

“Better a live coward than a dead hero”, a proverb passed down by the Chinese since ancient time, it coexisted with China’s constantly in volatile state and periodical social unrest. Coincidentally, the saying resonates with the life of Fugui in the novel “To Live” by Yu Hua, a prominent novel which touched many souls and emotions within and outside China. Meanwhile life, a key component and a main theme of the novel, is being valued and portrayed vividly through Fugui’s life, demonstrated by the use of literary devices and among them characterization evident.

Evident in this culture, immense amounts of pressure often cause dissatisfaction in one’s self, many times leading one to the misconception of attaining perfection. After losing everything in China, Jing-mei’s mother, inspired by Shirley Temple, gives her daughter peculiar tests as part of “becoming a prodigy.” Being fed up with the tests, displays of her boredom allow Jing-mei’s mother to give up for a while. One day, her mother sees a little Chinese girl playing piano on television, and this hatches the brilliant idea of having “Old Chong,” a deaf, old man, teach Jing-mei piano. Jing-mei was soon entered into the talent show, but she was clearly unprepared, and it turned out to be a complete fiasco, disappointing her mother. Two days later, she got in a verbal fight with her mother, and to upset her, Jing-mei declares, “I wish I were dead. Like them.” She was referring to her twin sisters that her

When she meets Fan Liuyuan, she takes her chances and follows him to Hong Kong. Her decision to leave Shanghai has two implications. Firstly, she wants an escape from her family. After years of following their rules and hearing their complaints about her presence, she finally has a chance to leave it all behind to find her own independence. Secondly, she is strangely attracted to Liuyuan and securing his love and attention is a conquest for her.