Vu Trong Pong Taboo Summary

In the story “Du Tenth Sinks the Jewel Box in Anger” by Feng Meng-long, courtesans appeared to be kept imprisoned and generally wanting to escape the life of prostitution. There are several contrasting perceptions of women and their work. Often times prostitution can be viewed as a practice of unclean or even immoral activates but in this story, prostitution displays a much more positive illustration than in most other stories. Men and women such as Li Jia, Sung Fu, and madam portrayed these women as inferior and as seen, Du Tenth had been just another commodity to them. By contrast, the author appears to show an alternate side of courtesans, as women of worthiness opposed to what most people assumed they already knew about the life of courtesans. Feng Meng-long wants to demonstrate that even though courtesans work in a non-respectable occupation doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be respected.

Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone is a contemporary and modern twist on the classic boy meets girl story. Based on the real life experiences of his parents, Nguyen intertwines his comedic style with the tragic reality that refugees of war must face, and creates a story that allows the tragedy of the survivors of the Vietnam War to become accessible to a modern American audience. Director Jamie Castaneda and the American Conservatory Theatre bring this production to life in San Francisco, where a blend of technology, hip-hop, and an all-Asian cast crew brings justice to a story often untold. The play mainly follows two refugees who manage to find love despite their circumstances. However, beyond the tale of two unlikely lovers is a story about dealing with loss, finding one’s identity, and navigating one’s way through a

Written by Margaret K. Pai, the Dreams of Two Yi-min narrates the story of her Korean American family with the main focus on the life journeys of her father and mother, Do In Kwon and Hee Kyung Lee. Much like the majority of the pre-World War II immigrants, the author’s family is marked and characterized by the common perception of the “typical” Asian immigrant status in the early 20th century: low class, lack of English speaking ability, lack of transferable education and skills, and lack of knowledge on the host society’s mainstream networks and institutions (Zhou and Gatewood 120, Zhou 224). Despite living in a foreign land with countless barriers and lack of capital, Kwon lead his wife and children to assimilate culturally,

People only focuses on where they are but forgets where they came from. In “The Trip Back”, Robert Olen Butler criticizes self and family importance on cultural perspective through the story of Khánh, a Vietnamese man living in Louisiana, who is on a way back of picking up his wife’s grandfather. Butler sets cultural difference viewpoint as the crucial aspect of the story through Khánh’s behavior.

Continuing with the views of Nguyen and his parents, Nguyen’s split identity of being Vietnamese and American is fueled by the way he interacts with his family. The aforementioned disagreement between Nguyen and his parents on fighting the

Do, Minh Hong T. Tieng Viet: Introduction to Vietnamese Language and Culture. 3rd ed. Sacramento: Cosumnes River College, 2004. Print.

c. In Khmer society, sexual pleasure was very important. Women were allowed to find a new sexual partner if their husband left for months. Also, any female beauty could be summoned to be the king’s concubine. For

In the book The Quiet American Phoung, the beautiful Vietnamese girl caught in a love triangle with an American spy and a war correspondent, is seen as a commodity, something to be bartered, without actually taking her feelings into consideration. She is treated as a delicate victim who needs saving by the men in the book but although it seems like Greene is portraying Phuong as nothing more than an object, he means for her to represent much more than that. Greene’s portrayal of Phuong as an object represents the treatment of the Vietnamese people in the hands of the Americans. She is meant to be symbolic of her country, both men, American and British want to possess her, much like the war raging in Vietnam.

Ninh’s novel jumps between flashbacks of the war and Kien’s love affairs, in particular one with his childhood sweetheart Phuong. Ninh uses the reoccurring theme of Kien’s love, or loss of love, as a metaphor for the impact the war had on the Vietnamese people. The original title of the novel is actually The Destiny of Love. Kien likens the war to a soldiers love saying, “The sorrow of war inside a soldier’s heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia…It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past” (Ninh, 94). Kien does find himself often reminiscing of his young innocent love with Phuong. The end of the novel focuses

The article “Clashing Dreams: Highly Educated Overseas Brides and Low-Wage U.S. Husbands” discusses the trend of marriages between highly educated women living in Vietnam and under-employed, low-income Vietnamese men living overseas. Both of these groups are unmarriageable by traditional Vietnamese standards. The women are generally older, in their late twenties to early thirties, with college educations and lucrative jobs. They view the pool of marriageable men in Vietnam to be underachieving and disrespectful of women. Conversely, Viet Kieu men, Vietnamese men who live in other countries, are seen as more respectful of women, and less controlling, since they live in more westernized countries. The Viet Kieu men, ironically, are looking for women who have been subject to fewer western influences than the women in the countries where they live, and who are more traditional. These men believe that women from Vietnam

The lives of women and experiences they faced were due to the stereotypes that are given to women during the time of the seventeenth century. Women are meant to be married, have children, and to attend to the needs of her husband as well as the needs of the household, not do the work of their husbands like Hsi-lu did.

Nam Le's “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” is a story about a male student trying to write a creative writing paper for his college class. The student, also named Nam, is suffering from writers block when his father comes to visit him. Le tells of Nam's struggle with the issue of whether he should write about his father's accounts of his survival during My Lai, and the Vietnam prison camps during the Vietnam War. “Love and Honor” talks of many issues surrounding ethnic literature, such as: 'authenticity', exploitation, who can write ethnic literature, and what could be described as a personal narrative. One of the obvious things in “Love and Honor” is the relationship between the father and the son, how neither of them actually knows enough about the other to understand each other, and also how the son trying to become something better with his life is something that the father both wants and doesn't want for his son.

In this article Brady tries to connect to every type of wife by stating all of the possible things they may do in a day. In doing this she is using pathos, because she trying to connect with their emotions. A lot of the examples are the same as the one for logos, when she says “I want a wife to” or “I want a wife that will” (229-230). She does not think that every wife does everything she states, but by listing all of the examples she is appealing to the largest audience that she can. One specific example of her using pathos in a sarcastic tone is when she says that she wants the liberty to replace her wife and then goes on to say “Naturally, I will expect a fresh, new life…” (230). It infuriates her audience when she says that, because it makes wives look more like tools than women, and since most of her audience are women it aggravates them even more. Brady uses her writing to make her audience think that wives do too much for their families without appreciation.

Han Kang’s use of comparison between two closely related but very different characters demonstrates society’s definition of a dutiful wife. Unable to withstand the embarrassment of having a wife he is not proud of, he leaves her. Han Kang used the sense of pressure to depict not only the public opinion, but also the force that drives Mr. Cheong’s actions.

Late one afternoon in a small village of Northern Vietnam ,Gilbert is sitting in a soothy kitchen fire with a number of local women which language is she didn’t understand,and trying to ask question about marriage .