Yellow Earth Essay

Both Yellow Earth and Two Stage Sisters use oppressed females as the main characters where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could be the solution to provide liberation for them. The main characters are portrayed as strong willed. In Two Stage Sisters, Chunhua has a strong sense of righteousness which is displayed throughout the film. She is insistent on performing the revolutionary operas even though it may be a threat to her life. Her strong nature is shown again in her willingness to stand up to those who tried to ruin her reputation in the courtroom scene. Cuiqiao, from Yellow Earth, also shows strong will to break from oppressive tradition of arranged marriage and seek freedom with the CCP. The films show the character development from both main characters being in the working class to being exposed to these new ideas.

However, their fortune is short-lived when bad omens rise because of Wang Lung’s insolent behavior towards his uncle’s family. Not only is their third child born a daughter, but a drought begins, preventing the land from cultivating and spreading both poverty and starvation through the North.

She had been sold off and married at the age of two and after moving in with her husband’s family, was treated as a servant. “This was a place for cooks and servants. So I knew my standing.” (pg. 28). This was the tradition in China which in turn was unjust toward her and her quality of life but also due to her being of a somewhat lower class and being an unmarried woman.

Furthermore, instead of arranged marriages that only benefited the patriarchal head, intellectuals pushed for marriages based on love which would create happy and productive citizens . In addition, based on her mother’s experience, Bao Qin rejects arranged marriages and intends to only marry for love . After hearing of two concubines who drug Cousin Hu’s mother to feign adultery and gain the favour of her husband, Bao Qin is enraged by the historic “powerlessness of women, [the] barbarity of age-old customs, cloaked in tradition .” With the broad shift from tradition as well as her own personal experience, Bao Qin rejects traditional gender roles and seeks to create her own. Furthermore, as China became divided into separate spheres of influence and opened to international markets, British and American industrialization brought new ideas of opportunities for women, challenging established gender relations . With new economic opportunities and education, women could become self-reliant, broadening their choices and their role in society. Consequently, after disobeying her parents’ command to attend Mr. Liu’s funeral, Bao Qin was able to support herself by enrolling in a new teacher training department . Reducing patriarchal control, industrialization allowed children to head to schools and factories, no longer needing to rely on their parents for education and work . As a result, while foreign

In Ha Jin’s novel Waiting, we are introduced to the protagonist Lin Kong a doctor in the ostensibly progressive communist Chinese Army. Lin Kong is agonizingly bound to Shuyu, the peasant wife his parents had arranged for him to marry due to this arrangement, Lin struggles with the cultural appropriations afflicted upon him within his family and love life as models of old are challenged with the new. His arranged marriage has bequeathed him to believe that his relationship with Shuyu is empty considering his lack of love for his wife, furthermore this leads to the ever-prevalent emotional strife and difficult decisions he faces throughout the novel while the Cultural Revolution is manifested. Anthony Gidden’s essay Family from the The Runaway World states that, “There is a global revolution going on in how we think of ourselves and how form ties and connections with others,” that is “advancing unevenly in different regions and cultures, with many resistances (Giddens 52). With this being said, the “Waiting” allows for us to explore Lin Kong’s relationships, marriages and multiple struggles with his identity during this transitory period in his life with the implied reforms that are to come with the Cultural Revolution in China.

There was a river. The first time I went to my aunt’s farm in rural China I was seven, and the only memory I could recall was the powerful, roaring river I needed to cross. There was a river. The second time I visited their farm, I also saw how all the local farmers and various other farming conglomerates used the river to develop the land and feed the thirsty quinoa and corn. There was a river. I went to her farm once again this past summer, and was shocked to see that the once strong and raging river was reduced to nothing more than a trickling stream due to overuse and a worsening environmental climate. She was forced to move to the impoverished city of ChiFeng and now has to do menial labor for her meager three dollars an hour.

To say this movie is an indictment of Communism or even of the antiquated customs persistent in the Shaanxi province of pre-WWII Northern China would mean seeing only part of the overall picture. The panoramic shots that the movie opens with create a sense of desolation – barren hills, desert landscape, and shoddy buildings housing poor farmers clawing their way through existence. The message of this movie is received not just from the characters and their actions, but from the setting and period as well. This use of the concept mis en scene achieves a certain impact on the viewer. The soil is dry and bland; the sky often mixes with the earth surrounding the characters in permanent gloom; the river is murky and slow. It was Bazin

The grandmother in this story symbolises Lin’s Chinese heritage. She is not very fond of taking

The mist in opening scene and overall color tone of grey suggests that Wang is paddling into a world of dullness. With his houseboat- his only sanctuary- Wang travels around to make a living by performing Bianlian in return of donation from people who appreciate his art on the street. Desperation and poverty are not only accompanying people in the slave market but also Wang: his wife left him after the death of his son; his only companion is not a human but a monkey. Master Liang’s confession that “ we all have our own sorrows” reflects the folk artists fate of twists and turns and bitterness. During one performance, Wang is intimidated and oppressed by soldiers, but he can only chant woefully “The dragon in the shallows is toyed with by the shrimp”. Many proverbs like this in the film convey to audiences his hardship and helplessness. Government corruption is also disclosed in the movie when Wang is falsely charged of all kidnap cases and imprisoned. In his quest for an heir, Wang visits Buddhist temple to pray and buys a Buddha to worship in the hope that it may gift him a son. All Wang’s spiritual sustenance is on the Buddha body. This showed Wang’s inner weakness and helplessness towards his own destiny.

All through time, successive generations have rebelled against the values and traditions of their elders. In all countries, including China, new generations have sought to find a different path than that of their past leaders. Traditional values become outdated and are replaced with what the younger society deems as significant. Family concentrates on this very subject. In the novel, three brothers struggle against the outdated Confucian values of their elders. Alike in their dislike of the traditional Confucian system of their grandfather, yet very different in their interactions with him and others, begin to reach beyond the ancient values of Confucianism and strive for a breath of freedom. Their struggles against the old values

The poem "A Song of Changgan" is very poignant, as it starts with a bashful girl who does not even smile around her husband and ends with her almost heartbroken, as her husband is far away. The poem shows the different stages of the relationship of the speaker and her husband, and it is an excellent example of long-distance relationships before modern communication systems.

and Mrs. Gao embrace the stereotypical patriarchal Taiwanese society—with Mr. Gao symbolizing how the tradition works. When Mrs. Gao speaks to Wai-Tung from the tape cassette, she references how Mr. Gao commanded many soldiers as a general but now Mrs. Gao is all that is left at home for the retired Mr. Gao to command. Her saddened words reflect on the amount power of the father figure has over the family. The parents are very eager for Wai-Tung to marry and provide an heir to continue the family line, without offering any concern for Wai-Tung’s own happiness. The view of continuing the family line is quite obsolete when compared with the modernized sentiments evidenced in current Taiwan (Gold 1092) in the younger population, but the elderly Mr. Gao’s desires are likened to the localist resentment in preserving traditional family values—maintaining an extended family at whatever the

In the film, The Yellow Earth directly addresses a relationship between the nature of the land that underlies the Maoist revolutionary. Peasants in The Yellow Earth struggle hard to survive against the hardships of the land, as they have done throughout their tradition and that tradition is questioned by a soldier that brings them the idea of Communism. Communism was meant to improve the lives of these peasants and create equality for all. In Chinese culture there is the ‘Theory of the Five Elements’ that is represented in the film as each representation of nature in the film is presented in a way to show this theory as that Earth is the color of yellow. Another example, is such as the girl in the opening scene, who spends a lot of time carrying

San Cong Si De epitomises the notion of the traditional female virtues in China at the time, which Cuiqiao is tied to.

The Yellow River is located in Qinghai, China. In the present day it is not very dense in population. It is a very high-altitude called the Tibetan Plateau. It is place of strong Tibetan and Mongol cultural traditions in present day China. The Yellow River is known by all Chinese people as the “mother river” (Wu). It is also agreed upon by almost all Chinese people that it is the cradle of Chinese civilization and the spiritual home of the Chinese people (Zhou). The Yellow River is the symbol of the Chinese nation, the spirt of the Chinese people, but most importantly civilization itself.