This morning I started reading a memoir called Paper Daughter by M. Elaine Mar. This is not the first account by a Chinese of her upbringing in China which has enthralled me from the first sentence. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club cast a similar trance with stories of an unabashedly autocratic parenting system which teaches young girls to be obedient, helpful, demure and feminine.
I love the contrast between the parents' stifling tactics and the child's natural impulses, or the ways the child misconstrues some of the parents' carefully conveyed messages, as when the narrator's mother tells her that her grandmother doesn't have to follow the same rules as everyone else only because she's old and has earned privileges.
"Oh yes," the mother says solemnly, "You must respect your elders." The young girl does respect her grandmother immensely, but only because she's allowed to go about without combing her hair. The girl hates her daily appointment with her mother's comb, and longs for such freedom from tyranny to be her right.
Or when the child understands things the parents never attempted to teach, lessons learned through experience and observation. For example, Ms. Mar learns from watching her mother and their female neighbor give each other false compliments to fulfil a social expectation of flattery alongside self-deprecation. Her mother coos at the young child of their neighbor, and the neighbor says
"'Isn't auntie kind! Oh see how much she likes you!'
Moy-moy, who was two, tottered off to fetch her chamberpot for me, prompting laughter from the two mothers. 'See how much she likes you, little Yee?' they asked. Perched on the rim of Moy-moy's toilet, I began to understand the meaning of subservience, a proxy for affection in our culture."
There are aspects of Ms. Mar's childhood which recall significant moments of my own. She recalls that her mother told her the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf every single day. I remember the first time my mother told me that story, and how profoundly that message hit home. The narrator of Paper Daughter says that she shivered when the boy died at the end, eaten by the wolf because of his own foolishness. I think my version was the sanitized American translation, in which only the lives of a few hapless sheep are sacrificed to the moral of the story. But the effect was strong. I think my mother told me that story only once, and she did not follow it with the narrator's mother's daily commentary: "You must never lie."
Yesterday, our second day on Beowulf in the 11/12 classroom, students wrote at the beginning of class about what people in their culture tend to talk about when they get together. The natural division that arose in first period and was maintained in the rest of the day was the generational gap - they students wanted to divide the conversation topics into what Older people talk about, and what Younger people talk about. After they discussed with their partners, we took feedback as a class, which resulted in these lists.
Then, we read the opening segments of Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney. Our question was, what do these people seem to care about? What do they talk about? Several of the same things came up - leaders, how to be "good," how to achieve power and wealth, former struggles, community problems.
I need to find a way to post our conversation topics in the class, so we can keep an eye to what these people are talking about that we also talk about.
I love the contrast between the parents' stifling tactics and the child's natural impulses, or the ways the child misconstrues some of the parents' carefully conveyed messages, as when the narrator's mother tells her that her grandmother doesn't have to follow the same rules as everyone else only because she's old and has earned privileges.
"Oh yes," the mother says solemnly, "You must respect your elders." The young girl does respect her grandmother immensely, but only because she's allowed to go about without combing her hair. The girl hates her daily appointment with her mother's comb, and longs for such freedom from tyranny to be her right.
Or when the child understands things the parents never attempted to teach, lessons learned through experience and observation. For example, Ms. Mar learns from watching her mother and their female neighbor give each other false compliments to fulfil a social expectation of flattery alongside self-deprecation. Her mother coos at the young child of their neighbor, and the neighbor says
"'Isn't auntie kind! Oh see how much she likes you!'
Moy-moy, who was two, tottered off to fetch her chamberpot for me, prompting laughter from the two mothers. 'See how much she likes you, little Yee?' they asked. Perched on the rim of Moy-moy's toilet, I began to understand the meaning of subservience, a proxy for affection in our culture."
There are aspects of Ms. Mar's childhood which recall significant moments of my own. She recalls that her mother told her the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf every single day. I remember the first time my mother told me that story, and how profoundly that message hit home. The narrator of Paper Daughter says that she shivered when the boy died at the end, eaten by the wolf because of his own foolishness. I think my version was the sanitized American translation, in which only the lives of a few hapless sheep are sacrificed to the moral of the story. But the effect was strong. I think my mother told me that story only once, and she did not follow it with the narrator's mother's daily commentary: "You must never lie."
Yesterday, our second day on Beowulf in the 11/12 classroom, students wrote at the beginning of class about what people in their culture tend to talk about when they get together. The natural division that arose in first period and was maintained in the rest of the day was the generational gap - they students wanted to divide the conversation topics into what Older people talk about, and what Younger people talk about. After they discussed with their partners, we took feedback as a class, which resulted in these lists.
Then, we read the opening segments of Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney. Our question was, what do these people seem to care about? What do they talk about? Several of the same things came up - leaders, how to be "good," how to achieve power and wealth, former struggles, community problems.
I need to find a way to post our conversation topics in the class, so we can keep an eye to what these people are talking about that we also talk about.
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