“Fan Jin Passes the Juren Examination” is a story written by Wu Jingxi, a failed scholar, that attempts to satirize the lofty ideals of the imperial examination. It tells the story of a fifty-year old man who has continually failed the examinations for thirty four years and has sought to pass the exams for all his life. Fan Jin exemplifies the struggle of every male in this era who has also devoted their lives in passing the examination in order to acquire an official title. This struggle is especially true for males coming from a humble background, like Fan Jin, and because the imperial examinations offer an opportunity of climbing up the steep and rigid social hierarchy of Chinese society, the mentality of bringing this glory to your family and yourself is romanticized. This glorification is with good reason too, because indeed the fruit of a scholar’s labor will taste so sweet. When Fan Jin passes the examinations, he is revered by his neighbours, villagers, and his whole family, including his father-in-law, Butcher Hu, who has always treated him with little respect. It is interesting to note that Butcher Hu changes his blunt attitude towards Fan Jin after learning that he passed. He went from treating Fan Jin like dirt to regarding him highly as “one of the stars in heaven” and hesitates to hit him unlike before. Other people around the village also show them their respect by offering him gifts. In conclusion, the story “Fan Jin Passes the Juren Examination” satirizes the struggle of pursuing scholars and the glorification of the rewards that come with passing the imperial
exams.
Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was brutally beaten by two white men with baseball bats in Detroit during the summer of 1982. They had just lost their jobs in the auto-industry because Japanese cars were gaining popularity in America, and they had assumed Chin was Japanese. Chin died a few days later in the hospital due to injuries sustained during the attack. When the case was brought to court, the courts ruled that the two white men has simply been attempting to teach Chin a lesson, and the two men got off with a fine of a few thousand dollars and a couple years ' probation. This ruling was what sparked the modern Asian American civil rights movement in the United States. The information presented here is what I already know from multiple workshops I 've attended and led on Vincent Chin and his story. What I want to know is how much of this information should Wayne State’s faculty and students know? Telling and hearing this story multiple times, I personally feel that residents of Detroit should know about the spark of a revolution in their hometown, but should they really? My personal attachments the Vincent Chin story have led to pursue the attempt of answering this question.
Murder Could you believe or even imagine a charming, handsome and popular high school boy killing his ex-girl-friend? This is the case involving Adnan Syed in the murder of Hae Min Lee in 1999. "On January 13, 1999, a girl named Hae Min Lee, a senior at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, disappeared. A month later, her body turned up in a city park.
Ban Zhao wrote Lessons for a Woman around the end of the first century C.E. as social guide for (her daughters and other) women of Han society (Bulliet 167). Because Zhao aimed to educate women on their responsibilities and required attributes, one is left questioning what the existing attitudes and roles of women were to start with. Surprisingly, their positions were not automatically fixed at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Ban Zhao’s own status as an educated woman of high social rank exemplifies the “reality [that] a woman’s status depended on her “location” within various social institutions’ (167). This meant that women had different privileges and opportunities depending on their economic, social, or political background. Wealthier noble women would likely have access to an education and may have even been able to wield certain political power (167). Nevertheless, women relinquished this power within the family hierarchy to their fathers, husbands, and sons. Despite her own elevated social status, Ban Zhao still considered herself an “unworthy writer”, “unsophisticated”, “unenlightened’, “unintelligent”, and a frequent disgrace to her and her husband’s family (Zhao). Social custom was not, however, the only driving force behind Zhao’s desire to guide women towards proper behavior.
The Cultural Revolution in China was led by Mao Zedong, due to this Liang and many others faced overwhelming obstacles in many aspects of their life such as work, family and everyday encounters, if affected everyone’s families life and education, Liang lets us experience his everyday struggles during this era, where the government determined almost every aspect of life. The beginning of the book starts out with Liang’s typical life, which seems normal, he has a family which consists of three children, two older sisters and him the youngest, his two sister’s reside in Changsha 1. his father has an everyday occupation working as a journalist at a local newspaper. Things start to take a turn early in life for Liang Heng, his family politics were always questioned, the mistake made by one of his family members would impact his entire family and it would be something they would have to suffer through, it was impossible for them to live down such a sin.... ...
The author travels to China as an English teacher for the Hunan Medical School. There he stayed for two years picking up many anecdotes along the way. The author already had spent a large amount of his life studying Chinese language and the martial arts. However, when he arrives in China he meets teachers who have dedicated their entire lives to perfecting a particular art or skill, whether it be martial arts or calligraphy.
The Death of Woman Wang, by Jonathan Spence is an educational historical novel of northeastern China during the seventeenth century. The author's focus was to enlighten a reader on the Chinese people, culture, and traditions. Spence's use of the provoking stories of the Chinese county T'an-ch'eng, in the province of Shantung, brings the reader directly into the course of Chinese history. The use of the sources available to Spence, such as the Local History of T'an-ch'eng, the scholar-official Huang Liu-hung's handbook and stories of the writer P'u Sung-Ling convey the reader directly into the lives of poor farmers, their workers and wives. The intriguing structure of The Death of Woman Wang consists on observing these people working on the land, their family structure, and their local conflicts.
The story of Fan Jin reveals the difficulty of social mobility. By depicting Fan’s twenty-four-year in taking the basic examination and his personal poverty, the author indicates how hard it can be for a low-level people to achieve his success. Additionally, the description of people around Fan Jin vividly demonstrates the contempt for people who are without power and wealthy and the adulation to people who are with wealth and political rights. Last, but not least, Wu obtains a strong desire to irony the imperial examination system. Therefore, he describes the mental disorder of Fan Jin in order to depict the nature of the examination – to let people have more knowledge or to let people have psychiatry- and the content of exanimation in order to reveal the useless of the personnel selection
Chapter 1: The Wan-Li Emperor, begins by explaining the major premise of the work: The concept of looking at a single year in the history of the leadership of China and evaluating the implications for understanding other aspects of history, including the decline of the Ming Dynasty. In this initial chapter, Huang provides an anecdotal history of some of the events that occurred, and includes within it a discussion of the set up of the leadership, the repercussions that occurred in the event of certain actions, including the prospects of an audience with the emperor. Huang reviews these issues as he considers that actions taken by the Wan-li emperor, who was only twenty-four in 1587 and who had been a veteran of ceremonial proceedings, and considers his history as an element of understanding the progression of leadership.
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 lead to pain, suffering and eventually achievement for the three of them, however at a harsh price for two brothers.
...non-conformist attitudes, and in The King of Chess the chess fool defeating the old chess master symbolizes the act of the old culture being defeated by the new. The King of Trees depicts how the belief systems in revolutionary China enforced new social norms on the population. Understanding the power of the social norms that were imposed in China at this time helps the reader understand how individuality in the citizens might have been expressed as well as why the government felt threatened by such behavior. One theme in The King of Trees is that individuality is persistent despite what is socially acceptable, and understanding the concept of social norms allows one to appreciate both sides of the difficulty conforming to social norms.
Filial piety is as closely associated with Confucius teaching as it is one of the virtues of Confucianism. Confucius once said, “Among human practices, none is greater than xiao” (Chan, Alan Kam-Leung; Tan, Sor-hoon). There is no doubt that filial piety remained the important aspect of Chinese society, where as the philosophers such as Confucius strongly pushed forward the idea of filial piety. A ...
In the beginning, Jing-mei, is “just as excited as my mother,”(469). Jing-mei was eagerly hoping to make her mother proud. However, her mother’s obsession with becoming a prodigy discouraged Jing-mei. The daily test began to aggravated Jing-mei because they made her feel less sma...
Through the characters and their experiences in The King of Children, Ah Cheng shows the effects that the Cultural Revolution had on education and how that affected the people’s search for personal meaning in education. The Cultural Revolution and Down to the Countryside’s elimination of all practical and economic incentives for receiving an education caused characters to find moral and ethical incentives for education, such as to protect others and to be able to communicate effectively.
However, the focus here will be on the lives of the courtesans. The Genji Monogatari provides us with an unrivalled look into the inner workings of Confucianism and court life in the Heian period. Song Geng, in his discourse on power and masculinity in China, claims that Confucianism gives rise to what he calls the “fragile scholar” or caizi() as it is referred to as in traditional Chinese literature.5 The so-called fragile scholar is a common character archetype seen throughout Chinese literature and, not surprisingly, also in the Genji Monogatari.... ... middle of paper ...
?Sheet after sheet, article after article, each da-zi-bao was a bitter accusation. One was titled, ?Teacher Li, Abuser of the Young.? The student had failed to hand in her homework on time, and Teacher Li had told her to copy the assignment over five times as punishment. Another student said his teacher had deliberately ruined his students? eyesight by making them read a lot, so they could not join the Liberation Army. Still another accused Teacher Wang of attempting to corrupt a young revolutionary by buying her some bread when he learned that she had not eaten lunch.? (42)