Prompts 14-18

Prompt 14
In the beginning Fugui does not show any of the traditional Chinese values and his life is not good. Fugui loses his family home due to his gambling problem, he almost loses his wife due to the gambling and generally not showing that he cares about her welfare or his children's. Yet it also shows that when the communists move in and he sees how bad life could be, he works to fix things. Fugui wins favor within the communist camps through his puppet shows and is able to work out a meager but decent life for himself and his family in the commune. Throughout the movie Fugui begins to show more of the traditional values and his life grows increasingly better. To live is to live well which is not measured by weath but by being a good person good will come to you. This seems to relate to the idea of yin and yang, that there is good and there is bad but through living well you can find the better of the two. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution are difficult times in history in which the people have to learn to adapt, although things may be tough, through hard work and adaptation they are able to make the best of their situation.

Prompt 15
Ethnic villages bring a sense of community and oneness with a person's own ethnicity despite being far away from their origins. Chinatown and all that it has to offer helps the people of the area retain their ethnic identity by being able to interact with people of similar backgrouds, purchase items they may not be able to find in local stores and take part in cultural activities that they would otherwise miss out on. Usually these areas would be seen by locals as ghettos or the like, yet now they are tourist attractions.

Prompt 16
The meal in Chinatown was quite the event. The items on the menu were in English but their descriptions were in Chinese so it seemed best to go with things we had heard of. The use of chopsticks usually causes a problem to some and it seemed that a few people reached a point in which they were more exhausted from trying to eat than actually full. The fact that the food was brought out and placed on a lazy susan was interesting. While we as Westerners (and the most obese in the world) are typically used to getting to eat everything that we ordered, this style of eating promoted sharing and made the meal more interactive than it would typically be if we stuck to shovelling food into our faces from our own plates.

Prompt 17
When we spoke of this topic in class we spoke of A.B.C.s or American Born Chinese and this crosses into other Asian nationalities as well. Although these people may have two parents of one nationality, if they grow up in America they are treated differently. These people are no longer just Chinese or Taiwanese because they pick up American ideas and values and may have never learned their parent's language, yet they are not considered fully American because they still retain some of their ethnic heritage.

Prompt 18
China's impression of human rights was shocking to me and seemed almost as if they were looking into a mirror at times. It was claimed that U.S. businesses work people in almost slave conditions yet this seems that this statement could be turned on the Chinese. China also claimed that the U.S. had a higher crime rate and blamed this on the availability of owning private firearms, they stated that since this was not allowed in China, crime was not a big issue there. It almost seemed that China deemed many of the U.S.'s problems on the fact that there is competition in the work place, to gain wealth, etc while the Chinese are in a way predestined for their positions so there is little competition.