Reeducation

The Chinese reeducation by the communist party after World War II was a significant part of recent history in the East. With the new age of communism China adopted this new government which dramatically began to change the lives of the Chinese people. With this revolution thousands of city people were relocated to the country to learn the ways of their ancestors in farming. Da Sijie writes the story Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress providing an eye witness report of the process of reeducation and the hardships these people encountered. The author provides a more intimate version of history by using some fictional characters and allowing the audience to fall in love with them. This makes everything that happens to them and what they experience all the more real. Also these characters being only in their teens connect to me a lot more than a history book would as even though they live in another time on the other side of the world, I can still relate to them. I can connect to the story. A real event I never experienced so insane it might as well have been fiction. However reading this book, I feel as if I am sitting on the great mountain in the China in reeducation.

The Second Quarter

So far this year in English Class has gone pretty well. I know boring start right? But I think I have gotten off to a steady start in English my sophomore. My teacher Mr. McCandless has not thrown me for a loop yet and I seem to be holding on well. My writing has been getting better in respect to structure and putting my ideas in a logical order that flows. We have read a lot, most of it being short stories which I have really enjoyed along with the poetry we have been analyzing. I am doing well with the quizzes on all of the material and I think my annotations have become a lot more thorough. I just think that as our class moves into the next quarter that as long as I continue to work hard and improve the results will as well. With more effort in some areas, the rest of this semester will be even better than the first.

The Ban on Knowledge

For this weeks journal entry I did some research on a rather controversial topic that has been relevant for thousands of years. Books. I know I was surprised too. Although literature is not the kind of controversy people are used to today like immigration policies or hate crimes, books are a significant source of controversy. I found famous classics that have been deemed illegal in some place in the world with famous names like John Steinbeck and Kurt Vonnegut. In fact one banned book I recently read was actually The Complete Persepolis. As an English class we went over this book and someone or some group in the world thinks it deserves to be censored and taken off of shelves. They do not think it is suitable literature accusing it of such crimes as adult themes or "explicit" substances like alcohol. Or it could be banned for something as small as conveying a negative theme like sadness or depression. While many think they are protecting society from dangerous literature, this censorship of knowledge seems to only remind me in other times in history such as Nazi Germany and the Communist Revolution in China. In my own opinion there is no good reason for destroying or hiding literature.