Literary Analysis - James

How does the protagonist change from the beginning to the end of the novel?  What does this character learn about himself (or herself) and about how the world works?

In the book Jiang really changed from the beginning to the end of the novel. In-between this period of time the author goes through any changes mostly mentally. For example in the beginning she was top student and very confident. When she goes to her new school she felt nervous and less confident. All of this was due to the fact that in her last school it was found out that her family was once a family of landlords. It wasn’t even her whole family, it only her grandfather which was no longer alive. The author also finds herself hating her family and past more and more because it was preventing her from moving forward in life. Then at the end of the novel she realizes that that was the past and she needed to look into the future. After that she felt better about her family and was determined to not let it break apart. 

The view of the world is one of the most important topics in the book or at least the view of China at the time. Reading the book living in 2015 gives the opportunity to see how different from todays society is. The author however could not see into the future to what modern China has become. In the beginning of the book the author was unaware of what stirring. She though that she was the most privileged person in the world. Later on she thought that she was the unluckiest because she was born into a family that has a “dark” past. When her family starting to be broken apart by the officials that were convinced that her father was listening to foreign radio, she thought that the world was an awful place to live.

In the end of the book the author explains how her family moved to the US and she went to live in Hawaii. Here she realized how free people in the US were. She saw people make fun of the president and not have to worry about a thing. This totally changed the way she saw the world. In the US she was allowed to write books about her experiences and not have to worry about a thing. This probably taught her a lot about herself because for once now she had an opportunity to read different books and different views on what she went through. This gave her another side of the story and maybe she read of stories much worse than hers.

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