ENG II Lit Circle Book Intros

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This was not my case. Instead the village matchmaker came to my family when I was just two years old. No, nobody told me this, I remember it all. Itw as summertime, very hot and dusty outside, and I could hear the cicadas crying in the yard. We were under some trees in our orchard. The servants and my brothers were picking pears high above me. And I was sitting in my mother's hot sticky arms. I was waving my hand this way and that, because in front of me floated a small bird with horns and colorful paperthin wings. And then the paper bird flew away and in front of me were two ladies. I remember them because one lady made watery "shrrhh shrrhh" sounds. When I was older, I came to recognize this as a Peking accent, which sounds quite strange to Taiyuan people's ears.The two ladies were looking at my face without talking. The lady with the watery voice had a painted face that was melting. The other lady had the dry face of an old tree trunk. She looked first at me, then at the painted lady.Of course, now I know the tree-trunk lady was the old village matchmaker, and the other was Huang Taitai, the mother of the boy I would be forced to marry. No, it's not true what some Chinese say about girl babies being worthless. It depends on what kind of girl baby you are. In my case, people could see my value. I look and smelled like a precious buncake, sweet with a good clean color.

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AMY tAN Interview

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THERE WERE ALL KINDS of stories told about the war that made it sound as if it was happening in a faraway and different land. It wasn’t until refugees started passing through our town that we began to see that it was actually taking place in our country. Families who had walked hundreds of miles told how relatives had been killed and their houses burned. Some people felt sorry for them and offered them places to stay, but most of the refugees refused, because they said the war would eventually reach our town. The children of these families wouldn’t look at us, and they jumped at the sound of chopping wood or as stones landed on the tin roofs flung by children hunting birds with slingshots. The adults among these children from the war zones would be lost in their thoughts during conversations with the elders of my town. Apart from their fatigue and malnourishment, it was evident they had seen something that plagued their minds, something that we would refuse to accept if they told us all of it. At times I thought that some of the stories the passersby told were exaggerated. The only wars I knew of were those that I had read about in books or seen in movies such as Rambo: First Blood, and the one in neighboring Liberia that I had heard about on the BBC news. My imagination at ten years old didn’t have the capacity to grasp what had taken away the happiness of the refugees.

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Ishmael Beah Interview

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I grew up in South Africa during apartheid, which was awkward because I was raised in a mixed family, with me being the mixed one in the family. My mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, is black. My father, Robert, is white. Swiss/German, to be precise, which Swiss/Germans invariably are. During apartheid, one of the worst crimes you could commit was having sexual relations with a person of another race. Needless to say, my parents committed that crime. In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race-mixing proves that races can mix— and in a lot of cases, want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason. There were mixed kids in South Africa nine months after the first Dutch boats hit the beach in Table Bay. Just like in America, the colonists here had their way with the native women, as colonists so often do. Unlike in America, where anyone with one drop of black blood automatically became black, in South Africa mixed people came to be classified as their own separate group, neither black nor white but what we call “colored.” Colored people, black people, white people, and Indian people were forced to register their race with the government. Based on those classifications, millions of people were uprooted and relocated. Indian areas were segregated from colored areas, which were segregated from black areas—all of them segregated from white areas and separated from one another by buffer zones of empty land. Laws were passed prohibiting relations between Europeans and natives, laws that were later amended to prohibit relations between whites and all nonwhites. The government went to insane lengths to try to enforce these new laws. The penalty for breaking them was five years in prison. There were whole police squads whose only job was to go around peeking through windows—clearly an assignment for only the finest law enforcement officers. And if an interracial couple got caught, God help them.

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Trevor Noah Interview

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The Joy Luck Club describes the lives of four Asian women who fled China in the 1940s and their four very Americanized daughters. The novel focuses on Jing-mei "June" Woo, a thirty-six-year-old daughter, who, after her mother's death, takes her place at the meetings of a social group called the Joy Luck Club. As its members play mah jong and feast on Chinese delicacies, the older women spin stories about the past and lament the barriers that exist between their daughters and themselves. Suyuan Woo, the founder of the Joy Luck Club, barely escaped war-torn China with her life and was forced to leave her twin infant daughters behind. Her American-born daughter, Jing-mei "June" Woo, works as a copywriter for a small advertising firm. She lacks her mother's drive and self-confidence but finds her identity after her mother's death when she meets her twin half-sisters in China. An-mei Hsu grew up in the home of the wealthy merchant Wu Tsing. She was without status because her mother was only the third wife. After her mother's suicide, An-mei came to America, married, and had seven children. Like Jing-mei Woo, An-mei's daughter Rose is unsure of herself. She is nearly prostrate with grief when her husband, Ted, demands a divorce. After a breakdown, she finds her identity and learns to assert herself. Lindo Jong was betrothed at infancy to another baby, Tyan-yu. They married as preteens and lived in Tyan-yu's home. There, Lindo was treated like a servant. She cleverly tricked the family, however, and gained her freedom. She came to America, got a job in a fortune cookie factory, met and married Tin Jong. Her daughter, Waverly, was a chess prodigy who became a successful tax accountant. Ying-ying St. Clair grew up a wild, rebellious girl in a wealthy family. After she married, her husband deserted her, and Ying-ying had an abortion and lived in poverty for a decade. Then she married Clifford St. Clair and emigrated to America. Her daughter, Lena, is on the verge of a divorce from her architect husband, Harold Livotny.

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By Amy Tan

The Joy Luck Club

Published: 1989Genre: Novel, DramaSetting: Most stories take place anywhere from 1920 to the late 1980s. Much of the novel is set in China prior to 1944Tense: The Joy Luck Club is told in the past and present tenses.

A Long Way Gone is the true story of Ishmael Beah, who becomes an unwilling boy soldier during a civil war in Sierra Leone. When he is twelve years old, Beah's village is attacked while he is away performing in a rap group with friends. Among the confusion, violence, and uncertainty of the war, Ishmael, his brother, and his friends wander from village to village in search of food and shelter. Their day-to-day existence is a struggle of survival, and the boys find themselves committing acts they would never have believed themselves capable of, such as stealing food from children. Eventually, Ishmael is conscripted as a soldier by the army and he becomes the very thing he feared: a killing machine capable of horrible violence. The army becomes his family and he is brainwashed into believing that each rebel death may avenge his own family's slaughter. The boy soldiers become addicted to cocaine, marijuana, and "brown brown," which give them the courage to fight and the ability to repress their emotions in times of war. Ishmael continues to soldier fiercely until his Lieutenant turns the boy soldiers over to UNICEF. Ishmael is taken to a rehabilitation center, where he struggles to understand his past and to imagine a future. The love and compassion he finds at the center from a nurse named Esther opens up an understanding and forgiveness within himself. Ishmael is welcomed by his extended family in Freetown and is again saved by their support and kindness.

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Author Interview

By Ishmael Beah

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solidier

Published: 2007 Genre: Memoir Setting: Sierra Leone, West Africa Time Period: Sierra Leone Civil War, 1991-2002

In Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, comedian and television personality Trevor Noah gives a heartfelt and funny recounting of his experiences growing up in South Africa as an oppressed person. Stories of Noah’s life are interspersed with insights into South Africa’s culture, systems, and history. Noah was born in 1984 to a single mother, Patricia, during the time of racial segregation known as apartheid. Patricia was a strong, driven woman who paid little heed to the racist laws that oppressed her. Noah’s father, Robert, agreed to give Patricia a child during a time when sexual relationships between black and white South Africans were illegal. Robert, a Swiss immigrant, never supported segregation and did what he could to undermine apartheid. Because it was dangerous for Patricia and Robert to be seen with their mixed-race child, Noah recalls sometimes being momentarily abandoned by his parents in public settings.

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Author Interview

Trevor Noah

Born A Crime

Published: 2019Genre: MemoirSetting: South AfricaTime Period: During the Apartheid in South AfricaWhat is the Apartheid?The Apartheid was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s