20070131
Once Upon a Time in Vancouver...
The last thing first-year university students expect to study in an English course at Simon Fraser University is a fairy tale. After all, having just recently been promoted from adolescent to young adult, shouldn’t they be given a chance to demonstrate their brilliance with a more mature text? Pauline Johnson disagrees with this outlook. Her short story “The Siwash Rock” is, after all, a typical fairy tale. It is complete with a Once Upon A Time (“it was thousands of years ago” [16]), a beautiful, brave and admired prince (“handsome boy chief… an excellent warrior… courageous man among men” [16]), a lovely girl that becomes his wife, and a seemingly-impossible triumph for a good cause. The story even ends with the couple living Happily Ever After: “from everlasting to everlasting” (18). This fairy tale must not be confused as fiction; for the two are distinctly separate: works of fiction provide insight to our own identities, whereas fairy tales do not possess the same appeal. I came into English 101 expecting to focus on fictional texts, not fairy tales, and for this reason Pauline Johnson’s “The Siwash Rock” is my least favorite addition to Vancouver Short Stories.
20070130
Hooray for Cliché: The Jade Peony
The Jade Peony was seven pages and ten minutes of my life that I desperately want back again.
Wayson Choy’s attempt at creating an emotional, heart-breaking account of the waning days of an old immigrant’s life comes off as clichéd and disconnected. The most painful part was the imagery, which, much of the time, was underdeveloped and vague in meaning. At best, the jade peony, which is important enough to Grandmama to become the title of the story, is mentioned as the centrepiece of a windchime that an old friend had given to her, and something that she “kept…always in her pocket, until her death.” (p. 120) While surely the author’s intention was for the jade peony to represent a magnificently beautiful thing that she treasured because it brightened her day, it mainly comes off as a symbol of materialism and superficiality, and did not spark much sympathy for me. The other image that struck me as relatively underdeveloped was the juggling magician. Perhaps the significance of teaching someone how to juggle is simply lost upon me, as I myself cannot do such a thing, but the description of this magician jumps from his abilities to strong emotional bonds without any sort of tangible, realistic connection (“He had been magician, acrobat, juggler, and some of the things he taught her she had absorbed and passed on to me...But above all, without realising it then, her hands conveyed to me the quality of their love.”). (p. 120)
On top of the imagery, the characters were downright annoying. The family as a whole comes off as very obsessive with their social status, putting down Grandmama’s rummaging for pieces for her windchimes (“We are not poor…yet she and Sek-Lung poke through those awful things as if…they were beggars!”), and generally unsupportive and unhappy with their lives, as displayed by the children when they complain about their schoolwork incessantly, shortly after they’d complained about Grandmama. (p. 120, p. 122)
Lastly, perhaps I’d missed it, but nowhere could I find the part where Grandmama gives Sek-Lung the jade peony, as he plays around with it in his pocket at the closing of the story. Evidently, not only is Grandmama a dear old lady with a rummaging fetish, her grandson is also a bit of a thief.
Wayson Choy’s attempt at creating an emotional, heart-breaking account of the waning days of an old immigrant’s life comes off as clichéd and disconnected. The most painful part was the imagery, which, much of the time, was underdeveloped and vague in meaning. At best, the jade peony, which is important enough to Grandmama to become the title of the story, is mentioned as the centrepiece of a windchime that an old friend had given to her, and something that she “kept…always in her pocket, until her death.” (p. 120) While surely the author’s intention was for the jade peony to represent a magnificently beautiful thing that she treasured because it brightened her day, it mainly comes off as a symbol of materialism and superficiality, and did not spark much sympathy for me. The other image that struck me as relatively underdeveloped was the juggling magician. Perhaps the significance of teaching someone how to juggle is simply lost upon me, as I myself cannot do such a thing, but the description of this magician jumps from his abilities to strong emotional bonds without any sort of tangible, realistic connection (“He had been magician, acrobat, juggler, and some of the things he taught her she had absorbed and passed on to me...But above all, without realising it then, her hands conveyed to me the quality of their love.”). (p. 120)
On top of the imagery, the characters were downright annoying. The family as a whole comes off as very obsessive with their social status, putting down Grandmama’s rummaging for pieces for her windchimes (“We are not poor…yet she and Sek-Lung poke through those awful things as if…they were beggars!”), and generally unsupportive and unhappy with their lives, as displayed by the children when they complain about their schoolwork incessantly, shortly after they’d complained about Grandmama. (p. 120, p. 122)
Lastly, perhaps I’d missed it, but nowhere could I find the part where Grandmama gives Sek-Lung the jade peony, as he plays around with it in his pocket at the closing of the story. Evidently, not only is Grandmama a dear old lady with a rummaging fetish, her grandson is also a bit of a thief.
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