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The Jade Peony Short Story Theme

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Culture differences, the differences of culture that has been created due to immigration, can create many tensions between generations in a household. The short story “The Jade Peony” manifests culture shock through two incidents. The first incident is depicted when Jung, Kiam, Liang were talking to their dad and telling him how grandma’s unacceptable disgusting behavior was causing them to get insulted by their friends. “The problem for the rest of the family was in the fact that Grandma looked for these treasures wandering the back alleys” “All our friends are laughing at us!”. Their father replied to this by telling to stop this but in the back of his head he thought “how could he dare tell the Grand Old One, his aging mother, that what …show more content…

Immigration experience has five fundamental components to it the Honeymoon Phase, Rejection Phase, Regression Phase, adoption phase, and Reverse Culture Shock phase. This story incorporates the rejection and adoption phase. The rejection phase is depicted many times throughout the story through one of the main characters Poh-Poh (the grandma). This can be seen through the eyes of Poh-Poh when she believes she is going to die soon because a cat crossed her, goes to alleys ways and trash bins searching for glass fragment, makes wind chimes, sends her grandchildren to Chinese schools, and by using herbal medicines. All of this substantiates the fact Poh-Poh is rejecting to give up her cultural practices and adopt Canadian cultural practices. The adoption phase is demonstrated through the main character/narrator Sek Lang’s siblings Jung, Kiam, Liang and parents. Some of the occasions where the adoption phase is implied is when they were; worrying about perceptions of white people in Vancouver ,worrying about their Canadian friends insulting them , calling Latin, French or German scientific and logical, calling themselves Canadians , and finding their grandma’s cultural practice’s disgusting. Upon examining these examples, we can consummate that Sek Lang’s sibling have adopted to Canadian cultural

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