Summer Vacations a Thesis Presented to the Faulty of the College of Arts

Summer Vacations A thesis presented to the faulty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts Wen‐Shin Lee June 2010 © 2010 Wen‐Shin Lee. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Summer Vacations by WEN‐SHIN LEE has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by _________________________________________________________ Joan Connor Professor of English ________________________________________________________ Benjamin M. Ogles Dean, College of Arts & Sciences 3 ABSTRACT LEE, WEN‐SHIN, M.A., June 2010, English Summer Vacations (82 pp.) Director of Thesis: Joan Connor Summer Vacations contains five short stories about a Taiwanese boy’s childhood. It starts with a piece of fate verse and a fortuneteller’s prediction. Each story focuses on one particular accident happening to the boy. When the boy faces the physical accidents, he also has the chance to think over his relationship with his family and friends. Approved: ___________________________________________________________________________________ Joan Connor Professor of English 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract………………………………..…………………………………………………………………………… 3 CRITICAL INTRODUCTION………………….………………………………………..……………………. 5 SUMMER VACATIONS………………………………………………………………………………………..16 Prologue……………………………………………………………………………………………….. .16 One: The Athletic Leader …………………………………………………………………………21 Two: Heading for Heaven………………………………………………………………………. .36 Three: The Earthly Paradise …………………… ..……………………………………………44 Four: Spicy King………………………………………………………………………………………54 Five: The Name ……………………………………………………………………………………....68 5 CRITICAL INTRODUCTION Listening to Young Voices: Child Narrators in Fiction Writing I remember how I enjoyed setting off fireworks when I was a little girl. I was always afraid that I would become blind and deaf when the fireworks were exploding and sparkling around me. Two years ago was the last time I played with fireworks. The bright lights were only high to my waist and the noises were not loud enough to cover my talk with my brother. “I used to think they were huge,” I said. “That’s because we are taller now. We’ve grown up,” my brother said. I kneeled down to recapture the scene in my childhood, to see what I couldn’t see with a grown‐up’s eye. The time length of childhood is as long as the other ages in one’s life, but I keep wondering why a single day and a little thing in one’s childhood can turn out to have an immeasurable significance. And I realize that the key point is the mind of a child. Christopher Morley said, “We call a child’s mind ‘small’ simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours is, for it can take in almost anything without effort” (Crowe, 34). The mind of a child, where most adults merely see innocence and simplicity, is full of mysteries and is able to carry so much weight. The virtues and habits identified by adults may not work in the children’s world, and children share their own rules and values according to their understanding of things. Their value system may knock against the ideology in the adult’s world when they grow to maturity. Most children will be educated and corrected and therefore gradually lose their original naiveté and pure perspectives. 6 I am driven to write about children because of my fascination with the child’s naiveté and how it may collide with the common values that I have obeyed since long before. A kid sees the same thing an adult does, but is able to understand it in another way. A different perspective can cast the same events with a new angle and then tell different stories. Even though Tim Love, a British critic and writer, points out in his reading notes that, “most stories of this type use a third‐person‐privileged point‐of‐view, though a first‐person treatment is possible.” I am willing to employ a child as the narrator in my writing and tend to give the child narrator more ownership. Through a child’s eyes, the adult readers are able to put their mature perspectives aside, to depart from the traditional thinking patterns, and to find delights in understanding things as children do. The Development of Child Narrators The use of child narrators is not rare in literary writing nowadays. Nevertheless, it is a comparatively new device in Western literary history. According to Marah Gubar, the narrative device originated from a juristic reformation in the Victoria Age when children’s testimony was admissible for the first time, but this new way of writing did not become generally acceptable until the late nineteenth century. Charles Dickens’s Holiday Romance, published in 1868, is recognized as the first novel with a child narrator (Gubar, 40). After Dickens, the technique had waited for thirty years for its second success: The Story of the Treasure Seekers written by Edith Nesbit and published in 1899. Meanwhile, in the United States, Mark Twain’s 7 Huckleberry Finn (1885) is identified as the pioneer in employing a child narrator in storytelling. However, things are slightly different across the Pacific Ocean. In traditional Taiwanese literature, child characters and narrators are rarely seen in adult fictions since most literary trends and movements in Taiwan are associated with the social development. In the 1940s, Taiwan was still an agricultural society and children were dependents who lacked productive forces. At that time, most adults did not pay much attention to their kids in real life, not to mention to read the literary works about children. Later on, as Taiwan transformed into an industrial and commercial society, child characters gradually found their places in literary works. Yet still quite a few works chose to focus on a child protagonist. A child character usually appeared in two ways: a son or daughter of the protagonist and a part of the protagonist’s childhood memory. It is not to say the existence of child characters is simply decorative. On the contrary, a child character may stir the development of the plot through certain ways. One of them is that a child character plays a role like the kid in the end of The Emperor's New Clothes, who unintentionally reveals the truth out of child naiveté. For example, The Son’s Big Doll, written by Chuen‐Ming Huang and first published in 1969, is a story about fatherly love. The protagonist of The Son’s Big Doll works as a sandwich man with a colorful clown dress every day. But one day his son cannot recognize him after the father removes all of the advertising sign and makeup. The boy’s emotional reaction provides his father an opportunity for self‐examination and also reflects the powerlessness of the lower class workers. 8 A child character who served a crucial part of the plot was common at that time; however, both Taiwanese writers and readers still paid little attention to the possibility of employing child narrators until Wen‐Yong Hou, a modern Taiwanese writer published Funny Stories in 1990 and its sequel in 1992. Funny Stories is a short story collection about boyhood. In his writing, Hou puts himself in the position of a little boy and displays a kid’s mind in his process of growth. Hou picks out the common materials in every Taiwanese kid’s life, such as origami, a baseball game, seeing a dentist and learning to ride a bicycle. The basic settings of his stories are family and school life. Through observing and experiencing the world in his own way, the mischievous narrator shows a kid’s innocence as well as a rebellion and an attempt to escape from the adult’s world. Interestingly, when Hou started writing these stories, his target audience was mainly teenagers instead of grown‐ups. Yet his stories evoked the collective memories of the older generation and also created alternative communication between the youth and the elder. After Hou’s books brought unexpected resonance among adult readers, more and more Taiwanese writers started to employ child narrators in their writing. For example, Ta‐Chuen Chang, the author of My Younger Sister and The Weekly Journals of a Young Boy, centers his stories on an imaginative teenage boy who is being forced to grow up and is struggling with the transitional period from a child to an adult. The young narrator’s confession allows Chang’s readers to see the change of a young mind. Chang’s writing includes humorous interpretation of life and childlike wisdom, and at the same time, reveals the ruthlessness of reality. 9 The trend of using child narrators also affected the theatre performance and movie production in Taiwan. The use of child narrators in literature and theatre gradually entered Taiwan mainstream culture since the last decade of the twentieth century. Why a Child Narrator The device of child narrators has gained acceptance and popularity worldwide, and a writer can do many things with a child narrator. One of the most direct advantages is the language of children which generally gives a story the quality of simplicity and freshness. And it is easier for the readers to get into a story told in a simple language even though the story is going to deal with serious themes. Besides, through a child’s eyes, which often catch the details that an adult ignores or fails to see, the readers are invited to rediscover something they might not see from an adult perspective. For example, the little girl, Scout, in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), leads the readers into the book with her soft and simple descriptions of her childhood life, her neighbors, her schoolmates and playmates. Scout’s original and fresh perspective turns little trivia into interesting adventures. After the book moves to the second half, the development of the plot touches upon sensitive issues such as racial equality and rape.

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