Jean Know Where The Gods Fly
Jean Know – „Where the Gods Fly“
“Being the new one”, haven’t we all tried that before? Being the new kid in school, or being the new employee at work. Then, imagine being new in a completely different country, where you have to start from zero. Making new friends, creating a network, learning a new language and also a whole new culture, is all very challenging and overwhelming factors, when moving to a new place.
This is actually the situation in Jean Know’s short story “Where the Gods Fly”, where a little family of three people emigrates from China to the USA, to create a new life by working and raising their daughter in school. In this short story, we hear about a mothers concern about, seeing her daughter being encapsulated in the Western culture. Whilst her husband, and father to their daughter Peal, is suffering from cancer. The parents of Pearl are working at a factory, and to avoid that Pearl would have to be home alone or stick around at the factory, they allow her to start dancing ballet. This gives their daughter a lot of unexpected success, and because they want Pearls to have a proper education and not live of dancing, they encourage her to quite dancing ballet.
Parts of this paper will focus on the structure of the short story, and the contrast between the two “worlds” that are represented in the story.
The story does not have an introduction, which means that is starts in medias res “I kneel here before the gods and the thought of what I am about to do stings my eyes like incense.” This is actually the end of the story, so the rest of the story will be leading us to how everything has come to this point. The story is not told chronologically, I would rather say that it was written with flashbacks or some kind of memory, because we first hear of the mother’s childhood and religious background, and then we hear of their life in America. As mentioned, we first hear about Pearls mother’s roots, and then we hear about how their life in America are
“Being the new one”, haven’t we all tried that before? Being the new kid in school, or being the new employee at work. Then, imagine being new in a completely different country, where you have to start from zero. Making new friends, creating a network, learning a new language and also a whole new culture, is all very challenging and overwhelming factors, when moving to a new place.
This is actually the situation in Jean Know’s short story “Where the Gods Fly”, where a little family of three people emigrates from China to the USA, to create a new life by working and raising their daughter in school. In this short story, we hear about a mothers concern about, seeing her daughter being encapsulated in the Western culture. Whilst her husband, and father to their daughter Peal, is suffering from cancer. The parents of Pearl are working at a factory, and to avoid that Pearl would have to be home alone or stick around at the factory, they allow her to start dancing ballet. This gives their daughter a lot of unexpected success, and because they want Pearls to have a proper education and not live of dancing, they encourage her to quite dancing ballet.
Parts of this paper will focus on the structure of the short story, and the contrast between the two “worlds” that are represented in the story.
The story does not have an introduction, which means that is starts in medias res “I kneel here before the gods and the thought of what I am about to do stings my eyes like incense.” This is actually the end of the story, so the rest of the story will be leading us to how everything has come to this point. The story is not told chronologically, I would rather say that it was written with flashbacks or some kind of memory, because we first hear of the mother’s childhood and religious background, and then we hear of their life in America. As mentioned, we first hear about Pearls mother’s roots, and then we hear about how their life in America are