The Magpie Bridge
3. In what way(s) does The Magpie Bridge contribute to the development of intercultural understanding?
Having you ever had a try of the pig’s blood cake? It is a famous steamed snack in Taiwan that made of pork blood and sticky rice, sold on a wooden stick and eaten like an ice cream. Being popular among the Chinese society for its chewy texture and unique aroma, it is, however, selected the first place of the ten world’s most unusual foods by the renowned travel website VirtualTourist.com in England and later on even prohibited from selling in the United States. This shows an apparent existence of the cultural divergence between the dining culture of the Chinese and the Westerners. Regrettably, the intercultural differences do not end at this level. In Liu Hong’s novel The Magpie Bridge, we go through a series of intercultural differences between Chinese and Westerners as experiences by the protagonist and see how she resolves them.
In the story, the protagonist Jiao Mei, a Chinese girl, has moved and started her new life in England with her father’s ex-lover, an English woman called Barbara after her father’s death. She falls in love with an English boy called Ken and is told to be pregnant by her dead grandmother, Tie Mei, who appears as a ghost and comes for revenge. As requested by Tie Mei, Jiao Mei needs to take back the bronze mirror from Barbara, which can both help Tie Mei to achieve her wants and save Barbara from her illness. At the end, although it doesn’t help to save Barbara from death but both Jiao Mei and Tie Mei are modified to be more mature and mellow. In these days of reexamining the past and present, as being surrounded by westerners all around, Jiao Mei experiences numerous intercultural divergences which she finds it hard to accommodate at first, but eventually accepts. In this essay, I shall first acknowledge that The Magpie Bridge contributes largely to the development of intercultural understandings and I will show how the intercultural
Having you ever had a try of the pig’s blood cake? It is a famous steamed snack in Taiwan that made of pork blood and sticky rice, sold on a wooden stick and eaten like an ice cream. Being popular among the Chinese society for its chewy texture and unique aroma, it is, however, selected the first place of the ten world’s most unusual foods by the renowned travel website VirtualTourist.com in England and later on even prohibited from selling in the United States. This shows an apparent existence of the cultural divergence between the dining culture of the Chinese and the Westerners. Regrettably, the intercultural differences do not end at this level. In Liu Hong’s novel The Magpie Bridge, we go through a series of intercultural differences between Chinese and Westerners as experiences by the protagonist and see how she resolves them.
In the story, the protagonist Jiao Mei, a Chinese girl, has moved and started her new life in England with her father’s ex-lover, an English woman called Barbara after her father’s death. She falls in love with an English boy called Ken and is told to be pregnant by her dead grandmother, Tie Mei, who appears as a ghost and comes for revenge. As requested by Tie Mei, Jiao Mei needs to take back the bronze mirror from Barbara, which can both help Tie Mei to achieve her wants and save Barbara from her illness. At the end, although it doesn’t help to save Barbara from death but both Jiao Mei and Tie Mei are modified to be more mature and mellow. In these days of reexamining the past and present, as being surrounded by westerners all around, Jiao Mei experiences numerous intercultural divergences which she finds it hard to accommodate at first, but eventually accepts. In this essay, I shall first acknowledge that The Magpie Bridge contributes largely to the development of intercultural understandings and I will show how the intercultural
References: Liu, Hong (2003). The Magpie Bridge. London: Headline Book Publishing.