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Cleveland
Heights High School Library
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Heights High School Library
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Summer
Reading Assignment for East Asian Literature |
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| Return to the CHHS Library Summer Reading Main Page | |
Directions:
Students enrolling in 12th grade East Asian Literature for the 2009-2010 school
year.
NOTE: This assignment is due Friday, September 3, 2010.
| I. | Read ONE of the following novels to read (summaries taken primarily from Amazon.com): | ||||
| A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee | |||||
| Gesture
Life presents a story in two different time frames. In one, delivered
via flashback, Hata is a medical officer in Japan's Imperial Army. Posted
to a tiny installation in rural Burma, he's ordered to oversee a fresh detachment
of Korean "comfort women"--i.e., victims of institutionalized
gang rape. At first he maintains his professional distance, not to mention
his erotic appetite: "It was the notion of what lay beneath the crumpled
cotton of their poor clothes that shook me like an air-raid siren."
But soon enough he's drawn into a relationship with one of the women, whose
bloody and horrific denouement leaves a permanent mark on the "unblissed
detachment" of his existence. The present-tense, American half of the story revolves around Hata's life in Bedley Run, where he adopts, alienates, and finally forms a shaky rapport with his daughter, Sunny. We might expect this sort of material to pale in comparison with his wartime trauma. But oddly enough, Hata's suburban melancholia is much more compelling--and the gradual disclosure of his past, which is supposed to ratchet up the tension, seems too crude a mechanism for a writer of Lee's superlative talents. |
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| Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto | |||||
| In this translation of a best-selling novel first published in Japan in 1987, the young narrator, Mikage, moves into the apartment of a friend whose mother is murdered early in the tale. What seems like a coming-of-age melodrama quickly evolves into a deeply moving tale filled with unique characters and themes. Along the way, readers get a taste of contemporary Japan, with its mesh of popular American food and culture. Mikage addresses the role of death, loneliness, and personal as well as sexual identity through a set of striking circumstances and personal remembrances. | |||||
| The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri | |||||
| The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting old ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. | |||||
| A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini | |||||
| The story starts decades before the Taliban came into power in 1996, and ends after the era of Taliban rule. The main character begins life as a "harami" - the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man and one of his housekeepers. Forced to live in a small shack with her emotionally disturbed and possibly epileptic mother, Mariam lives for Thursdays, the day her father comes to see her, bearing small gifts and showering her with the affection she craves. Naturally, Mariam wants to be a part of her father's life and fit in with his legitimate family, but when she attempts to force his hand, she is rebuffed and feels betrayed by his reaction. Her impetuous actions bring an end to the life she has known for fifteen long years, and lead to an arranged marriage to a much older man, a shoemaker, whose views on the rights of women mirror those that the Taliban would soon enforce. A powerful story of the plight of two women whose lives become inexplicably interwoven as they search for meaning, love and ultimately, for freedom. | |||||
| American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang | |||||
| Indie graphic novelist Gene Yang's intelligent and emotionally challenging American Born Chinese is made up of three individual plotlines: the determined efforts of the Chinese folk hero Monkey King to shed his humble roots and be revered as a god; the struggles faced by Jin Wang, a lonely Asian American middle school student who would do anything to fit in with his white classmates; and the sitcom plight of Danny, an All-American teen so shamed by his Chinese cousin Chin-Kee (a purposefully painful ethnic stereotype) that he is forced to change schools. Each story works well on its own, but Yang engineers a clever convergence of these parallel tales into a powerful climax that destroys the hateful stereotype of Chin-Kee, while leaving both Jin Wang and the Monkey King satisfied and happy to be who they are. | |||||
| II. | Summer Reading Assignment -Construct a literary analysis that answers one of the following questions: | ||
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This
analysis should be at least three pages in length and no longer than five
pages. |
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