Breakthrough Writer

Lesson for "Bane of the Internet"

Essay Option for "Bane of the Internet" Only

Since "Bane of the Internet" doesn't compare to other stories in terms of its specific focus on consumer addiction, we have a new option that addresses this story only:

Compare "Bane of the Internet" with a consumer addiction that has afflicted someone you know, a person whose addiction has rendered her helpless (in a learned helplessness kind of way).

In your mapping components, show 4 or 5 parallels between the addiction and the one shown in the story. 

Your research links could be Ha Jin's book, my blog and and any research you deem appropriate regarding consumer addiction, learned helplessness, etc.

Lexicon

One. How Do You Defend Yourself Against Addiction When It Comes Upon You Gradually?

Slippery Slope:

The Internet begins as an insidious process of dissolution, wearing down the Third Eye bit by bit until slaves of the Internet have no free will, no freedom to act independently and rationally.

First we stop writing letters. We write degraded, abbreviated emails and settle into convenience. And then we whet our appetites or I should say we inflame our appetites on various consumer goods so well packaged on the Internet.

We click on images and images feed envy and envy feeds unrealistic expectations. 

The most dangerous things that happen to us in life happen incrementally and insidiously, bit by bit, under the radar. When we lose our souls, it never happens in a grand, tumultuous moment. It always happens gradually. 

There is a perhaps overused analogy of a frog comfortably waddling in a pot of room-temperature water. The water slowly heats up and painlessly the frog is dead. Such is internet addiction.

Two. Convenience Trap:

As we enjoy more and more conveniences, we develop a dependence on them resulting in the erosion of our tolerance for pain, hard work, patience, and putting for meaningful effort to maintain human relationships. Before we can understand what has happened to us, we have become emotional cripples. 

Three. Paradox of the Internet:

The more "connected" we are with technology, the more disconnected we become because the modes of communication are superficial and these superficial modes replace meaningful ones.

Four. The Purpose of Advertising:

To create desires that would not otherwise exist. The internet is more than anything an arm of advertising. Advertisers know your psychology more than you do. They know it more than your therapist does. They are smarter than your therapists. Advertisers are the supreme psychologists of the world.

Those who know psychology go into advertising.

Those who want to know about psychology but never really understand it become therapists.

Five. Libido Ostentandi:

Latin for the need to show off, to be ostentatious as a way of finding validation, regognition, and for being flattered with the title of having "good taste."

Six. The Death of the Rational

The older sister says "be rational" but to no avail. The younger sister has no Third Eye. Therefore, she has no free will and is at the mercy of her irrational impulses. She is a slave to nonsense. 

Consumerism is based on the irrational: 

"Oh, what a feeling!" (Toyota)

"He's got gum!" (Wrigley's)

Make your boss Stouffers Stuffing and get a promotion

Seven. The dangers of consumer ostracism:

If I don't have X, people won't accept me into their tribe; if I don't have brand XY, people won't love me the way they should; if I don't have brand XYZ, I won't find fulfillment and as a result I won't be worthy of other people's love.

Eight. Older sister becomes a Cash Momma instead of a loved family member.

In fact, the older sister, living in America, becomes the object of scorn and envy and as such is not loved at all but despised.

Nine. The consumer addict becomes a cynical nihilist:

Selling organs probably a ploy but in any case the younger sister is making a Faustian Bargain, a deal with the devil.

Ten. Being a Consumer Is in Many Ways Being Stuck in Adolescence

Consumerism is a form of arrested emotional development. You're stuck in adolescence, which is defined by moments of grandiosity (inflated expectations of consumerism) followed by disappointment, self-pity, and self-hatred. These feelings of self-loathing compel you to seek more grandiosity (buy more crap) followed, once again, by self-pity and disappointment. 

Getting trapped in this cycle is a form of learned helplessness. 

When you buy a car, there are heightened emotions, adrenaline kick, hormone spike, for example (study at Duke showed men gain testosterone when sitting in a Porsche and LOSE tesosterone when sitting in a Camry. Where's the free will in that?) and then after the hormones settle, you descend into a Consumer Hangover.

And what is the remedy for a Consumer Hangover? More shopping! And what follows more shopping? Another Consumer Hangover. 

Eleven: Consumerism Is About Finding Meaning, Idendity, and Belonging

When we look to consumerism to replace basic human needs such as meaning, identity, and belonging, we call this impoverishment through subsitution. The more we fill the void in our lives with fake albeit potent "meaning," for example, the more we crave real meaning and try to fill the void with more and more fake meaning. 

Buying an iPad, a Mini Cooper, or a BMW grants us privileged enterance into a special club where we luxuriate with people who remind us of ourselves and our values. 

Sample Thesis Statements That Are Too General Or Too Obvious

"The Bane of the Internet" is about imprisonment.

"The Bane of the Internet is about consumer addiction.

"The Bane of the Internet" is about a greedy woman who loses her soul to the devil.

"The Bane of the Internet is about an American from China who watches helplessly as her family in China become full of greed, envy, and spite.

"The Bane of the Internet" makes it clear that we should maintain meaningful communication with our family.

"The Bane of the Internet" shows it's important to have the Third Eye to ward off greed and addiction.

"The Bane of the Internet" is an excellent story about how self-destructive consumer addiction can be.

Better Thesis:

"The Bane of the Internet" is example of the type of story in Ha Jin's collection in which the absence of the Third Eye results in the loss of freedom evidenced by __________, __________, __________, ___________, and _______________. 

 

Example of an Introduction about the Learned Helplessness of Consumer Addiction, Transition, and Thesis

Evisu, True Religion, G-Star, Slim Flare, Citizens of Humanity, 7 For All Mankind, Diesel . . . I found I could not sleep at night unless I recited names of fabulous jeans, jeans that cost between $200-400, jeans that boasted of denim so soft, so textured, so resplendent, so magical, so distinctive, and so empowering that they put all other jeans to shame and rendered the wearers of those inferior jeans pariahs unworthy of my company. The glorious name-brand jeans I am speaking of had almost supernatural powers so that simply wearing them afforded you membership to a special club, a high-brow coterie of people in-the-know, people who could not be bothered by the rest of mundane humanity.

This underground designer jean society often communicated on Internet message boards, chat sites, and met monthly at swank cocktail parties where they would show-off their jeans to others whose jean expertise made them qualified to truly appreciate the way the jeans showcased your svelte thighs, cupped and massaged your rock-hard buttocks, and delineated the appropriate, eye-brow-raising contours. Marriages and other dynamic relationships were born from these designer jean parties where matches were made in denim heaven.

Of course, ordinary people lacked the imagination and refined sensibility to seek out and wear the designer jeans I am speaking of. Rather, only a rare breed, a self-described cognoscenti, coveted these elite jeans. We were people who were plugged-in to a secret society, a mysterious network through which our belonging entitled us to know everything that went on in this world that “really mattered” before it “went mainstream.” We had, for instance, software embedded in our cell phones so that when a new jean came out on the market or a jean went on sale our cell phone vibrated pleasantly and thereby alerted us to a new consumer opportunity. We had unique access to special underground warehouses in the garment district where we could buy jeans as rare and mysterious as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were mysterious locations so secret we had to be blindfolded and escorted down several spiral stairs to a dank basement where an old lady with moth-ball breath would rudely shove the pair of designer jeans into our hands after we gave her a wad of cash. We weren’t even allowed to try the jeans on, but because their very elusiveness gave them unusually high cachet among the designer jean community, we took the chance that they’d be a perfect fit and usually we were right and found that these underground designer jeans afforded us glories that no other jean could give us.

This isn’t to say that we, as members of the elite designer jean cult were absent of problems. We had some, to be sure. One is that once we put on a pair of jeans that we absolutely loved, we found it almost impossible to take the jeans off, even for showers, the beach, and bedtime, so that for many of us our jeans doubled as bathing suits and pajama bottoms. Also the first day we got our jeans we’d often be overcome with a sort of ambulatory mania by which we’d feel compelled to walk all over town so that the world could see us in our perfect-fit jeans. We’d strut across the mall, around the neighborhood, and into strange homes and do a pirouette until we were escorted off the premises or chased away by vicious attack dogs.

We couldn’t wash these jeans because every wash faded and thus diminished them. Thus we walked around in filthy, great looking denim rags, Fabreezing them, but soon, that's wasn’t enough to curtail the stench that was redolent of cow dung. Nor could I do anything to stop the rashes, ingrown hairs, boils, and bacterial infections rendered from wearing filthy jeans for six months without changing them. 

The skin infections combined with the over-tight jeans sometimes strangulated the femoral artery and caused gangrene and some of us had to have our legs amputated.

You would think having our legs cut off would finally remedy our jean obsession, but you're wrong.  These amputees simply bought prosthetic legs so they could adorn them with even tighter jeans than ever. In a perverse way, the prosethetic thighs and calves afforded them an opportunity to elevate their jean obsession to even greater heights. In fact, a whole specialized jean industry was developed to target those who hobbled on their new prosthetic limbs.

Imagine intoxicating yourself with the delights of adorning your plastic legs with jeans while forgetting to lament the loss of your natural limbs? 

What a woeful race we were, slaves to our consumer addiction. 

Indeed, the above account shows that consumer addiction is a disease that is accompanied by learned helplessness. Likewise, this same helplessness is chronicled in "The Bane of the Internet," which shows, like members of the jean cult, the key factors of consumer addiction, including _____________, _______________, ______________, and _________________.

In Class Activity:

Develop a thesis that compares three to four stories. 

All Lessons on One Post

Lesson #4: In the Crossfire: Welcome to the Third Eye

Tian Is the Hero with the Third Eye

One. What is Tian Chu’s freedom quest? To escape the infantile imbecilities of his mother, a wet blanket, a pernicious force on him and his wife Connie. She’s a malicious force who would add tofu and soy to dishes even though she knows Connie has allergies to these foods. American culture gives Tian's wife a freedom that his mother cannot understand.

But let's be clear: Tian must also be free from the kind of retaliation that might sever him from his mother. 

You never free yourself from a relative. Like herpes, some problems stick with us forever. All we can do is DEFUSE the situation. There is no "closure."

 

Two. The mother has become a “monkey on the back,” a burden that seems to never go away. To have a “monkey on the back” is a form of imprisonment. Part of this burden rests on the cultural differences between the mother and son. The mother does not approve of the wife having this much freedom. The son knows the mother means well: She is protective of her son's interests.

Three. Mother castrates her son through a thousand cuts, most of the cuts centered on Connie: “What’s the use of being six feet tall if you can’t put Connie in her place?” Even here, the son's Third Eye sees the mother's good intentions.

Four. The mother is a petulant malcontent, always bickering and complaining in order to put down her son. She’s full of insults. While the son indulges his mother, he knows his mother's malcontented words are a cancer on his marriage.

Five. Mother is over protective, believing that Connie is using her husband while working on her degree, denying him children, not cooking for him, and making him do her laundry. Again, the mother means well for her son.

Six. Mother is a master of manipulation always tugging on her son’s heartstrings of guilt. “If you don’t do as I say, you are proving that you want to disown me.” Mother's love for her son is contaminated by a desire for too much control.

Seven. The son sees some good in his mother: She befriends a poor mother, Shulan, whose husband has abandoned her and child for another woman.

Eight. What frees Tian from his mother? Cunning. He asks his boss to terminate him, so he can look for a new job. He has to be clever to both his wife and mother in order to preserve their self-respect and honor. He lies to his wife and says he was fired. But Connie knows her husband is using a hustle and she becomes part of the trick or hustle. The couple’s fake poverty terrifies the mother into leaving and she even reveals that Tian’s sister wanted the Mother to pressure her son to financially help the sister’s son go to college.

Tian also lies to his mother, saying the fighting between her and Connie stressed him out, compromised his job performance and led to his losing his job.

Nine. The mother implicitly blackmails her son to give her money so she can return to her home without shame.

Ten. For Tian, freedom can only be created if he manufactures a false persona for his parents, especially his mother.

The Third Eye As It Is Evident in Tian, Eileen from "Choice," Fanlin from "A Composer and His Parakeets," and Ganchin from "A Good Fall."

1. The Third Eye removes you from the trees and allows you to see the forest: You get sucked up into a drama of excruciating pain but have meta-cognition: the ability to distance yourself from the pot of boiling water (from which your limbs flail) and make a detached plan of effective action: get out of a misguided relationship; gingerly tiptoe around your bellicose mother by being more clever than she is.

2. The Third Eye emphasizes the bigger, long-term picture over the short-term, narrow confines of obsession and emotional upheaval.

3. The Third Eye is about valuing the cool intellect over tumultuous passions. As such, the Third Eye often tells you to avoid compulsive action but wait for more information or at the very least wait until your passions cool so that your action is done in a condition of lucidity.

4. The Third Eye is the adult that exercises discipline and calm over selfish desires because in part the Third Eye has realistic expectations about life and can enduring suffering without self-pity. I'm thinking of Eileen here. 

5. The Third Eye is the moral conscience that recognizes your vulnerability to misguided passions and self-betrayal. It sets you free from a situation from which you have been "banging your head against a wall" repeatedly. The Third Eye tells you that you must free yourself from this condition of futility. I'm thinking of Fanlin as he recognizes his bogus girlfriend. 

6. The Third Eye allows you to see a conflict in terms of gray rather than black and white. For example, Tian does not see his mother as evil even though she is a pernicious force against him and especially Connie. He sees the good in her, helping abandoned women for example, and his ability to comprehend his mother as a complex tangle of contradictions prevents him from demonizing and dehumanizing her so that he can salvage something from his mother-son relationship.

7. In desperate cases, the Third Eye doesn't become apparent until there has been a "good fall," a hitting of rock bottom in which you no longer have nothing to lose and in this state you're better to evaluate all the delusions that have shackled you to your unnecessary imprisonment.

Example of an Introduction about the Third Eye, a Transition, and a Thesis

A student who took my freshman composition class last semester showed up to my over-crowded Critical Thinking class six weeks ago and begged me to add him. I did as he wished. How did he repay me? Last week during lecture and class discussion, I saw him, in a flagrant disregard for my lecture, doing his chemistry homework. 

My first impulse was to toss his chemistry book across the room and scream a spittle-fueled tirade at him. But my Third Eye kicked in and told me to cool it. I could admonish the back-stabber, my Third Eye told me, but only with cold, calculated, controlled rage.

I walked over to the offender, picked up the chemisty book, and scrutinized the text, squinting my eyes with sarcastic intensity, before I said the following:

"When you do your homework, it's a sign of disrespect to me and the other students. And when you disrespect us, you lower morale. And when you lower morale, you degrade my ability to teach. And when you degrade my ability to teach, you threaten my livelihood. And when you threaten my livelihood, you compromise my ability to feed my children. Is that what you're trying to do here!"

He shook his head emphatically, upon which I said, "Thank you. You're very kind, sir." That's the last I've seen of his chemistry book, or smart phone for that matter.

Fortunately for me, my Third Eye asserted itself before I lost my temper and embarrassed myself by having a hissy fit in front of my students. Perhaps this Third Eye is our only link to free will. 

We see such a link between the Third Eye and free will in some of the more mentally healthy characters in Ha Jin's A Good Fall. Their Third Eye manifests in many ways, not the least of which is ___________________, ______________, ______________, and __________________.

Personal Interview:

If you don't have your own story for your introduction, you may have to conduct a personal interview with someone who has the Third Eye.

This link for MLA Works Cited Format shows that citing a personal interview is rather simple. Last name, first name, title (if any, or you can just put "friend," "co-worker," whatever pertains), Personal Interview, date.

Example:

Wheeler, Harriet, co-worker. Personal Interview. 6 July 2010.

In-class Activity:

With another student, develop a thesis that analyzes the Third Eye's role of delivering the characters from imprisonment and finding freedom. Make sure your thesis has at least 4 mapping components.

 

Example:

In Ha Jin's story collection A Good Fall some of the stories show characters breaking free from their imprisonment as a result of their Third Eye. As the stories show, this Third Eye is essential to personal freedom because the Third Eye allows the characters to ________, __________, _________,and _______________. 

Sample A paper:

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Eric Peterson, 0089463

Professor: McMahon

English 1A-Section 6373

23 March 2012

 

A Good Fall by Ha Jin

The Third Eye and the Chinese Buddha

 

                A man stood in a state of profound self-contemplation as he saw a wavering image of himself shimmering at the edges in the reflection from above in the sunlit flowing river which came in the beginning from melting mountain snows which were there at the high points of distant mountains due to waters evaporating from the sun since the beginning of time.  As I am able to see and understand this man, I know also that he is mortal and came from both a father and a mother.  There exists a writing of the Lotus Sutra (Watson 24) which seeks to explain three types of wisdom of a single mind, which is comparative and analogous to there being three eyes, not just the two which most of use in hours of being awake to see that which is in the corporeal world.  It discusses the wisdom of the Buddhas as being of such a depth that it can clearly penetrate to the core of universal truth and is therefore described as “infinitely profound.”  In the book A Good Fall by Ha Jin, we see the Third Eye come into play by overriding immediate lower world animalistic states in the lives of Fanlin, Tian Chu, and Wanping in many ways.  Each of them in fact has a Third Eye as all human beings do, and this not only saves these characters from states of delusion and self-pity, seeing only in black and white, and self-imposed slavery, but also helps them to find true enlightenment. 

 

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In the story “A Composer and his Parakeets” we enter the life of Fanlin who is in some type of relationship with an Indian actress by the name of Supria, and from the very beginning of the book we are allowed to see inside of the mind of Fanlin’s delusional self-contradicting thinking, for not only does he suspect that the parakeet Bori is a gift from another man to Supria, he on the same page admits to himself that not only has she been with many other men, but he also tells himself that he proposed to her while she avoided the subject and made excuses.  He is at the early stages of delusional thinking, believing that she will marry him much in similarity to the homeless man in Redondo Beach who will never again go into any type of building even years after the fire which took the life of his wife and daughter.  Fanlin begins to place a human personality into the bird by feeding it first millet from the Hong Kong Supermarket and this progresses to him feeding the bird a variety of foods such as boiled rice, bread, apples, watermelon, grapes, and even milk.  He projects his delusion induced sense of self-pity into his mental view of the bird by continuing to project his own damaged thoughts more and more deeply into the bird, even telling the bird that he is stuck with Fanlin as he has been dumped by Supria.  Ha Jin often describes fat birds and even refers to a fat caterpillar in his book Waiting so one could deduce that Ha Jin knows much about the subtleties of love in both the Chinese and American culture and the story of “A Composer and his Parakeets” in A Good Fall is demonstrative and likely influenced by experiences Ha Jin may have had as a younger man.  As the story progresses, Fanlin lets the bird out of  a cage and into his studio as he composes music on a synthesizer, and he projects that due to the way the bird watches him and flutters his wings, he must understand him.  He asks the bird if he likes his work, the second time he actually begins speaking to the bird, as if he is replacing Supria with Bori on some subliminal level.  He becomes angry with Bori for alighting on the keyboard and making notes on Fanbin’s synthesizer then pooping on his desk.  He excuses his behavior and compares him to a

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newborn baby.  The relationship between Fanbin and Bori progresses as smelling Supria’s clothes and remembering their love making do not ultimately fulfill his need for companionship, he as a sensitive man and a musician can sense a distance and lack of interest the few times they talk on the phone, as though even her talking to Fanbin on the phone for a few quick moments is an inconveniencing interruption to her life which is a world away.  Fanbin continues his disillusioned thinking that somehow things will work with Supria, at the same time it appears as though he is dating Bori, often taking the bird to lunch.  A foiled break in into their apartment introduces that primal fear which we feel when our living space is violated and Fanbin projects this and Bori seems to be frightened and quivering, so Fanbin holds and kisses him, the way a man might comfort a woman.  If I am to use my Third Eye, the question can be asked who am I to pass judgment on a man who grows to love an animal, a bird known as Bori who brings tears to Fanlin as he jumps into the ocean to save him?  The third eye manifests and allows Fanbin to have the clarity of thought to be able to recognize that Supria never really did care about either he or Bori and that his life would be better off without her as she demonstrated that just because something meant something to Fanbin did not mean it ever had any meaning to her.  At the very end his composing becomes far more feeling and expressing of soul and the replacement parakeet Devlin makes ready to fly off into the sky with other birds of the world, symbolically freeing Panbin to allow things of nature such as Bori and Supria to follow their own destined natural course with the clouds forever unowned and unencumbered by the composer, for who can ever truly own a bird, a woman, or a song?

                As a man who has survived a broken home I profoundly have learned to appreciate the fact that my mother did bring me into the world and fed and clothed my body as I began the education of my mind in our public schools, as time progressed I found my own way as a lion cub who becomes a lion.  As

 

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the story “In the Crossfire” begins we very quickly are able to see that Tian Chu (Ha Jin 87) is able to initiate his third eye by looking at his current exact economic situation with a view of grey rather than the extreme of either white or black.  Some may have seen looming layoffs or lower company performance as a reason to become emotionally unglued, with Tian Chu he looks at all possibilities of past and present, he knows he is a citizen, he knows he can collect unemployment benefits, he knows his current standing with the INS so rather than become emotionally unstable he deftly handles his mother calling him on the cell at work by quickly telling her is busy and cannot talk, a well-played series of moves.  With Tian Chu the husband, his mother Meifin and wife Connie, we see that mother or mother in law issues do not have any political or national boundaries and in steps Meifin who seems to

have learned to say anything born of her tangle of contradictions (McMahon Class Notes) regardless of whether or not it is accurate or the effect it may have on her son or daughter in law.  In the first scene within the home we can see the effect on the microcosm the presence which the leathery handed television remote holding cigarette smoking television watching Meifin has, the other people in the house have changed their schedules and sleeping arrangements and Connie has even asked her not to smoke in the house which Meifin duly ignores.  We transcend into the three of them eating dinner together and very quickly Meifin becomes antagonistic toward Connie and complains about the food, Connie’s parents, and Connie herself.  She very easily pushes Connie’s buttons and they go back and forth at one another, with Meifin making multiple value judgments toward Connie and her identity, showing absolutely no appreciation for the food and shelter which is being provided for her.  Tian mentions layoffs but is not heard, and he ends up leaving the dining room to finish his dinner in peace and allow himself to contemplate Meifin’s agenda and what is motivating her actions.  Meifin had told him “You can always trust me, because you’re part

 

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of my flesh and blood and I’ll never betray you.” (Ha Jin 93)  He uses his third eye and is able to see that indeed she does have an agenda and that there is a grudge due to he and Connie not sponsoring a sister’s son who wished to go to a Toronto college.   Tian has the wisdom to see that his mother is motivated by the agenda of gaining monetary as well as sponsorship support for another family member, who is to know how far she will go to try to wield her self-supposed sense of influence if she is to gain the support of her son.  The concept of the third eye comes into the psyche of Tian again as he learns that his mother has invited someone to their home for dinner.  We can deduce that some customs and traditions remained with Tian although he had left China more than a decade ago for although Meifin again crossed the boundaries of respect for Tian and Connie, he succeeds in convincing her to simplify the meal they are mutually preparing and explains that meat and fish are plentiful and that the true value was conversation and warm atmosphere, this resonates with Meifen and she makes sure the stuffing and dough are in a state in which her invited friend can also participate.  He takes Meifin to pick up Shulan whom he recognized, and he is moved and reflects on the tough life she is living and has led, the act of her mother inviting this woman makes him glad.  Thoughts of the core human struggle for food are mentioned by Ha Jin in “The Russian Prisoner” from his book Ocean of Words.  Here a Russian named Lev is taken prisoner by the Chinese and provided with a translator named Mr. Zhang, who becomes angry that Lev does not recognize how little the Chinese soldiers had to eat compared to him after he throws an unfinished piece of chicken out the window.  This goes to a core theme of being able to see the common Chinese struggle for getting enough to eat and how this deep unconscious memory of sacrifice is what was kept in current memory to maintain that connection to the homeland.  Interestingly the dinner conversation alludes to comparisons of how little difference there is

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to being poor in either China or the U.S. and Tian notices what each person is eating and drinking.  At the same time he is able to see that the guest and his mother perceive him differently due to him having been successful, he arranges to be laid off by his manager and arrives home announcing that he has no more job.  What in fact happened is he worked the situation to his advantage and he and his wife learn the true agenda of Meifin’s visit and she decides to arrange to go back home.  It takes some great acting and they support her belief that going back home is the wisest choice and offer her money to help her save face and so Meifin can get something from the young couple.  We learn that Meifin did not truly

understand the struggles which must be overcome and endured to succeed across the ocean and Tian holds alive the memory of his parents together waiting for him with sodas and tangerines in the rain, their anxious faces brought tears to his eyes and he holds on to that gratitude as he recognizes that he must allow his mother to have her new image of him as one who fell from grace and he must hold onto and cherish the memory his parents had of him as he succeeded in his first test.  With his third eye he has learned to recognize that when it comes to himself and his mother and wife, nothing will ever be a clear picture in black and white but all of the contrasts and hues will blend into a whirlwind of grey like the view of a raining neighborhood in winter from the window of a speeding bullet train. 

                As a young man getting ready to drive my $400.00 T top Camaro from the dope man’s house a woman we will call K walked up to my rolled down driver’s side window and said “You remind me of someone named Shy with your shy eyes.”  Such was the distant promise of America to the Chinese and other immigrants for she was an attractive looking queen when viewed across an ocean through jaded lenses, not seeing the age and wear and wrinkles covered by pancake makeup reminding one of the women in New York shown in a black and white picture wearing nothing but worn frilly undergarments on a New York City sidewalk.  Such was the tunnel vision promise of America to the poor of the world

 

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nations as now recognized by the first glint of light as seen through the third eye of Wanping as it first begins to open in “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry.”  Bring us your poor, your hungry, and your sick, and we may help them grow or we may wear them down to the bone should have been the real pitch that America the cunning lady of the night told to all the immigrants who came here to try to find a better life.  The story starts out with Wanping being concerned of a rent increase by Mrs. Chen and at the same time we see he appreciates the house due to its large colonial size, proximity to the city, and the immense weeping cherry tree which birds came to visit and the tree itself stood at a position of prominence in front of the house.  He is approached by Mrs. Cheng with not being charged any additional rent if he agrees to drive the women, who are all prostitutes, to out call appointments.  Right away we walk into the life of persons immigrating here who are selling their labor and their bodies to sweatshops and sweaty men.  We also see that Wanping takes advantage of the offer from Mrs. Chen and also gets her agreement to be part of the group meal plan which the women get, we learn about what it is like for them to have to sell their bodies to different men to make a living and pay rent, the third eye opens a bit more as Wanping sees that not all prostitutes are bloodsuckers and not all johns are bad and loose men, some were wrecks with personal problems which they did not know how to handle.  He puts himself in the mind of the man whose wife has been bedridden for a long time and sees that if he were a police officer, he would most likely not arrest this man.  He completes a certain rite of passage with the women and becomes a protector in their eyes when he intervenes and gets rid of a john who is making trouble and this actually has the effect of creating a stronger relationship bond with all of the women and even Lili acts nicer toward him and speaks to him more often with her eyes open

 

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wider, symbolic of Wanping’s third eye opening wider simultaneously.  They cooked fish for him several times a week and Huong would pack leftovers in a container for his lunch which made her seem like a

girlfriend, which Wanping gets used to.  Wanping becomes very sick and is cared for by Huong and this awakens childhood memories of the care his mother gave him and as he is missing her in his feverish dream thoughts Huong knocks on the door and brings him a steaming bowl of wheat noodles made from scratch with chives, napa cabbage, shrimp and eggs, as though it came from his home province in China.  She stays home from seeing a client to take care of him, checking on him periodically and bringing him vitamins, a comforter, and a container to pee in so he did not have to go far and get cold in the night.  The following night under the weeping cherry leaves blinking with street lamps Wanping asks Huong to quit her sex work so they can be together and her eyes gleam with happiness, he discovers that she owes thousands to a local gangster named Croc who is making money off of sex workers and gamblers.  His third eye is wide open now as he sees all scenarios, he sees her stirring a pot in a small white cottage and he hears her song along with the voices of children and his mind tells him to not let the other women or Mrs. Chen know of their relationship at this time while he ponders their future under the moonlight with the sounds of insects in the quiet night.  They both try to negotiate a settlement plan with the Croc and he quickly sees that Croc does not see anything but his own greedy agenda and he will not budge from his smirking rat eyed demeanor of a small man who has absolutely no vision.  Wanping sees right away that there is absolutely not any way that a person such as Croc will change his way of thinking for the likes of him or Huong as Croc only thinks in black and white.  It finally sinks in with Huong that she has been nothing but a cash cow for the Croc and her own family and Wanping realizes he cannot write to his family for fear of retaliation from Croc’s men so they both break

 

Peterson 9

free from their imposed slavery as the cherry tree fades into the distance edges indistinct and they walk off arm in arm into their new life, no longer slaves to Madame America.

                As the hourglass continues to release sand time continues to flow forward and the great oceans of the earth take away that which volcanoes give back for we speak of land and the passage of time. 

Whether I am seated in a comfortable hall bedecked with jade buddhas and listening to the flowery scholarly words of a self-proclaimed master wearing fancy silk robes or listening to the common wisdom of an old man taking a walk in a park, I will take moments to hear the clarity and value of that which comes from the voice of each human being.  We have learned from Ha Jin who is the voice of the characters in all of his stories that we must never take only a single glance or listen to only a single sentence from another, but we must learn to use our third eye to see all sides and roles that every person in our lives plays.  By in fact undergoing the sufferings of delusions, self-pity, seeing only in black and white, and self-imposed slavery, Fanlin, Tian Chu, and Wanping gained the knowledge that there are human beings in their families and lives who are one-sided and do not see the true value that these men had to offer the world.   If one allows themselves to see with their newly opened third eye that one must experience suffering and animalistic states in order to find and understand true enlightenment, one will have appreciation for the role each human being has played in the fabric of their life and will have learned the lesson taught by the Chinese Buddha. 

 

 

 

 

 

                                Peterson 10

Works Cited

Ha Jin, “The Russian Prisoner.” Ocean of Worlds.

                Zoland Books, Cambridge, Massachussets 1996. Print

---, “A Composer and His Parakeet.” A Good Fall.

                Random House, New York 2009. Print

---, “In the Crossfire.” A Good Fall.

                Random House, New York 2009. Print

---, “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry.” A Good Fall.

                Random House, New York 2009. Print

---, Waiting. Random House, New York 2000. Print

Mc Mahon, Jeff.  “In the Crossfire” Humanities El Camino College,

                Torrance. 22 Mar. 2012. Lecture

The Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings. Trans. Burton Watson

                Soka Gakkai, Japan 2004. Print

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All the Good Fall Lessons on One Post

Lesson One: "The Beauty" and "Temporary Love"

Lesson Two: "A Composer and His Parakeets" and "Choice

Lesson Three: "The House Behind a Weeping Cherry" and "A Good Fall"

Lesson Four: In the Crossfire

Essay Options for A Good Fall

Essay Option 1 A Good Fall

In a 5-page research paper, develop a thesis that develops the contradictions of freedom as those contradictions are evidenced in the stories of Ha Jin’s A Good Fall. Refer to no fewer than 2 stories. Your outline might look like this:

Paragraph 1: Introduction of the theme through exposition (explaining and defining the theme) or use a personal anecdote if possible. 

Paragraph 2: Thesis with 4 or 5 mapping components

Paragraphs 3-9: Elaborate on your mapping components

Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a restatement of your thesis

Last page is your Works Cited page with at least 3 sources.

Second Option:

In one page, write a profile of someone you know who like one of the characters from Ha Jin's short story collection is saddled with a variety of impediments to love, especially the impediment of blindness or ignorance or willed ignorance or naiveté or something else that means emotional blindness. Then transition to your thesis that compares the impediments of love (blindness, rigid loyalty to a role, rigid committment to a tradition, a sense of futility, deluded by a chimera, etc.) to at least three characters from at least 3 of the stories.

Outline:

Page 1: Introduction: Write about a time you were blind in a way that created an obstacle to love. Or use someone else. 

Page 2: Thesis paragraph that explains the impediments of love (or focus on blindness) in Ha Jin's stories with 4 or 5 mapping components.

Pages 2-5 will elaborate on your mapping statements.

Conclusion on page 5 will reiterate your thesis.

Works Cited page, page 6, will reference Ha Jin's collection, McMahon's blog, and one more source for a total of 3 sources.

Qualities of a Successful Thesis

1. One complete sentence that makes a meaningful, often provocative, assertion that can be demonstrated and supported with examples, illustrations, logic, and counter-arguments. 

2. A successful thesis is NEVER obvious or self-evident or safe. For example: Married couples will experience improved intimacy if they communicate better. Too obvious.

Another example: The characters in Ha Jin's stories are often afraid of love and this fear makes them lonely. Too obvious. 

3. A good thesis challenges commonly held beliefs and assumptions. Example: Throughout McMahon's lectures, he over and over again talks about the characters' "blindness" as an impediment to love, but to the contrary, the characters are not blind at all. They see with all too much clearness their predicament, which is that they are too torn by their home country's traditions and restrictions and American's apparent unlimited freedom. Living inside this conflict afflicts Ha Jin's characters with __________, ________, _________, and ____________.

Lesson #4 “In the Crossfire” (87)

 Tan Is a Hero Who Has the Third Eye and Free Will

One. What is Tian Chu’s freedom quest? To escape the infantile imbecilities of his mother, a wet blanket, a pernicious force on him and his wife Connie. She’s a malicious force who would add tofu and soy to dishes even though she knows Connie has allergies to these foods. American culture gives Tian's wife a freedom that his mother cannot understand.

But let's be clear: Tian must also be free from the kind of retaliation that might sever him from his mother. He is walking a tightrope, which requires, skill, cunning, and the Third Eye.

 

Two. The mother has become a “monkey on the back,” a burden that seems to never go away. To have a “monkey on the back” is a form of imprisonment. Part of this burden rests on the cultural differences between the mother and son. The mother does not approve of the wife having this much freedom. The son knows the mother means well: She is protective of her son's interests and she wants him to have a wife based on an ideal that the mother has grown up with all her life. The son knows it's unlikely he can change an ideal etched in the heart and soul. Tian's mother sees marriage as a tradition, but in America marriage is a business.

Three. Mother castrates her son through a thousand cuts, most of the cuts centered on Connie: “What’s the use of being six feet tall if you can’t put Connie in her place?” Even here, the son's Third Eye sees the mother's good intentions and prevents him from losing his cool.

Four. The mother is a petulant malcontent, always bickering and complaining in order to put down her son. She’s full of insults. While the son indulges his mother, he knows his mother's malcontented words are a cancer on his marriage, especially since his wife is affected by the Mother's insults.

Five. Mother is over protective, believing that Connie is using her husband while working on her degree, denying him children, not cooking for him, and making him do her laundry. Again, the mother means well for her son and she cannot support a daughter-in-law who appears to value her career over her husband.

Six. Mother is a master of manipulation always tugging on her son’s heartstrings of guilt. “If you don’t do as I say, you are proving that you want to disown me.” Mother's love for her son is contaminated by a desire for too much control.

Seven. The son sees how his mother is harmful to his wife, but he also sees some good in his mother: She befriends a poor mother, Shulan, whose husband has abandoned her and child for another woman. The son in other words has a nuanced view of his mother: He doesn't demonize her. He instead sees her complexities.

Eight. What frees Tian from his mother? Cunning. He asks his boss to terminate him, so he can look for a new job. He has to be clever to both his wife and mother in order to preserve their self-respect and honor. He lies to his wife and says he was fired. But Connie knows her husband is using a hustle and she becomes part of the trick or hustle. The couple’s fake poverty terrifies the mother into leaving and she even reveals that Tian’s sister wanted the Mother to pressure her son to financially help the sister’s son go to college.

Tian also lies to his mother, saying the fighting between her and Connie stressed him out, compromised his job performance and led to his losing his job.

Nine. The mother implicitly blackmails her son to give her money so she can return to her home without shame.

Ten. For Tian, freedom can only be created if he manufactures a false persona for his parents, especially his mother.

The Third Eye As It Is Evident in Tian, Eileen from "Choice," Fanlin from "A Composer and His Parakeets," and Ganchin from "A Good Fall."

1. The Third Eye removes you from the trees and allows you to see the forest: You get sucked up into a drama of excruciating pain but have meta-cognition: the ability to distance yourself from the pot of boiling water (from which your limbs flail) and make a detached plan of effective action: get out of a misguided relationship; gingerly tiptoe around your bellicose mother by being more clever than she is.

Examples: Subaru WRX STI no front seat; BMW 5 Series, 3 jobs . . .

2. The Third Eye emphasizes the bigger, long-term picture over the short-term, narrow confines of obsession and emotional upheaval.

3. The Third Eye is about valuing the cool intellect over tumultuous passions. As such, the Third Eye often tells you to avoid compulsive action but wait for more information or at the very least wait until your passions cool so that your action is done in a condition of lucidity.

4. The Third Eye is the adult that exercises discipline and calm over selfish desires because in part the Third Eye has realistic expectations about life and can enduring suffering without self-pity. I'm thinking of Eileen here. 

5. The Third Eye is the moral conscience that recognizes your vulnerability to misguided passions and self-betrayal. It sets you free from a situation from which you have been "banging your head against a wall" repeatedly. The Third Eye tells you that you must free yourself from this condition of futility. I'm thinking of Fanlin as he recognizes his bogus girlfriend. 

6. The Third Eye allows you to see a conflict in terms of gray rather than black and white. For example, Tian does not see his mother as evil even though she is a pernicious force against him and especially Connie. He sees the good in her, helping abandoned women for example, and his ability to comprehend his mother as a complex tangle of contradictions prevents him from demonizing and dehumanizing her so that he can salvage something from his mother-son relationship.

Other examples: GPA and the professor who sent student off to war.

7. In desperate cases, the Third Eye doesn't become apparent until there has been a "good fall," a hitting of rock bottom in which you no longer have nothing to lose and in this state you're better to evaluate all the delusions that have shackled you to your unnecessary imprisonment.

Thesis Example:

In Ha Jin's story collection A Good Fall some of the stories show characters breaking free from their imprisonment as a result of their Third Eye. As the stories show, this Third Eye is essential to personal freedom because the Third Eye allows the characters to ________. __________. _________. and _______________. 

 

Example of an Introduction, Transition, and Thesis About the Third Eye

A student who took my freshman composition class last semester showed up to my over-crowded Critical Thinking class six weeks ago and begged me to add him. I did as he wished. How did he repay me? Last week during lecture and class discussion, I saw him doing his chemistry homework. His disrespect went deep into my psyche and I felt my blood boil as I prepared to throw his book across the room and scream a tirade. But before I lost control, my Third Eye stepped in and directed me on a different course.

I calmly walked over to the offending student, picked up the chemisty book and said the following:

"When you do your homework, it's a sign of disrespect to me and the other students. And when you disrespect us, you lower morale. And when you lower morale, you degrade my ability to teach. And when you degrade my ability to teach, you threaten my livelihood. And when you threaten my livelihood, you compromise my ability to feed my children. Is that what you're trying to do here!"

He shook his head emphatically and said he was sorry, upon which I said, "Thank you. You're very kind, sir." That's the last I've seen of his chemistry book, or smart phone for that matter. And I achieved my goal without losing my temper and making a fool of myself.

What saved me in this instance? The Third Eye, that ability to distance ourselves from our emotions, even in a heated situation, and act with reason and cool detachment.

We see this ability to reason with cool detachment in  some of the characters in Ha Jin's A Good Fall. Their ability to exercise the Third Eye gives them free will and is evidenced by ____________________, __________________, ____________________, and _________________________________.

 

In-class Activity:

With another student, develop a thesis that analyzes the Third Eye's role of delivering the characters from imprisonment and finding freedom. Make sure your thesis has at least 4 mapping components.

 

 

Lesson #3: “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry” 195 and “A Good Fall” 221

Grammar and Spell Check: Find the 15 Errors in the Following Paragraph 

Wanping and Ganchin, too of my favorite characters from “A Good Fall” short story collection our both being pimped by the Man. Wanping labors in the garment industry buy day and plays the role of neutered lackey for a brothel at night, similary, Ganchin is exploited by his salacious“pimp”; Master Zong, charlatan kung fu extraordinaire. Although, we feel sympathy for both characters; we are annoyed buy they’re passivity in the face of hostile forces. Including the Chinese mafia and Master Zong’s willingness two deny Ganchin payment for his services at the temple. It is not until Ganchin expels a customer from the prostitute’s brothel that we see some notable courage, likewise; it is not until Ganchin has a “good fall” and sues Master Zong that his life moves in a more desirable coarse. 

 

 

We've been talking about the existence of free will or its absence (determinism) in the stories by Ha Jin and how our essay must address this conflict.

One threat to free will is a mental condition called learned helplessness.

Learned Helplessness in "A Good Fall"

Learned helplessness is a disease in which you close your heart and mind to your strong self and settle for your weak self resulting in shame, which reinforces your identity with your weak self, resulting in more shame, and so on. 

You exercise your strong and weak selves like muscles getting them stronger and stronger depending on which one you exercise more.

When you do your homework or any discipline you have your strong voice telling you to focus and your weak voice telling you to take a break, a nap, an internet check on your social media, etc.

Learned helplessness is a vicious cycle. The more you become helpless, the more you become ashamed; the more you become ashamed, the more you feel helpless and so on and so on. 

Here's another definition of learned helplessness:

Learned helplessness is the paralysis that results when you convince yourself that you are helpless to overcome a predicament when in fact, objectively speaking, you have the means to solve your problem. For example, the baby elephant grows up chained to a pole and its owner eventually removes the chain but the elephant, as an adult, never leaves the pole because he’s convinced that he’s chained to it.

 

Once we sink into learned helpnessness, can we change?

You can't change unless you recognize you're in a vicious cycle and feel motivated to change.

You can't feel motivated to change unless you feel genuine shame, the kind that comes from you, not from others, and have a vision of a stronger self to aspire to. 

There are two kinds of shame.

There is genuine self-induced shame, which leads to positive change.

Example: A man stops eating the leftovers for lunch because his children who are napping need to eat some. If he eats all the food, he will feel ashamed, so he stops.

But what about the husband who stops, not because of his own shame, but the shame of getting caught by his wife?

We can call this type of shame BS shame, the kind in which you're ashamed you "got caught." You're more interested in your image than your "content." 

Kids will behave nicely at other families' homes but be brats at their own home, for example. 

A husband will be nice and mature around his wife when other couples are around but be a fussy bully child in their absence.

He's ashamed to be seen as a jerk to others but not himself. 

Real shame for our lives as helpless victims is the only way to change. I don't know if this change is the result of a choice or not.

Can we choose to experience real shame? What about the people who gorge at HomeTown Buffet?

We have to feel ashamed of our helpless state and motivated to change, but I don't know how we reach that point.

Causes of learned helplessness

One. Denial of being in a condition of learned helplessness. Does Wanping have to work as a lowly garment slave without any love in his life? Or is this a choice he makes? He says his job is like a prostitute's because he is "selling himself."

Two. Playing the life of a victim until you sincerely believe you are a victim. I had a student whose fiance left her 3 days before the wedding and she was pregnant. She never dated again. She was "protecting" herself but in reality she destroyed herself, killing an important part of who she was.

Three. We prefer the devil we know more than the devil we don't know (change).  Wanping is not ignorant about his horrible job but he is ignorant when it comes to looking at better alternatives. So is Ganchin.

We can call Number 3 "The Adam 12 Effect": We prefer the pain of helplessness to the terror and suffering of change. 

Four. We become dependent on people helping us because we're so helpless: We learn to enjoy the self-pity of believing that we're helpless more than the enjoyment that results from growing stronger. Here's the irony that we'll repeat later: We have to work hard for people to pity us and take care of us MORE THAN DOING THE WORK OURSELVES AND MORE THAN BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR OWN LIVES. I received this wisdom from a student, a male nurse, who described some dead weight nurses he worked with.

Five. We love the attention of being helpless. Learned helplessness is the identity of the helpless victim. This identity is a form of self-pity, egotism and in worst cases narcissism because you expect everyone to stop and focus their attention on your needs, your helplessness, your victimhood, which you use as a banner of glory and entitlement.

Six. Self-Reinforcement Or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

You have inculcated (taught through endless repitition) yourself with the belief of your helplessness so that your condition becomes true, but this truth isn't the result of the real world; rather, it's the result of your interior world: what's inside your head.

Seven. Solipsism

When you live only inside your head without being connected to the real world you suffer from a mental disease called solipsism. 

A skinny anorexic who thinks she's fat suffers from solipsism. 

An obnoxious, arrogant charlatan who thinks he's a gift to the world suffers from solipsism. 

An able person who doesn't look for work or try to excel in life suffers from solipsism. 

Eight. Vindication

How does this happen? A sense of helplessness or futility becomes your identity. 

Second, because failure is your identity, you compulsively invest enormous amounts of time and energy in your identity of futility and failure and you reach a point in which you NEED your life to be a failure.

Why? Because then you're proven right. To be proven right is to enjoy something called vindication.

And vindication feeds the ego.

Of course, this whole cycle of invested failure and vindication exists inside your head.  

Nine. Learned Helplessness Is Addictive Because It's All About You

It promises victimization, which makes you think others will make decisions for you and perform your hard work. 

The irony is that to play the role of helpless victim, you have to constantly manufacture so much BS you actually do MORE work than if you would not be a victim and simply be your responsible self. 

To play the victim is to live a selfish existence, which means you live as if your life is yours and yours alone. This is a lie and a delusion.

The comedian Louis C.K. says in one of his TV episodes in which he is trying to talk a friend out of committing suicide: "Your life isn't yours. It's bigger than that. It belongs to your friend, your family, the community, to the world."

Ten. Getting Lost Inside Your Head

Your interior thoughts are full of fiction, fantasy, exaggeration, delusion on such a grand scheme that living inside your head is like getting lost in a mansion with many rooms and eventually falling down a spiral staircase from which there is no bottom. We call this madness.

To get out of your head, you need something that Jerry Seinfeld calls "The Third Eye," the ability to detach from yourself and watch with a certain objectivity your thoughts and actions. 

Psychologists call The Third Eye something else: metacognition. Another way of defining this: You think about thinking. 

This is a technique discussed at some length in a best-selling book The Power of Now (I've read it; its teachings seem to be derived from Eastern religions). 

Examples of "living inside your head" without the Third Eye to stop you:

You obsess over a girl whom you're angry at because she's "ignoring" you or she's "cheating" on you when in reality this woman doesn't even know you. Your "relationship" with her is all in your head.

You obsess with worry over a speech you have to give in a college class and while obsessing you become paralyzed with breathless terror so that you almost die of a heart attack just before you go onto the stage. This near death reinforces your fear of public speaking.

You teach yourself, like Ganchin, that your fate is suffering, to be poor and to be exploited by your employees because you don't know anything else.

Your interior thoughts create a self-fulfulling prophecy loop:

You believe a negative outcome will happen; the negative outcome occurs and you now are convinced of your "prophetic powers."

"She's going to leave me."

"I'm not attractive enough. No one will ever love me."

"I'm going to fail."

"I'm too damn scared to do this properly."

"Tonight at the Senior Prom I'm sure I'll have a horrible time and make an ass of myself."

How do you free yourself from the self-fulfilling prophecy loop?

You need the Third Eye; otherwise, you won't even know you're trapped in the loop.

You need successful experiences to contradict the "failures" that live inside your head.

The second cause of learned helplessness:

The grief and self-pity you feel over your perceived learned helplessness convince you that your suffering is deeper than everyone else's and this belief that you are a Special Victim of Intense Suffering makes you feel, in a perverse way, superior to everyone else. Therefore, your learned helplessness is a form of egotism and narcissism.

Again, you need the Third Eye to see how narcissistic you've become.

 

Two. Symptoms of Learned Helplessness

1. A lack of belonging and feeling marginalized to the point of feeling like a “misfit.”
2.  A habit of repeated failure that reinforces your feelings of impotence.
3.  A defeatist, pessimistic attitude that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. "No one is going to go out with me to the Senior Ball. No one is going to like me. You watch."
   
4.  Defining yourself as a victim and making yourself dependent on others.
5.  An unconscious determination to fail because you’re afraid of success, which will force you to grow up and assume adult responsibilities.
6.  A determination to see yourself as a tragic figure who has no control of what happens to you.
7.  A fearfulness of life that compels you to hide in the psychological womb of self-pity.
8.  You're a contradiction: Stupid enough to be weak but smart enough to manipulate others to bail you out every time.
9.  Even when you know the right steps and can do something on your own, you wear out people so that they carry your weight up the mountain. They decide it’s easy to carry you on their shoulders than it is to help you because you resist  being helped.
10.  You procrastinate long enough so that you always need an excuse or an extension, reinforcing your self-image as a flake, a slouch, and lazy bum.
11.  You create drama and crises out of nothing and enjoy watching other people put your fires out.

Major Causes of Learned Helplessness

 One. Self-Reinforcement

You have inculcated (taught through endless repitition) yourself with the belief of your helplessness so that your condition becomes true, but this truth isn't the result of the real world; rather, it's the result of your interior world: what's inside your head.

Two. Solipsism

When you live only inside your head without being connected to the real world you suffer from a mental disease called solipsism. 

A skinny anorexic who thinks she's fat suffers from solipsism. 

An obnoxious, arrogant charlatan who thinks he's a gift to the world suffers from solipsism. 

An able person who doesn't look for work or try to excel in life suffers from solipsism. 

Three. Helplessness, futility, a sense of failure all become addictive. 

How does this happen? A sense of helplessness or futility becomes your identity. 

Second, because failure is your identity, you compulsively invest enormous amounts of time and energy in your identity of futility and failure and you reach a point in which you NEED your life to be a failure.

Why? Because then you're proven right. To be proven right is to enjoy something called vindication.

And vindication feeds the ego.

Of course, this whole cycle of invested failure and vindication exists inside your head.  

Four. Learned Helplessness Is Seductive

It promises victimization, which makes you think others will make decisions for you and perform your hard work. 

The irony is that to play the role of helpless victim, you have to constantly manufacture so much BS you actually do MORE work than if you would not be a victim and simply be your responsible self. 

To play the victim is to live a selfish existence, which means you live as if your life is yours and yours alone. This is a lie and a delusion.

The comedian Louis C.K. says in one of his TV episodes in which he is trying to talk a friend out of committing suicide: "Your life isn't yours. It's bigger than that. It belongs to your friend, your family, the community, to the world."

Five. Getting Lost Inside Your Head

Your interior thoughts are full of fiction, fantasy, exaggeration, delusion on such a grand scheme that living inside your head is like getting lost in a mansion with many rooms and eventually falling down a spiral staircase from which there is no bottom. We call this madness.

To get out of your head, you need something that Jerry Seinfeld calls "The Third Eye," the ability to detach from yourself and watch with a certain objectivity your thoughts and actions. 

Psychologists call The Third Eye something else: metacognition. Another way of defining this: You think about thinking. 

This is a technique discussed at some length in a best-selling book The Power of Now (I've read it; its teachings seem to be derived from Eastern religions). 

Examples of "living inside your head" without the Third Eye to stop you:

You obsess over a girl whom you're angry at because she's "ignoring" you or she's "cheating" on you when in reality this woman doesn't even know you. Your "relationship" with her is all in your head.

You obsess with worry over a speech you have to give in a college class and while obsessing you become paralyzed with breathless terror so that you almost die of a heart attack just before you go onto the stage. This near death reinforces your fear of public speaking.

You teach yourself, like Ganchin, that your fate is suffering, to be poor and to be exploited by your employees because you don't know anything else.

Your interior thoughts create a self-fulfulling prophecy loop:

You believe a negative outcome will happen; the negative outcome occurs and you now are convinced of your "prophetic powers."

"She's going to leave me."

"I'm not attractive enough. No one will ever love me."

"I'm going to fail."

"I'm too damn scared to do this properly."

"Tonight at the Senior Prom I'm sure I'll have a horrible time and make an ass of myself."

How do you free yourself from the self-fulfilling prophecy loop?

You need the Third Eye; otherwise, you won't even know you're trapped in the loop.

You need successful experiences to contradict the "failures" that live inside your head.

The second cause of learned helplessness:

The grief and self-pity you feel over your perceived learned helplessness convince you that your suffering is deeper than everyone else's and this belief that you are a Special Victim of Intense Suffering makes you feel, in a perverse way, superior to everyone else. Therefore, your learned helplessness is a form of egotism and narcissism.

Again, you need the Third Eye to see how narcissistic you've become.

Examples of Failed and Successful Thesis Statements

A Failed Thesis That Is Too General Or Obvious: Examples:

The characters in Ha Jin's short story collection suffer from blindness.

The characters need to see reality for what it truly is.

The characters in Ha Jin's stories are usually well-intentioned but desparate for change.

Better, More Specific Thesis Statements:

The intersection of Chinese traditional culture and American post-modern culture afflict the characters with a tension between _______________, ____________, ________________, and ________________.

No matter how "free" America may be, learned helplessness impedes the characters of Ha Jin's short story collection from ever being free until they can _____________, _____________, ______________, and _____________.

Ha Jin's stories masterfully render the dangers of learned helplessness, which include ________, _________, _________, __________, and __________. 

 

Example of a Successful Introduction That Gets Your Attention and Transitions to Your Thesis

Have you ever been to a couple’s house with your wife, got an upset stomach from nerves or the gnawing sense that the meat they served you was undercooked or contaminated or both, had to suffer the great shame and anxiety of rushing to their bathroom several times, and then depleted their entire stock of Costco toilet paper? Worse than that, you later learned you clogged their toilet, found out they had to call a plumber at some late-night hour on a Sunday and that this plumber charged them triple the normal cost for snaking their pipes and they could barely pay the plumber. Their financial burden was so bad they ended up being two months late on their car and mortgage payments so that their credit rating plummeted. What is really sad about all this is that they were just about to buy a second car, and guess what? Their late car and mortgage payments disqualified them for a low interest rate so they couldn't afford to buy that second car after all.  If you don't think this story is sufficiently pathetic already, then listen to this:  This couple—who used to be good friends with my wife and me—blamed me for all their financial troubles and they no longer want to be me friend. 

Things like this happen to me all the time. My friends list is dwindling. At this rate, losing about a friend a month, next October I’ll be completely friendless.

On a related note, Facebook has already deleted my account because the amount of people who unfriended me was far greater than the amount who had accepted me on their Facebook friends list. To make a long story short, I've been permanently banned from Facebook and no one at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto will talk to me. Believe me, I've called and emailed repeatedly. 

If this condition of losing friends goes on much longer, say three years, I'll be in big trouble.  My guess is that learned helplessness will sink in at which point I will become “unfriendable,” for now and all eternity. 

Desperate to get my friends back, I recently called the couple whose plumbing I had single-handedly ruined and begged for their forgiveness, even offering to co-sign on their car loan (I have an excellent FICO score) so they could get a cheaper rate, but they didn't return my calls. After my initial offer with no response, I then sent them $100 gift cards for Target, iTunes, Amazon, Olive Garden, and Home Depot, but even after all that they still haven’t called me.

Unfriendable. I had better get used to the sound of it. 

The above account is obviously of a man who's reached the end of his rope. He has descended to a point of learned helplessness, a condition in which he believes, contrary to reality, that he is helpless to improve his situation. We see a similar tale of woe in Ha Jin's short story collection A Good Fall in which free will is threatened by learned helplessness in many ways, not the least of which is ______________, __________________, ______________, and _________________. 

 

"The House Behind a Weeping Cherry" (195)

 

1.     How are the main characters prisoners living inside a prison? 197; also the juxtaposition of the garment shop with brothel. See 212. They come to America for freedom, but find themselves slaves to debtors, blood-suckers, predators. They are indeed prisoners seeking heaven in their American hell. These short stories were written in the 1990s when China's economy wasn't the powerhouse it is today. 

Part of their personal hell isn't merely economic however. It's also their own complacency with set routine (of course owing the Mafia is part of it too).

2.     How does the story deal with appearances and reality? Think glamorous exotica and meretricious malaise. See 198, 201 America is an alluring chimera, a prostitute, if you will, attracting people from all over the world, who come here only to be enslaved. In both stories, America is a sort of character, a Trickster, that takes the other characters up and down the different emotions of promise and crushing disappointment. 

3.     What is Wanping’s rite of passage on page 208? He expels one of the unruly clients out of the house and establishes his power, authority, and loyalty. A rite of passage is a way of initiating into a group, a way of proving one's worthiness of the group, a way of proving one's fidelity, loyalty, and strength for the sake of the group. 

4.     What does Wanping realize about his life on page 209 when he catches the flu? He needs what? Also see 210. He needs warmth, love, affection, companionship. He's been living in total darkness and an arctic freeze. A taste of tenderness awakens him from his blindness. 

5.     Defend or refute the choice at the end of the story. It seems like the first step in fighting the enemy and the enemy within, learned helplessness. 

“A Good Fall” (221)

1.     Compare the theme of imprisonment in “A Good Fall” with “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry.” Two characters who suffer from learned helplessness. And in both cases identify the Third Eye that frees them. For Ganchin, the fall brings him to his Third Eye. So does his girlfriend. 

2.     How is the story a re-telling of David and Goliath?

3.     What details paint Master Zong as the quintessential hypocrite? 222

4.     Why do you think Master Zong feels compelled to fire Ganchin?

5.     What evidence is there that Cindy has affection for Ganchin and that he is too naïve and blind to be aware of such enticing affection? Yes, he is aware that she is fond of him but does he know HOW fond she is of him?

6.     How is Ganchin’s identity as a monk a hurdle for him in the story? In other words, how does his being a monk create internal conflict? (Is the hacking cough a metaphor of Ganchin dying to his old self?) Being a monk has become for him about self-denial and self-limits; also it has been a source of a martyr complex, which makes him an intractable or perpetual victim. 

7.     How is the theme of learned helplessness common throughout this story and other stories in the collection? 225, 231 Time and time again, Ganchin convinces himself that he is helpless and believing he is, he becomes in fact helpless, like Huong and her co-workers in a previous story. Learned helplessness is a form of blindness. 

8.     Ganchin says he’s been pushed to the edge of a cliff on page 229. How does this pertain to the story’s title? What does the title mean? He needs to let go of his old self, his old life and fall, die to his old self and become someone new in America. 

9.     How is Ganchin’s robe a metaphor on page 234?

10.  What is the public’s reaction to Ganchin’s suicide?

11.   What lesson is Ganchin slowly learning at the story’s end?

Lesson #2 “A Composer and His Parakeets” (9) and “Choice” (49)

 

Grammar Check: Find the 21 Errors in the Following Paragraph

In Ha Jin’s “A Good Fall” is a novel of short stories featuring character’s lives that can be describe as tormented, excruciating, myopic, and, at times lugubrious. Take, for example, A Composer and His Parakeets; which renders a man so emasculated by his manipulative wannabe actress girlfriend that his only intimacy is with a needy bird. Which begs the question: Our the characters in Ha Jin’s story collection two cartoonish to be taken seriously? Although, at times they do descent to maudlin buffoonery and foolishness, there psychological complexity as they clash with the excesses of American life helps lift “A Good Fall” beyond easy satire, in fact, I will venture to say that Ha Jin’s collection is a masterpiece, it is an exquisite, nuanced picture of Chinese immigrants wrestling with a myriad of America’s most malevolent forces, these include slave labor, prostitution, exploitation of naïve Chinese immigrants, and the cultural constraints that make good people sell themselves short, indeed, for all the humor of these stories; there is an underlying sadness and melancholy that pervade each one.

 

1.     Why do couples settle into a relationship based on lies?

You can say people are blind or they choose to blind because it's easier to be deluded on a certain level. Of course, it's really not easier.

It could be argued that Fanlin and his girlfriend Supriya are both saddled down by some rather heavy delusions. What are they? Think of the musical score, The Blind Musician. Both are blind; therefore, they can never be free.

Or one can argue they are free to assert their will to be blind.

Or one can argue their blindness is not chosen; it's an unconcious impulse. I tend to agree with the first argument. 

The crux of the matter:

Fanlin is blinded by his own neediness, which compels him to commit to a vain person who is not willing to offer him reciprocity. In spite of being in a relationship, Fanlin is lonely and bonds with a bird more than his own girlfriend. 

Fanlin is afraid of the "A" word: alone, so he settles for a BS relationship.  

Supriya is too vain to acknowledge that she is using Fanlin as her lackey or servant to groom her career.

They're both using each other in an unhealthy way.

In America, we would say that Supriya is shillyshallying or dillydallying or lollygagging until someone better comes along. She shows contempt for her boyfriend, which means she must have contempt for herself.

Perhaps I'm being pessimistic, but is Supriya really on the verge of a breakthrough in her acting career or is she, like most actors, doomed to a life of small bits here and there?

Perhaps her needy boyfriend is willing to massage her delusions and reinforce their symbiotic relationship so he doesn't have to confront "A." 

2.     The relationship between Fanlin and Bori casts light on Fanlin’s relationship with Supriya. Explain.

Story's Major Theme:

Life is what happens while you’re waiting for the grand moments; closer to Bori; farther from Supriya. In other words, there is no real life with Supriya; it's just a dream, a life that will always come later. He's waiting for that life to come with Supriya, but it never will come. His real life is in the here and now and it's with Bori.

3.     How is Supriya using Fanlin? She is blind to the fact that she uses her boyfriend, that she doesn't love him and therefore doesn't love herself, and that she has a zero acting career. See 12 and 13. She won't marry him and settle down. She's dilly-dallying until someone better comes along?

4.     What evidence is there that Fanlin and the bird are bonding? (blister, travel companion, etc). Most importantly, see 23, the change in the second half of Fanlin’s music score, more depth, melancholy, beauty in the face of the death of his beloved bird.

“Choice” (49)

I should say as a preface that while this is not my favorite story, I think it is the BEST story. There is a difference between favorite (the way life should be as in "A Good Fall," my favorite story and the way life really is, "Choice.")

1.     Why does the narrator Dave Hong hate his father? 50 His father belittles any aspiration that doesn't entail money and power.

2.     Explain the different meanings of the story’s title. David's choices, and Eileen's, and her daughter's.

3.     Explain Dave’s sense of dislocation and lack of belonging on page 54. He lives alone, not sure of his choices, wondering if he's doomed to a life of loneliness and destitution.

4.     Explain the significance of Old Feng on page 59. He represents Eileen's joyless duties at work, catering to the paranoid needs of an obscure writer. She is someone perhaps too busy to deal with the drama of a young boyfriend who has fun the affections of her daughter.

5.     What evidence is there that Sami feels Dave and Eileen’s relationship betrays her recently deceased father? 63 Sami sulks and becomes passive-aggressive when she sees evidence of intimacy between Eileen and Dave. Perhaps the mother fears, having lost her husband, that a relationship with Dave could cause her to lose her daughter.

6.     What evidence is there that Sami wants Dave to replace her father, but not replace him in the sense of being Eileen’s husband? Or perhaps did Sami have a romantic crush on him? 66, 69, 71 Sami stole his shirt. She calls them "shameless animals." Sami doesn't want to lose a father figure again. She tells Dave that he'll dump her mom.

7.     On page 74, what suggests that Sami and her mother are trying to abate their complicated feelings (way too complicated) for Dave and want to vanquish him in order to save their relationship? How does this situation pertain to the story’s title? (competition for the same man? Guilt over that and their recently deceased father/husband? Both protective of each other’s feelings?)

8.     Is “Choice” about choosing the lesser of two evils? Give a personal example. The mother will be "less happy" without her boyfriend but in this case happiness is not the issue. Preserving her relationship with her daughter is the issue. Maturity is being able to take "happiness" out of the equation when you have to. Maturity is knowing when to say "happiness is not relevant."

Perhaps the story's theme is that there is no such thing as "the right choice," which is a myth. All choices are messy, complicated thorny beasts sodden with the hideous and the horrible. 

9. What fears does Eileen have? 

She fears that she and Sami are competing for Dave, which will obviously compromise her relationship with her daughter. 

She fears dating Dave disgraces her husband even though he is dead. 

She fears that if Dave dumps her, she and her daughter will have to experience the devastating loss of a husband and father figure all over again.

 

Argumentative Thesis Examples for "Choice"

Some argue that Eileen should not reject Dave, that she is a prisoner of fear, hiding in an emotional prison affording too much protection. But in fact, Eileen made the right choice by rejecting Dave because, in spite of his friendly, helpful personality traits, he presents too much risk to both Eileen and her daughter. His first risk is that he is not anchored to anything. He is a lonely man without a sense of belonging and in this lonely state he is needy. Needy people make bad, compulsive decisions. It is likely that, as Sami predicted, he will eventually tire of his caretaker role, reject Eileen, and waste her time. The second risk he poses is that while he is a helpful presence in Eileen's househould, she has not gone through the grieving process enough to form a stable bond of intimacy with Dave. Finally, Dave is too young to know that he wants to settle down with an older woman who cannot bear him a child. He is fooling both himself, and Eileen, if he thinks otherwise. Taken in its totality, Eileen made the wise and prudent choice by suppressing her passions and expelling Dave from her life. Eileen's discipline shows conclusively that she is not a slave to irrational passions and that in fact she is free.

 

A Thesis That Counters the Above One

Whoever wrote that Dave presents Eileen a high risk is in grievious error. For one, Dave has been nothing but sincere in his intentions throughout the story. He has no tricks up his sleeve, no skullduggery whatsoever. Second, the idea that all men must be biological fathers is a gross generalization that has no bearing in scientific data or research. Finally, this notion that the possible breakup between Dave and Eileen would be a trauma tantamount to the mother and daughter re-experiencing the father's death all over again is utterly absurd. All of us face the risk of loss in a relationship. All of us are vulnerable. Eileen, and her daughter, are no different than the rest of us.

McMahon's Sample Introduction Transitioning to a Thesis About Free Will

Mario Alzone and I were teenagers when one hot summer night we ignored the No Trespassing sign, climbed over the gate of the swanky Tanglewood Apartments, and took a dip in the luxury swimming pool. Floating in the water was this oversized fluorescent orange bra. Alzone picked it up, studied the extra large cups lasciviously and then announced that he had forgotten to buy his sister a birthday present. I told him he was an idiot and laughed, assuming he wasn't serious.

But a few days later I attended his sister's birthday party and Mario presented her with this lurid orange bra, unwrapped, and she didn't even look surprised, apparently desensitized to her brother's troglodyte behavior. 

Alzone’s judgment had always been skewed. He once sped a mini bike, lost control, and crashed through a church wall. Two days later he discovered he had broken his leg.

His employment history was sketchy. He never went to college, so he’d get these non-skill jobs: margarine  and ketchup factories, slaughterhouses, Toys R Us . . . the list seemed endless.

One day I went with him to the unemployment office and I was disgusted by the nicotine-coated building, the unfriendly, ghoulish, brain-dead functionaries working behind the cracked plastic partitions and I realized my days with Alzone were near the end.

I got serious about my college studies, got off the academic probation list, and started earning straight As.

Should I pat myself on the back for my college success? I don't think so. My success wasn't based on any "choice" I had made. Rather, my motivation to succeed was no choice at all; it was a compulsion based on vanity, the need for a job that I could boast about at cocktail parties, and disgust for a life dependent on unskilled jobs. 

I've never been someone possessed by free will. Rather, I am driven by hardwired impulses to be disgusted by a life of deadends, thankless jobs, and lowly status. In other words, my biological and psychological makeup compell me to embrace those things that will lift me higher up the Darwinian food chain. 

Likewise, most of the characters in Ha Jin's stories don't appear to be endowed with any free will. Rather, they are driven by unconscious impulses, which include insane jealousy, cultural obligation, guilt, and curdled love gone bad.

Free Will and Determinism in Ha Jin's Stories

"The Beauty" : no free will; Dan is driven by jealousy. Dan becomes more and more odious and disgusting as the story progresses. He becomes a more intense version of his already lame self. He is what we call a centripetal character.

"Temporary Love": no free will; Lina is driven by a sense of guilt and duty; Panbin is overcome by curdled love that leads to bitterness and nihilism.

"A Composer and His Parakeets": There is free will in a subtle way. Fanlin slowly lets go of his denial about Supriya's lack of love for him and undergoes the slow, arduous journey toward acceptance rendered in his melancholy musical composition.

Fanlin has grown as a person; thus we can say he is a centrifugal character.

"Choice": There is free will: Eileen cuts short her passionate affair with Dave because it's destroying her relationship with her daughter. Eileen ultimately asserts discipline and self-denial in the face of temptation for the sake of her daughter.

Lesson #1 for “The Beauty” 25-48 and “Temporary Love” 175-194

 

Essay 1 A Good Fall

First Option

In a 5-page research paper, develop a thesis about freedom as you see it in the stories of Ha Jin’s A Good Fall. Refer to no fewer than 2 stories.

 

 

You can NOT write about freedom unless you understand imprisonment since freedom is about being free FROM something, that is to say, it is about being free from some sort of imprisonment.

There are different types of imprisonment, psychological, emotional, spiritual, obligational, financial, physical, etc.

The glutton is a slave to over eating.

The racist is a slave to ignorance, bull-headedness, and fear.

The man who can't stop thinking about his ex lover after 20 years is a slave to heartbreak.

The alcoholic is a slave to Old Milwaukee or Pabst.

The person with chronic sciatica (lower back pain) is a slave to pain.

The person who is jealous is a slave to madness.

 

Your outline might look like this:

Paragraph 1: Introduction of the theme through exposition (explaining and defining the theme) or use a personal anecdote if possible. 

Paragraph 2: Thesis with 4 or 5 mapping components

Paragraphs 3-9: Elaborate on your mapping components

Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a restatement of your thesis

Last page is your Works Cited page with at least 3 sources.

Second Option:

In one page, write a profile of someone you know who like one of the characters from Ha Jin's short story collection is saddled with a variety of impediments to love, especially the impediment of blindness or ignorance or willed ignorance or naiveté or something else that means emotional blindness. Then transition to your thesis that compares the impediments of love (blindness, rigid loyalty to a role, rigid committment to a tradition, a sense of futility, deluded by a chimera, etc.) to at least three characters from at least 3 of the stories.

Some impediments to love:

1. blindness

2. jealousy

3. insecurity

4. lack of trust

5. "shot-blockers"

6. entitlement (Seneca wrote about a variety of pathetic people who wait around for people to love them and never find love; they languish in loneliness; Seneca wrote that you should not wish to be loved; love others and they will love you)

Outline:

Page 1: Introduction: Write about a time you were blind in a way that created an obstacle to love. Or use someone else. 

Page 2: Thesis paragraph that explains the impediments of love (or focus on blindness) in Ha Jin's stories with 4 or 5 mapping components.

Pages 2-5 will elaborate on your mapping statements.

Conclusion on page 5 will reiterate your thesis.

Works Cited page, page 6, will reference Ha Jin's collection, McMahon's blog, and one more source for a total of 3 sources.

Qualities of a Successful Thesis

1. One complete sentence that makes a meaningful, often provocative, assertion that can be demonstrated and supported with examples, illustrations, logic, and counter-arguments. 

2. A successful thesis is NEVER obvious or self-evident or safe.

For example: Married couples will experience improved intimacy if they communicate better. Too obvious.

Another example: The characters in Ha Jin's stories are often afraid of love and this fear makes them lonely. Too obvious. 

3. A good thesis challenges commonly held beliefs and assumptions. Example: Throughout McMahon's lectures, he over and over again talks about the characters' "blindness" as an impediment to love, but to the contrary, the characters are not blind at all. They see with all too much clearness their predicament, which is that they are too torn by their home country's traditions and restrictions and American's apparent unlimited freedom. Living inside this conflict afflicts Ha Jin's characters with __________, ________, _________, and ____________.

 

How McMahon Would Write an Essay for This Topic

Here's an introduction I've never tried before: Make a list of disturbing generalities about something based on specific characters in the assigned book. Then drawing from those generalities, I set up a thesis to do a specific character analysis. 

Ten Things Men Don't Want Women to Know

1. If a man is jealous that you're cheating on him, not only are you not cheating on him, he's cheating on you. 

2. Men will lie until the repeated lie convinces them that they are telling the truth.

3. Men will bite their nose to spite your face.

4. Men don't want understanding or compromise in a relationship; they want victory and the upper hand.

5. Men often blossom into mature, loving human beings during the dating phase only to regress into adenoidal 13-year-old boys after marriage.

6. Men use marriage to retreat into a cave of routine, predictablity, and protection from the dangers of single life.

7. Men are not looking for an equal female partner. They are looking for a mother to indulge their infantile, needy propensities. 

8. Men don't want to be in relationships. They want 24/7 access to a Goody Box full of toys, goodies, sweets, and pleasures only to look for a new Goody Box every time they exhaust their current one. 

9. Men will lie to you repeatedly. However, if they catch you in one lie they will scream the riot act. 

10. A man will lose interest in you as soon as he believes you no longer contribute to the glorification of his image and power.

Sound like harsh view of men? Read Ha Jin's stories from A Good Fall and you'll find plenty of men who are emotionally imprisoned by the aforementioned character flaws, including psychotic jealousy, spite, control, and the worship of power. 

 

 

Lexicon

One. jealousy: a mental disease, a form of imprisonmnet, a form of madness turning into a demonic obsession in which the subject projects his own desires to commit heinous acts of infidelity on his partner. As his obsession grows, he becomes more and more controlling and suffocating until he reaches a yet even higher level of insanity in which he WANTS his partner to cheat on him in order to vindicate his delusions. He longs to shake his finger and say "I told you so! I knew it!" Jealousy is sometimes rooted in insecurity; in worse instances, jealousy is rooted in sociopathy, the evil condition of despising all people or being indifferent to others' suffering or both.

Two. Projection: Assuming others have your worst traits while remaining blind to those traits you have in yourself.

Three. Vindication: proving to others and yourself that you are right. The problem with wanting to be right all the time is that you forget more important things like reaching an understanding with others.

Four. Solipsism: extreme self-centeredness in which you look at others as either competitition to be destroyed or trophies to be displayed for your glory. Solipsism leeches away at empathy until there is none. The ultimate destination of solipsism is insanity. With solipsism there must be a degree of paranoia and delusions of grandeur.

Five. Seeing the trees but not the forest: You micromanage the small things and lose sight of the more important things (Lina)

Six. Obligation to conformity of the social order vs. obligation to one's true self (Lina)

Seven. Heartless reciprocity: Doing a good deed not out of love but to demand that the person you help be under obligation to return a favor, often bigger than the original good deed (Zuming)

Eight. Spleen love: The more you love someone, the greater degree that love can turn to hate (Panbin).

“The Beauty” 25

1.     What evidence is there that Dan has been suffocating his wife Gina? Control, jealousy, mistrust, the sense that Gina is hiding something from him, which she is, but he has no idea. The problem is that the more he suffocates her, the more she wants to live in a parallel universe away from him as an escape thus reinforcing his suspicions. They are caught in this vicious cycle.

2.     How does Dan’s jealous behavior actually encourage a closer friendship between his wife Gina and her friend Fooming Yu? Fooming Yu knows her secret and uses it to hold power over her, so Gina is being controlled by two men. Plus she's raising a child. This will lead to her insanity if nothing changes.

3.     What evidence is there that Dan pursued Gina as a trophy object and not a human being? See pages 29 and 32. Dan sees Gina as a competition, not as a human being. His relationships are all compromised and poisoned by his egotism and solipsism (extreme self-centeredness).

4.     How does his daughter Jasmine enflame Dan’s jealousy? See page 28. Baby doesn't look like either parent. So who's the father?

5.     What is the irony of Dan’s visits to the bathhouse?

6.     What is Dan specifically jealous about on page 29? Fooming knows more about Gina than does Dan. Perhaps Dan has little interest in Gina other than the way she makes her husband look good like an accessory.

7.     How are Dan’s character flaws rendered on page 29? He has a Darwinian view of the world that makes his humanity ugly. Everyone is a competitor for status. Another flaw is that Dan suffers from projection; since he wants to cheat, he projects, that is, he assumes his wife wants to always cheat on him. The more jealous the husband, the more likely he is to cheat.

8.     What is the real source of humiliation Dan suffers on page 31? He cannot control his wife.

9.     What evidences a sense of resentment Dan harbors against his daughter Jasmine on page 35? He resents her for impeding his sleep "on purpose."

10.      How is Dan seen as a man of abstractions, not reality, on page 36?

11.      What is the essential insanity of jealousy? See page 37. Once you invest energy into believing that your spouse is cheating on you, you HAVE to believe it in order to justify and vindicate all your lost energy.

12.          Unravel the mystery of Gina. 40-48

13.      Is Dan’s curiosity and suspicion toward his wife vindicated on page 44?

14.      How is Dan’s inhumanity revealed after he hears the truth? 45 "You gave me a raw deal! No wonder Jasmine is so homely."

15.    What hypocrisy regarding self-deception does Dan reveal on page 45?

16.     Explain the story’s ending, Dan’s reluctance to go home. He feels betrayed because he can no longer trust his wife who duped him.

17.      While one crisis has been resolved regarding Gina’s identity, there is a deeper, unresolved crisis that doesn’t bode well for the marriage. Explain. (Dan’s character, overwrought by egotism, solipsism, superficiality, centripetal development, etc)

“Temporary Love” 175

1.     What is the perplexing situation called a “wartime couple”? Cohabiting to reduce living expenses while spouses live in another country.

2.     What are Lina’s flaws? Naiveté and rigid adherence to loyalty code prevent her from seeing the big picture and the truth.

3.     How do we know that Lina is in denial? Over what? 178 (mutual convenience)

4.     What does it mean to be “responsible” on page 179? How could we have opposing definitions?

5.     Contrast Lina’s life with Panbin and her life with Zuming. How is it the difference between heaven and hell?

6.     What evidence is there that Zuming does not love his wife?

7.     Zuming nursed Lina’s father after he had a stroke. Does this make Zuming seem like a loving person? Explain. 185

8.     What does Lina discover after she accuses Panbin of telling Zuming about their affair? 187

9.     One of the story’s sad points is that Panbin opened Lina’s eyes as to what kind of men there are in the world. Explain in the context of the ambitious Zuming.

10.     Once you’ve tasted good love, can you leave it and settle on a compromised, degraded version of it? Explain.

11.     Will Zuming leave Lina some day? Explain. 190

12.     How does Panbin’s life illustrate “spleen love”? See 191-194. He becomes an “international womanizer,” a nihilist, a bitter misanthrope.

 

Class Activity

In a half page, write a profile of someone you know who is like Dan (full of jealousy and solipsism) or Lina (obedience to conformity) or Zuming (exercises heartless reciprocity) or Panbin (the victim of spleen love).