Wasn’t present for the films on Tuesday.
Text: Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung
- Major Themes
- Loss
- Sacrifice
- Secrets
- Forgiveness
- Family
- Hope
- Dreams
- Sexism
- Home
- Tradition
- Author able to make you experience exact thoughts of Hannah throughout the novel.
- Connections between class texts
- The Mandate of Heaven. The Rise and Fall.
- Hannah’s breath rises and falls in the sheets.
- The dad getting sick then better then sick again.
- The parents leaving their home of Korea, making a new home in America, and then once again moving back to Korea.
- The relationship between the Sisters shifting throughout their lives. Their entire family dynamic changing.
- The interweaving of Folk tales and reality. Simchung, Cliff of a Thousand Flowers. The relation between the sisters and the lessons they learn form the stories are completely determined by their own lived experiences.
- Father owed life to Komo, Father owed life to Wife
- Hope remains an integral part of the lives of the family in “When The Emperor was Divine” and the family in “Forgotten Country” are holding on to whatever hope they can fin wherever they can find it.
- Author’s ability to make you feel a certain way about a character and then reveal a secret and have that opinion completely flipped on it’s head never ceased to impress.
- Watching a parent die is rough, book brought on some painful memories.
- Dreams and reality merging, the folk tales all seemed to have too much of an exact correlation with the events happening to the characters.
- I liked the subtle ways the author depicted the discrimination the family faced in America. The everyone assuming they know the Chinese family only because they are both Asian. The “Ching Chong Ching” and the casualness of the teacher around the murder of the Chinese man.
- Forgetting to Remember. The Mother’s sister just being forgotten and how much of a long lasting trauma that had on the mother. The father saying he didn’t remember the things about Korea.
- The mother tried to kill herself in the end right?
- “The body remembers old wounds” 133
- “Joy can stop time” 159
- “We are nothing but our history” 171
- “We’re just one world” 180
- “All boundaries are imagined” 266
- “Negative Hope” 194
- “We have roots, everyone does” 216
- “A knot is impossible to unravel without cutting it apart. Sometimes it can’t be undone.” 289