Chinese Dancing Bendigo Analysis

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Chinese Dancing Bendigo style is an exceptional story that emphasises on cultural perspectives and how it affects certain individuals. In doing so, it has shaped my understanding of how life is for a half Asian, primary school boy living in Australia. Some messages found through the story are how it has a didactic aspect to it in regards of teaching us not to be judgmental due to the fact that the bi-cultural individual may be facing problems of self-acceptance in many aspects such as appearance. In addition to this, the story portrays the differences between the cultures found within the story showing me how different two cultures can truly be. Finally, in the end of the story, we see the persona accepting himself through culture showing me …show more content…

This is due to the fact that the individual may be going through a stage where their cultures may be contradicting making him feel alienated. One way this is shown in the story is, how the persona, who is half Australian and Chinese, describes his personal appearance by saying, “I caught a glimpse of my poo-brown eyes and flat yellow nose; then I just looked down at my feet as they slunk away”, in this quote we see that the person is describing his personal appearance through imagery, in doing so he is demonstrating his half Asian side. However, we see that he uses emotive language in order to make the reader understand how the boy feels about his appearance. Especially saying how his feet “slunk away”, in other words he is ashamed of his appearance. Later on in the story we see how he describes the Australian kids through, “They had sandy hair, pale freckly skin and blue eyes that could read the board from the back of the room without corrective lenses”. We see in this quote how the he uses imagery to describe them however instead of using poor emotive language he uses a description that practically praises them. In doing so I noticed that the boy hates his Asian side and he thinks looking Australian is better showing how he feels contradicted by his personal image. This teaches me not to be judgmental to bicultural individuals as it may be adding fuel to the …show more content…

This has shown me what a bicultural individual must undergo until he can be considered as accepted. To sum this concept in one simple sentence, the text has used a metaphor describing what is like combining the two culture, “It was like climbing onto a made-in-Australia dragon-shaped life-raft in a sea of contradicting”. The metaphor simply makes the concept much easier to understand as a reader making it relatable in the aspect of the reader picturing it in their heads. As I said, this story has also shown me what it is like for a bicultural individual to live in a modern day

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