Short Story: COUNTRY BOY QUITS SCHOOL

Grade 10-KATARUNGAN                                                                                     July 18, 2016

i.                     TITLE OF THE STORY

Country Boy Quits School

ii.                   NAME OF THE AUTHOR

Lao Hsiang (1899-1966) his pen name is Lao Shê as a novelist, was born in Peking (now Beijing).  He has been called as one of China's best modern writers.  The prolific output of this humorist, patriot, and realist also included poetry, several volumes of short stories (many of which contained humor and featured the townspeople of Beijing), and many plays.

iii.                  SETTING

A.      PLACES

·         China- on the first sentence of the third paragraph, it states there if how the father of a boy amazes the books’ contents and exclaims that the people in the pictures are not Chinese so it implies to me that it is the place of that nationality that is being mentioned.

·         School- so many times the teacher is made mention in this place of having to do with the teaching to the boy, Baldy, Hsiao Lin and others,   aside from that the family decided that the boy must be taken out of this place believing that the teaching style is inappropriate for their culture.

·         House- a place where a boy has been studying and reads his books aloud which every dweller is able to hear clearly but makes them mad due to their wrong translation as well as the interpretation.

B.      TIME

Based on information provided by one of Lao Hsiang translators, Howard Goldblatt, it appears that Lao began writing short stories around the early/mid-1920s and had published several large collections by the mid-1930s.

iv.                 MAIN CHARACTERS

The boy who is hardworking, even at an early age of 8 years old he begins to help his family for their daily subsistence. He gains only a little learning in school due to his parents’ ignorance for they (parents) themselves are illiterate.

v.                   SUMMARY

The story is about a poor Chinese family which has a boy of an early age, toiling everyday for a living just to help augmenting the other basic needs of their family. The family is forced to send this boy to school following the City Ordinance, to cite: An official proclamation had been issued in the city to the effect that unless a boy over six years of age is sent to school, some adult in the family will go to jail. Good thing there is a law that compels this boy to study so that it could have been a chance for him to acquire knowledge too but sooner or later he misses that mere chance due to the intervention of his family’s poor insight.

The English illustrations in books and the literal meaning they are using for translation lead to much confusion and misunderstanding in their household which everyone is holding grudges against each other, which in fact without basis at all because their judgment is only based on their own unreasonable perception, which the true intention of the content of the books is the other way around. The intention is for the betterment of the reader’s life.

As the boy studies he frequently reads these books at the top of his lungs and it brings discomfort to the ears of every family member every time they hear this due to their own inaccurate interpretation of the foreign system of education. This incident always results to chaos and misunderstanding so that one day the father decided that these books will never be read again by the boy because his family is certain that the school is not teaching the proper way so the boy is finally pulled out of the school in which the father chooses to be rather in jail than destroying the family for continuously sending a boy to school. It only demonstrates that the entire family lacks in education itself because there is no doubt that they are seeing things differently which is out of context.

vi.                 LESSON LEARNED

I learned that education is very important to us so that we can improve and do better with our lives.  If we are well-equipped, we could be flexible enough to all the changes around us. Education is what we become in the future.

However, to those people who are not fortunate enough to have a chance to go to school due to financial reason or might be the government is not very particular on the matter pertaining to education. It is sad to know that these people are not able to cope up well with what is happening around them. Like the family in this story, they are incapable to do things to make their lives more comfortable. They lack of education because China at that time was more rigid with its communist doctrine. In order to grip its people especially the masses, it is unwise for the government to introduce education to them because rebels come from the rank of educated bracket of society.

vii.                PERSONAL REACTIONS

I felt disappointed about the boy’s ordeal, because of this different culture that is being introduced by the educational system, the children are the ones who are affected. Society begins from a place called family, but in many instances families are part of different cultures which bring conflicts to children that they have to confront. The family supposes to have the big role in encouraging and to guide these children in order to adapt between two different cultures or more. But it saddens me that the family especially the father  who has the first hand to design the future of his son, is forcing this boy to be ignorant about other cultures. They make it clear that the boy should not learn any culture aside from Chinese and it is absurd because everything else in school to them is abnormal. Anyway the writing style of the author is satiric yet full of lessons.