Creative Writing EPQ

Tiger In The Tai

Themes

Outcome

“under the illusion she is a tiger.”

“She is not a rat like me, she is a tiger, and I hear her roar every time I close my eyes.”

“I watch the water drowning her face, extinguishing the tiger inside of her, the fire’s resilience burning out.”

Chuming

Others- River Tai, Hands, Origami Swan, Flowers, The Bench, The Moon Lady

Yin

Culture Conflict

Lihai

I can see America in her, how her exterior radiates her emotions, but I can see the east in her too: it leaks out of her eyes and falls down her cheek.

Eastern Wind

Mama’s voice carries through the eastern breeze: the wind that drives across continents to meet its culture. It will go to such lengths to be home.

Ai-yah! Language!

Research & Planning

I crouch down and sit on an upturned crate. Yellow lanterns painted with black ideographs of longevity ( ) and home ( ) are tossed around like concubines in the wind. They’re draped from the apartments above, tied like tadpoles to a pond and just as fragile.

???? 1880

Chapters

I saw the Tai when it was not polluted, but a gleaming river parting the near south and east of China. Children played in it, small girls dipped in their lily feet when they were strong enough to stand on them. The numbness of tender broken bones meant the ripples flowed over them, unrecognisable and invisible as a wish.

I am what they call cán huā, a broken flower, a fallen woman. As I slip through the door and stare at the path to the stairs, sz sounds fill the air, which is four in Chinese. It means die.

Saviour 1891

Rebirth 1879

Creative Writing EPQ

Chinese-American Literature

?!

Sitting Quietly

1934

Husband dies, gives birth to daughter

1908

Meets future husband and moves out of uncle's house

1906

First Oriental Only School

Begins school but enters prostitution aged 14/15

1886

Chinese Exclusion Act

Lives as paper daughter with uncle

1882

Research

Characters

• Novels
• Pictures
• Historical
• Geographical

Born

1876

Geographical

Pictures

Historical

Amy Tan- The Joy Luck Club

Incentive to leave Ningpo...

• Taiping Rebellion
• Ningpo Massacre

Finally... bandits

Logbook/Diary

Lisa See- On Gold Mountain

“But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.”

“When you’re Chinese you’re supposed to accept everything, flow with the Tao and not make waves.”

“I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitterness.”

"In a crowd of Caucasians, two Chinese people are already like family.”

Contextual and conceptual

The Great Depression

Prostitution

Paper sons and daughters

Enclaves of single men

"She had come here in 1949, at the end of a long journey that started in Kweilin in 1944, she had gone north to Chungking, where she had met my father, and then they went southeast to Shanghai and fled farther to Hong Kong, where the boat departed for San Francisco.”

Action:

From re-reading “The Moon Lady” and “Scars” I have decided that my protagonist will come from Ningpo, Zhejiang province. It is perfect for wealth and there was a war- why her father sent her away, also it means I can mention Fong See, since Ningpo was renowned for its furniture craftsmen.

Joyce

Writer's block!!

Internal Monologue

Non-Linear Narrative

Evaluation

Extended Metaphor

Analepsis

Structure

Still... Research

Development