Stories (21st)

• Stories


  Title of the story
• Caroline Hau


  Filipino-Chinese author/writer who wrote the story "Stories"
• Caroline Hau was known for her works on Filipino culture and literature
• The story "Stories"

  About the family history of the main character who traces her family's migration story from China to the Philippines
• FIRST PERSON point of view 


  what narration was used by the main character
• Rhetorical strategy


  Description used to convey the literary language of the plot
• Rhetorical strategy is often employed in writing that is meant to persuade or make a strong point
• The narrator uses words and descriptions to persuade readers into believing and understanding the literal meaning of the plot
• Succinct


  Expressing in few words or a short concise expression
• The story depicts the comparative poverty the family has experienced in China and in the Philippines
• How the father took care of his garden

  1. Used snake trail for fertilizer

  2. Planted and took care of plants
• The main character narrates the father's experiences from the past in China (T’ang mountains), Hong Kong, and the Philippines
• The father grew up without knowing his own father who was managing a flour business in the Philippines
• During the "hungry years", the father's family had to eat sweet potatoes and steal salt from the sea due to the Japanese blockade
• After the father's father returned home in 1946, the "hungry years" ended but the father could not shake off the habit of poverty
• The father had many memories from his school days, such as being punished by the schoolmaster for cursing
• The main character wants to be a writer


  But the father tells her she needs to live more to have something to write about
• The main character wants to go to China with the father to see where his past memories happened, to not lose him "in sepia and shadows in head"
• The story uses imaginative language to present the connections between the family's past in China and their present life as Chinese Filipinos
• The father wanted the author to write based on her own experiences and the truth, but the author believed that she could finish the story with or without experience
• The absence of his father was then considered for him as their…

  Hungry years
• During how low China was, they had to steal salt from their own sea.
• Towards the end, the author reflected on her Chineseness by asking questions such as “who am I?” and ”why am I here?”
• Where is ”stories” situated in?

  China
• The father uses the pronoun nan (we) even though he appears to be talking about himself.
• The father settled in the Philippines after he married the mother and raised a “table of four legs”, having a son and four daughters (including the narrator)
• How many siblings does the author have?

  a brother and three sisters
• What does Chinese diaspora mean?

  Overseas Chinese
• From which historical moment did Caroline Hau contextualize “stories”?

  World war 2
• What type of fiction is “stories”?

  historical fiction