The Conflict of Culture in Saving Sourdi
The Conflict of Culture: In a Literary Context
Cultural environments are one of the major influential factors on human behavior, especially in early adolescent years. This can definitively shape perspective, individually and collectively as a society, to the point where this perspective becomes an ultimatum. This is often how various forms of dogmatism arise and gain power. And, it is indeed how cultures come to clash, or conflict with one another. In May-lee Chai's �Saving Sourdi,� we are shown the generational gap between cultures in a Cambodian family living in the United States and the conflicts within the family that come as a result. Ralph Ellison's �Battle Royal� and Andrea Lee's ...
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�Saving Sourdi,� deals with the struggle of growing up in Anglo-American society while having Cambodian cultural ethics/morals and traditions imposed on her and particularly her older sister, Sourdi. The admiration and idolization that Nea holds for Sourdi creates a major clash with her own struggle to be independent. First of all, this conflict mostly arises from Sourdi's fear of being independent and her willingness to passively except the roles that women are pressured into in Cambodian culture, which is polar opposite of Nea's personality. For example, after Nea stabs the drunk man who is harassing her sister, Sourdi reacts with great fear, ferociously shaking her little sister exclaiming, �They could take you away. The police, they could put you in a foster home. All of us� (Chai 130). Because Sourdi is several years older than Nea, she has the perspective of growing up in Cambodian society, which is also a factor of Sourdi's personality considering that Cambodia has etiquette ...
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the vast majority of black people in the United States have ancestry here that dates back to slavery (300-400 years).. In �Battle Royal,� the narrator explains his own displacement, as a black man, by the dominant culture, exclaiming that he had to discover that �I am an invisible man� before he came to the realization that �I am nobody but myself� (Ellison 277). In other words, his identity was invisible to the society he lived in; the dominant forces in American culture had stripped away his historical and ancestral roots and made him feel ashamed of what was left, being slavery. Such is true for the narrator's grandfather, who wasn't aware of his complacency in his own oppression ...
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"The Conflict of Culture in Saving Sourdi." Essayworld.com. July 2, 2011. Accessed November 28, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Conflict-of-Culture-Saving-Sourdi/99795.
"The Conflict of Culture in Saving Sourdi." Essayworld.com. July 2, 2011. Accessed November 28, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Conflict-of-Culture-Saving-Sourdi/99795.
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