TOW #1 - Learning to Live

My grandmother handed me a magazine this weekend, asking me to please actually read it instead of just putting it away somewhere like I usually do. The magazine was a supplement to the World Journal (世界日报), a Chinese newspaper that all Chinese grandparents at Chinese school read frequently. This supplement, with essays both printed in Chinese and English, is targeted to Chinese-American families getting ready to send their children off to prestigious colleges. All of the essays include some sort of advice and make me feel bad as I read about “kids around my age who rose to face challenges usually more daunting than my own” and have already gone so far in life. Unfortunately, most of the essays are written fairly poorly as well, but that can be forgiven since some of the writers primarily speak Chinese. If I could read Chinese well, then I’m sure I’d love their essays.

A boy yawns while awaiting Hilary Clinton's arrival in Beijing last May - Reuters
...Or maybe he's already feeling the pressure of getting into a good college

Liren Ma, the author of Learning to Live and the child of a Chinese immigrant like me, has something different. On one hand, his prose is coherent and flows well, and it doesn’t seem tentative and unsure like that of other writers of the magazine. On the other hand, his advice isn’t to give back to your parents because of the huge sacrifice they made for you, because that would be giving up on yourself. Instead, one should “remember that everything they did was to give [you] the freedom to one day chase [your] own dreams.” He conveys this message by telling us his story, establishing ethos and pathos with the reader. The former he does by sharing experiences that are relatable to other children of Chinese immigrants. For example, he writes about the pressure he felt from the stories his grandparents would tell him about their childhoods or even other kids his age who are doing much better than him, stories which my grandparents frequently tell me too. He establishes pathos by evoking emotions from these stories. He describes the pressure of the stories, the stress of college applications, and the worry of not living a fulfilling life.