Analyse af 'Where the Gods Fly' af Jean Kwok

Moving to a new country can be very overwhelming and scary. Finding the balance between staying who you are and fitting in is very hard, but adapting to your new surroundings is important. You cannot expect the surroundings to adapt you. Not having your family, old friends and not knowing the language is difficult enough in its self, but when your origin country is dissimilar from your new country, it’s even harder. Bringing a child to a whole new country, but still wanting them to keep their former culture alive can seem almost impossible. You wish them a good life, but you have to take away what they love the most. So what do you do?

The short story “Where the Gods Fly” narrates these factors. “Where the Gods Fly” is written by the Chinese American writer Jean Kwok in 2012. Kwok has born in Hong Kong, but immigrated to Brooklyn, New York at the age of five.

The short story is about a Chinese mother’s struggle to give her daughter the best life she can while still keeping their offspring alive. The unnamed mother and her unnamed husband works day in and day out at a factory in Chinatown to provide their family. Meanwhile their daughter Pearl is at school. Pearl has a hard time fitting in at the new school, but one day a ballet school gives a special lesson at Pearl’s school. Pearl is so talented that they offer her a scholarship. As time goes Pearl becomes more and more distanced from her parents and their previous culture – ballet is now the biggest part of her life. “As the years passed, she began to take classes every day, (…) she seemed to belong to a world so foreign to the factory by then that I no longer even minded her presence there.” To start with Pearls mother only allows her to dance ballet so she doesn’t have to spend every day at the factory with mom and dad after school, but quickly ballet becomes the only thing on her mind. Pearls mother is confused and doesn’t t know what to do – she won’t allow her daughter to dance no more. Throughout the story the mother thinks back at her own childhood in China and somehow refuses to integrate to the American society. Pearls mother misses her former relationship with her daughter and wants a proper education for her, instead of dancing. At the end of the short story, she decides to tell Pearl that it’s time to quit dancing and focus on other things in life.