Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Directions: With your team, read and annotate your selected poem, analyzing the poet’s main
ideas, as well as elements of supporting craft and technique. Then, construct one or two formal
theme statements, which you will delineate to the class while you walk them through your expert
analysis.
Just think—
before I invented the 100 Chinese silences,
the Chinese would have had to stay indoors
and gabble about civil war and revolution
or go outside and build a really loud wall. 35
Thesis #1: In the poem, Chinese Silence No. 22, Timothy Yu utilizes allusions and a
juxtaposition between other cultures in order to demonstrate the lack of representation in the
Chinese culture.
Quotes:
Thesis #2: Yu uses various connotations and characterization of the Chinese silence to delineate
that this silence is not caused by others, rather the Chinese apply this silence to themselves due to
their own culture’s values.
Thesis #3: Yu demonstrates to the reader how this Chinese silence is founded upon stereotypes,
and is shown through juxtaposition to other cultures as well as to China’s past in order to reveal
the reality of how the Chinese culture is not necessarily synonymous with their silence.
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Immigrant Blues
Li-Young Lee, 2008
Thesis #1:
Thesis #2: