One time, at a convenience store, I got into a conversation with the cashier (an old, friendly woman) that was deeper than I think either of us planned. She apologized for a slow machine and I replied, with a laugh, that I was in no hurry. “Good,” she said, “this world is too fast these days.” I agreed, readily, and she pursued the subject. She told me that it was up to me to keep my generation from moving too fast and to keep the world from moving too fast. The America described in Woman Warrior seems to be the exact world that this lady and I were discussing. However, I think it’s important to see that it’s not just Chinese immigrants that have this opinion. It’s anybody who’s experiencing the fast-paced world we now live in. Even though I did not live in these slower than times that this woman and the mom in Woman Warrior spoke of, I still find myself missing them. I know what the mother means when she thinks about how “time goes slower [in China]” and how in America “we have to hurry” (105). I do identify with these two about how fast our lives are. I feel like each day, each week is soaring by and time is only speeding up. I remember when my parents were telling me that high school would fly by and I didn’t believe them and here I am, almost done with my first year of college. This semester flew by and all I can think of as I read the words spoken by the mother in Woman Warrior is how much I keep missing out on. There are so many things I planned to do that I never got around to because this world we live in always moving. I wake up, go to class, go to meetings, do homework, hang out with friends, and before I know it, another day has passed. I go to bed, wake up, and repeat the routine all over again. Like Brave Orchid’s children, I “could not sit for very long” and “had wandering feet” (113). And I realize now, in high school, I became a person that cherished this lifestyle. I signed up for as many things as I could handle, took hard classes that kept me busy, and made friends and plans for the weekends. I loved this way of living because I was always busy. I had fulfilling things to occupy my life and I never really had to slow down and assess what life really meant.
So, sometimes, I wonder if that’s how we all live. We all strive to be successful and we’re so set on our future that we don’t really pause to live in the now. All our actions are in pursuit of something ahead instead of what we want right now. Furthermore, I had a discussion with someone once about how hard we work here. So many people go through an entire year with only a week of vacation. Although I don’t think we live in a terrible country, I do have to agree that “human being works her life away” (104). I heard that in Sweden, when a family has a baby, the mother gets a year off work to spend with the baby and then the father also gets the next year off to spend with the baby as well. The value of family life, while still strong in America, seems a little less than elsewhere. I know many families here that don’t eat dinner together and don’t take holidays very seriously. I grew up with a sit-down dinner every night and family values are extremely important to me.
This book has truly taught me the value of time and how we should manage it. I’ve realized how to think about my time now as I live my busy, hurried life and how much I am going to have to value and manage it later in life when I have my own family. I want to instill similar values in my children as my parents have in me. I understand where Brave Orchid is coming from when she tries so hard to keep her family together and I can see where she’s coming from when she feels disappointment in her children when they fail to meet her standards.
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