Response to "Scar", "The Red Candle", and "The Moon Lady"

Of these three stories my favorite would have to be “The Red Candle” and my least favorite “The Moon Lady”. My favorite was “the Red Candle” because of Lindo Jong. So far she is now my favorite character because of her personality. I loved how clever she was to think of a plan to get out of her horrible marridge without ever breaking her promise to her and her husband’s family. The way she devised this plan and waited for the exact moment when it would be perfect was absolutely brilliant. In fact one of the reasons I liked her was because when I read about her clever plan she reminded me of my favorite clever, witty woman, from the past, Elizabeth Bennet. Although these two women are from very different ethnicities and times I found their worlds strangely similar and them also strangely similar. They both came from worlds and families where women were in superior to men and their only purpose and most important thing was marridge. Although these women are so different they both have the same determination to get what they want and they share some of the same wittiness and are both very clever. I noticed a lot of themes and motifs in these stories. The first theme was also in “Jane Eyre” and that would be the color red. The color red was very big in the last two stories. In “The Red Candle” all you have to do is just look at the title and you already see red. In this story the double sided marridge candle was red as well as her wedding dress and the scarf she wore that covered her face the day of the wedding. In the last story “The Moon Lady” she was watching the woman in the kitchen gutting animals and then when she heard footsteps she noticed she had gotten drops of blood on her clothes and decided to cover it up by putting turtle blood all over her clothes. The color red also goes hand in hand with mankind, blood, and human flesh according to the meanings of the mahjongg tiles with the color red, and in the first of these three stories she gets burned which goes with human flesh and her mother cuts out a piece of her own flesh to put in a soup for her mother. There were other themes and motifs, but none were as big as the color red except for maybe the theme of family and promises.