Why did the chicken cross the road?
Because you want to escape the Taliban.
Some people say that the movie "The Kite Chaser" shows that the American values are triumphant. This is a cliché and a catering. This cannot be denied. Movies that do not cater to American values can hardly win the public and the box office in the United States. Does not reflect the value of the United States, does it reflect the value of the Taliban? This is a Hollywood production, what can you expect from it? This is popular culture. It is impossible for the public to understand the intricacies behind a story. Instead, they pay more attention to what kind of story the movie is telling, whether it is consistent with their own psychological expectations, or on the contrary, whether it is different from their own lives. Is there enough distance to form the exoticism in his mind?
In fact, the treatment of Chinese literature and art works is the same in the West. Purely Chinese translation works, including "Wolf Totem", have limited sales because Americans are too unfamiliar. Many of the Chinese-themed works in bookstores are "remembering bitter and sweet" style post-scar literature, which also caters to Westerners' stereotypes about China. Including Ha Jin, the China that he wrote about is suffering and miserable, so that my compatriots can't see any warmth for the motherland when they see it. When I get some works written by Chinese writers in English in bookstores, I often get angry because there is nothing better than your hardship during the Cultural Revolution? I'm not saying that it should be changed to eulogize merits, but why not find some themes in the intersection of reality and happiness? This is a very sad thing.
But we cannot say that catering to American values is necessarily bad. The film does attribute many problems to the Taliban, the Soviet Union, and ethnic problems in Afghanistan. Americans really like to play the role of savior. Only the Americanized Amir in the movie can save his nephew from the Taliban. But what is so good about the Taliban? Do you need someone to check your beard like a policeman on the street every day? And that cruel "stoning", today even the Saudi princess still needs to escape by political asylum in Britain. Faced with the same problem, Jesus picked up the stone and asked everyone: Who among you has no sin, you can come and smash her. This kind of compassion and tolerance is the cornerstone of a human civilization building. This world needs diversity, but it must not be allowed to overwhelm everything, including right and wrong judgment, and the pursuit of decency as stated in the movie.
A better realm is to go beyond the black-and-white judgments of right and wrong of the American way of life, but to unify its opposites. Another immigrant literature, What is the what, is about the experience of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng from Sudan to the United States. This book is written in Deng’s first person, but the author is an American named Dave Eggers. The voice of this book is unique, breaking the routine from a backward society to a developed society. In this book, Deng, who escaped from the civil war in Sudan and survived a catastrophe, encountered robbers in the United States and almost died in Atlanta.
Back to the first question, what happens after the chicken crosses the road? Have you lived here happily ever since? This is where What is the what goes beyond a little bit. Like most great works, works with a question mark (not a period or exclamation mark) are good works. The writer is not to give people answers, he is here to lead us to ask good questions.
But asking such a good question is more like a Greek tragedy. At least until now, it has not been heard that Hollywood plans to turn the story of Valentino Achak Deng into a movie.
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