THEME of SHANGHAI GIRLS
It has been obvious how someone's life can change so much. In the life, there's something that you just can't have control over. It is quite frustrating to admit that you don't have total control over your fate, but that is the way nature works. Pearl, as a main character of the book,  faces the inevitable misfortune in her life. Through that, she fell a lot from the top model of the magazine in Shanghai to a arranged wife of a son of a poor Chinese family. She struggles a lot through the story to fight her fate. No matter how hard she tries to work things out, dull amount of time flies away with no or very little changes left. At some point, it seems meaningless and worthless to put an effort to fight her fate when it takes so much time and effort. 
But it does not necessarily mean that your life is always have been determined into one fate. There are lots of things you can change with your effort over time. But life usually works this way. There is a given fate, sometimes inevitable, and you will either accept it or try to fight for another way. It could take just a second, days, or even years to make a difference. 

Pearl's life and responsibilities

Pearl, as a main protestant in the book SHANGHAI GIRLS, take a role as a older sister who needs to fight and make her sister and her own destiny that is left with them in the land of America. 

No matter how the life gets to her, and how hard and complicated it gets, she still has so many responsibilities with her. She has to look after her daughter, her sister, and her husband whom she recently found out that he doesn't belong there in that family just like herself and her sister. 

This makes me wonder if the people would have that many things to be responsible in their complicated lives. For now, I can't really imagine how this life could be that complicated. It is kind of complicated enough for me to balance families, friends, schools and works, but it isn't as complicated and tangled with that many factors to take care of as Pearl does. But it feels like someday in the lifetime, there will be the time when everyone get into complicated life. I wish Pearl could handle her troubled life fast and wisely.

Shanghai Girls

      Pearl and May have been living with their arranged husbands since they arrived in America. To me everything seems so ridiculous and awful. I wouldn't be able to breathe and live the normal life in that environment. They need to work for them everyday, don't get any allowance, don't get to have any privacy, and live with strangers. They don't even love their husbands or even barely know who they are. They don't get to make their own decisions; they just need to obey their father-in-law and their husbands.
      It is so great that we get to choose what we want to do, who I want to live with, where I want to go, and whatever decision I want to make for my own as long as I put enough effort to it. 

Quote from Shanghai Girls

I've asked myself the same question many times these past months, and I still don't know the answer.

- Shanghai Girls (p116)

      Sometimes, I just feel as lost as Pearl for a long time. I throw myself a question about same thing over and over, but the answer doesn't always appear right away as I need. If it lasts for long time it usually stresses me out and bothers me, but that's how life is. I have to work through the problems and look for the right answer for me.               

SHANGHAI GIRLS

  Shanghai  girls is the book that is drawing two girls' surviving life from China to America when Japanese attacked China. It starts with the pretty basic and simple lives of these siblings in Shanghai. But the story gets intense as more events happen around their lives. These two girls start as the top, luxurious girls who work as models of magazines in Shanghai. But the war, it changed everything around them. I've never get to thought about every detail that war can bring to citizens' lives. When I had thought of the word 'war', it just appeared to be something that the soldiers kill their enemies and lots of explosions. 

   Through this book, I could actually see the every pain that the citizens can experience throughout their lifetime just by one war. The two girls lost their parents, friends, ones they loved, and their own freedoms. They had to suffer the poverty, and there were no more freedoms left for them. They were sold to one old Chinese man to get married to his sons from their father's debt. Their whole lives were at the mess. Even though they have been trying through out the stories to escape from their fates, they found it much more complicated and difficult to escape.

Today's Education

    We are all expected to go to school until college. People claim that it is to prepare us for the better future where we will need to go find and make our own ways. However, in fact, barely half of us who are getting educated these days actually "learn" what we really need. The things we really need to learn, it is not some kind of formulas in the math textbooks that we probably will not even see in rest of our lives. It is not the economical graphs for lessons that is forced into our heads either. But this fact is highly ignored. Nowadays, the purpose of the schools seems to be just holding on to the students for half of the days, force whole bunch of information into their heads despite what their real interest is, and train them into all same ways. This surely will not help people to find their ways in their futures.
Therefore the school itself needs a change before trying to force every student into one same closet with 0 flexibility. The educational systems should develop various ways that students can learn through which fit best for them. Instead of filling up the textbooks with all fixed formulas, textbook can bring out better opportunities to students when they actually fill up the textbooks with something that students can really use their brains and think to figure out the problems. If the schools educate their students in a different angle than it is now, it can provide better dimensions in study for the students.


http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html


http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover.html