Week 7 Essay: Chinese Fairy Tales

The unit I read for this week was Chinese Fairy Tales. I absolutely loved this unit! I only read half of it, but it was still one of my most favorite so far. I chose this unit to read because I had read the Japanese Fairy Tales the week before and I wanted to see if there were any differences or similarities between the two. I'm not sure if I can say I found differences or similarities between the Japanese and Chinese myths and stories, but I did notice some very interesting things about the chinese stories that could relate to their culture.

One thing I notice throughout almost all of the stories was that anyone in a political standing was treated as a hero. Sometimes they would even take the place of the hero in the actual story. I found this very interesting and though I don’t know a lot about chinese culture, I wonder if this reflects how they see their political figures, or at least did. If it is, then I think it is so cool how they showed it in their stories! If it isn’t then I wonder why they made so many of the political figures in the stories so heroic.

Another thing I noticed was how the chinese show their foxes. I know that foxes in Japanese culture are normally shown as tricksters and magical and not normally shown in a good light. In these stories though, the foxes weren’t really doing anything bad but they were treated so poorly from the people that they left. And in another story a fox had something very precious stolen from it by a man but he did nothing to the man. What the man had stolen brought him much wealth and fortune and the fox let him enjoy it until he was old and no longer needed when he took.

Overall I highly recommend this unit! It was great, an easy read, and very entertaining!

Madame White Snake