Homeland's Things We Always Care The Most
The paper will analyze two stories, ‘Hut on the Hill,’ and ‘The Land of Sad Oranges.’ The two stories were written by two authors who focused on showing the world that a certain government was oppressing ‘their’ people. The story ‘Hut on the Hill’ was written by Can Xue in 1989, and it is a reflection of the trials and tribulations that she underwent through as a result of the government, punishing her parents for alleging that they were ‘ultra-rightists’ because of them being intellectuals.
Although it is a fictional story, as one reads it, one can see the relation with her life. For instance, she once lived in a dark room and the story speaks of a man who lived in a dark room. Ghassan Kanafani wrote the second story in 1962. The oranges symbol that is used in the story is a representative of the personality of the Palestine. It talks about how they were oppressed by the invasion of the Arab armies who forced them into exile. Just like the fresh orange fruits in Jaffa that withered and died with their demise, their lives in terms of hope and innocence dies when they live Jaffa. The thesis of these two stories focusses on the mental torture that is experienced by the narrators because of changes in their livelihood.‘Hut on the Hill,’ is an allegorical story because it represents a reflection of the social life that was in China at the time when this story was written. It centers about bad things happening in the family of the narrator. There is a hut on the hill, behind the family’s house, where a person who has been imprisoned. Every night this person begins to moan and furiously bang the wooden door as if he wants to be escape from his confines. However, apart from the narrator nobody else is able to see this hut or the prisoner.
The family of the narrator comprises of a father, mother and a small sister. There is conflict between the narrator and her family members. The reason for this is that the narrator has a compulsive behavior that forces her to clean her desk drawer every night. Instead of her mother encouraging her to be tidy, she dislikes it; because of the noise and the light that comes from the narrator’s room. She claims that it drives her crazy. On several occasions while the narrator is out of their house, her parents have made a great mess of her drawer, stolen her chessboard and buried it near the well. However, whenever they bury her chessboard, she digs it up at midnight.Her father is mentally anguished because he thinks that he dropped a pair of scissors into the well. This mental anguish has forced him to howl mournfully as a wolf every night when this thought invades his mind. He once attempted to fish out the scissors lying at the …
