Broken Transformers is written by Bi Shumin in 1992, who is one of the Chinas most successful writers
by
tritaya (student)
Tritaya Thiraputthiphokhin
Ajarn Santichai Preechaboonyarit
Writing for Literary Analysis
1 December 2012
Broken Transformers
Broken Transformers is written by Bi Shumin in 1992, who is one of the China’s most successful writers. The story is about one of the families in China that a mother buys the smallest transformer, which is expensive, to her son although she earns a low-income. Bi Shumin uses Transformers to be the symbol of western culture that is beginning to dominate the traditional eastern culture. It causes many negative changes to society, relationship and people’s thought.
Previously, eastern society believes that luxurious goods which are imported from western countries are not necessary, because they move into China for getting money. As we can see from the scene that the mother thinks “The toy replicas now pouring into the store were sucking money from parents like locusts devouring crops.” (P.64) There is another scene when the boy says to his mother. “Mum, let’s go. The paper says Transformers are only foreign kids’ cast-offs. They move them into China to get our money.” (P.65) These scenes show thoughts of eastern people that eventually change because of the influence of cartoons and other factors. Expensive and useless toys are getting very popular among children. “Almost everybody has one and they’re all different, so we trade to play.” (P.66) This shows that wasteful toys belong to every class of society. Luxuries become indicating a social status, whoever does not have lavish goods such as transformers seems to be poor. We can see from the scene that the mother is loath to leave her son with any regrets about his childhood. “I didn’t want to have to read in his autobiography: I liked toys when I was little but my family was too poor to afford them, so I could only watch the other children playing with theirs.” (P.65) A lack of luxurious things makes the mother feel inferior than other families. “But was it to be the case that no ‘blue-collar’ worker should ever own a Transformer?” (P.65) All of these suggest that western culture is dominating eastern society gradually and changes eastern society into materialism, wasting a lot of money on expensive products instead of buying necessary things such as hat and scarf.
