There are many examples of people achieving freedom in the short stories in the book Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen.

by rjaganna25studentsd125org (student)

Consider the questions below about the topic of freedom.

What does it mean to be free?

What is freedom?
What is the cost of being free?
How am I free? How am I not free?
What are our responsibilities as free citizens?
Do we have obligations to others?
What empowers us to feel free? What gives us a sense of power/independence?
What inhibits us from feeling free?
What sacrifices do we make to feel free?

Your essay will include,

-Evidence from at least two stories

-Each paragraph will have evidence from different stories. In other words, you will NOT organize this essay by story, but rather you will explain how your chosen stories connect to answer the question.

-Maximum word count--1200 plus or minus 5

Your essay is due by the end of the PERIOD on

Wednesday, May 4th on turnitin.com

What empowers us to feel free?

True freedom is an exceedingly hard feeling to achieve in life. There are many things that one can have to make themselves feel free, and many have pondered the question of what can make a person feel free. There are many examples of people achieving freedom in the short stories in the book Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen. From these stories, there is tons of evidence suggesting that in order for one to live freely, they must have a feeling of motivation, which can stem from a quest or purpose that is meaningful to them.

Motivation can stem from a quest or purpose that is meaningful to a person. A clear example of this is from the short story Shanghai Murmur in the book Land of Big Numbers. In this story, the narrator, Xiaolei, is a low-wage worker in a flower shop, whose boring life in a huge city makes her feel insignificant and slowly strips away her motivation. When she meets a rich, confident man who is a usual customer at the flower shop, she grows fond of him, and when he leaves his expensive pen there by accident, she takes it. She grows an attachment to this pen, as to her, it represents a better, more meaningful life, so she is devastated when she loses it and goes on a quest to find it because of what it represents to her, even at the expense of her own job. This quest gave her motivation. This is demonstrated by how determined she was to find it; on page 163, Chen writes, “Even after she got another job… the pen still haunted her. She’d bought a bicycle by then and would ride it up and down the length of the city, leaping off occasionally at stationery stores to check their racks in different seasons.” Chen said that Xiaolei would “ride it up and down the length of the city, leaping off occasionally at stationery stores,” exhibiting how persistent Xiaolei was in her mission for meaning, because she would check every store in the city for the pen every single season of the year. Chen mentioned that this happened after she had “got another job,” demonstrating that even long after the incident with the pen, Xiaolei’s quest was still motivating her every single day. Thus, this meaningful quest for Xiaolei motivated her constantly for months, whereas before she realized said mission she had little motivation. Another thematically comparable story from Land of Big Numbers is Flying Machine; an old man named Cao Cao, lives a life as a poor farmer, but is much more ambitious. Both Cao Cao and Xiaolei are motivated by their meaningful mission to create a better life for themselves. When Cao Cao is contemplating how he will attain this goal, Chen writes, “He, too, was going to transform himself with an invention the likes of which his neighbors had never seen. To that end, he had become a connoisseur of what others might call rubbish: rusted-through woks, old bicycle parts, broken farm implements (page 97).” Chen mentions how Cao Cao was going to “transform himself,” which was his mission to improve his quality of life and his station. To achieve this mission, Cao Cao felt he needed to build a unique invention, which required him to overcome his poverty by using neighborhood trash to be used as parts, which is a hard obstacle to overcome for anyone. However, Cao Cao builds with trash anyway, because his mission is so important to him. This demonstrates how Cao Cao’s mission for a better life gave him motivation, so much so that his motivation could allow him to trump any obstacle that came in his way. Thus, motivation is derived from a meaningful quest or purpose.

This is a preview of the whole essay

In order for someone to live freely, they must have a feeling of motivation. First, in Shanghai Murmur, when Xiaolei was still searching for the pen that went missing, which was truly her mission to have a better life, Chen writes, “It was a benign quest that gave her some control over a city that threatened to wear her down.” Chen called Xiaolei’s quest “benign,” meaning that her mission was non-harmful, and good in nature. Chen also mentioned how the “city threatened to wear her down,” meaning that Xiaolei’s motivation was at risk of being reduced due to the conditions of her city life mentioned before, like how the city was big and made Xiaolei feel insignificant, and how her life was boring. However, thanks to her “benign quest,” the problem was avoided because it gave her more motivation, thus preventing the city from wearing her down. Finally, Chen writes that this motivation gave Xiaolei “some control over” the city that threatened to wear her down, demonstrating how Xiaolei gained a sense of freedom and control in her life even despite how the city took a toll on her, and again, the reason she was even able to have a feeling of freedom and control was because of the motivation she received from her mission to create a better life for herself. Thus, her motivation made her feel free. Again, Flying Machine relates to Shanghai Murmur thematically in this way, because both main characters gained freedom from their motivation. When Cao Cao is imagining what he could build from the rubbish he had collected from the neighborhood, after he had build his airplane that only worked as a car, he thinks, “There was a trash compactor he could build that would crush it all into tiny cubes that he could carefully stack, one by one, until they made a perilous tower that he could scale to the sky.” Now, Cao Cao’s imagination that his trash compactor could build a tower of trash that could “scale to the sky” is outrageous; however, the image of a “trash compactor” is instead a metaphor for Cao Cao himself, because just like the trash compactor, he can take even trash and build it into something that can “scale to the sky.” This demonstrates that Cao Cao’s imagination is limitless, showing how much freedom he has. In addition, the only way he can have freedom to imagine building such things is because of his motivation. Chen mentioned that Cao Cao imagined he could “carefully stack” each compacted piece of garbage and make it into a tall building, showing that the reason why Cao Cao could imagine building such a thing was because he would be the one building that intricate tower every step of the way, something only a highly motivated person could do. Thus, Cao Cao was able to achieve freedom with his high sense of motivation, just like Xiaolei.

In conclusion, motivation can stem from a meaningful quest, like how Xiaolei and Cao Cao were both motivated by their quest to create a better life for themselves. In addition, this motivation allows people to feel free, demonstrated by how Cao Cao and Xiaolei gained feelings of freedom/control because of their motivational quests. It is clear from the stories of Xiaolei and Cao Cao that although there are many ways to achieve freedom, motivation from a meaningful quest is a necessity in finding that feeling.

Freshman Accelerated English

Writing Argument Rubric