Bill Chun Wai Hung

Professor Arca

English 1B

8 June 2004

Religious Cause? Or Cultural Cause?

The stories “Why a Robin” (25), “Crickets” (371), and “No Music Before Mosque” (566) all explore the relationship between the parent and the child. In each of these three works, the parent was not able to completely acknowledge the mind of the child. This estrangement between the parent and child keeps an invisible gap between them. I call this invisible gap the relationship distance between the parent and the child. The relationship distance is the common factor among the three works, and it is also the connection between the works. Besides indicating the existence of the connection, I would also consider the cause of the relationship distance. There are two main causes for the relationship distance to exist, and they are the cultural cause and the religious cause. The relationship distance of “Why a Robin” (25) and “Crickets” (371) were caused by cultural cause, while that of “No Music Before Mosque” (566) was caused by religious cause. So which is a stronger cause for the relationship distance? The cultrural cause or the religious cause? In order to answer this, we have to determine whether it is the relationship distance caused by the cultural cause more difficult to overcome, or is it the religious cause.

An example of a relationship distance caused by the cultural cause can be found in the story of “Why a Robin”. “Why a Robin” is a short story that emphasized the estrangement between the mother and the daughter. At the beginning of the short story, the daughter was ignorant to her mother. This is especially true when the daughter insulted her mother by saying “You don’t know anything.” (26) The mother felt desperate to the ignorance of her daughter, and she felt “helpless” (28) in terms of what she could do to improve her relationship with her daugher. Such a relationship distance was caused by the different cultural experience the mother and the daughter have encountered. In other words, the mother wanted her daughter to see the “beautiful bird (peacocks)" (26) she once saw, but he daughter had never experienced the beauty of the peacock. In contrast, the daughter thought peacock was an “exotic bird” (26). “I didn’t see that.” My classmate Lauren gained insight of the short story “Why a Robin” when I told her the experience of seeing a beautiful peacock did influence the way the mother felt about peacocks. This difference in cultural experience of birds caused the mother and the daughter to argue over the subject of birds. The argument over such a trivial issue of birds represents a relationship distance between the mother and the daughter, because they could not even discuss about the daughter’s normal homework peacefully.

Similar relationship distance caused by cultural cause can be found in the story of “Cricket” (371). The Vietnamese father, Ted, in “Crickets” tried to bring himself closer to his son, but he was not successful. The father attempted to teach his son the traditional crickets fighting game that he found interesting himself. (373) However, the father was not able to show his son an exciting cricket fight because he could only found a few “big and inert” (374) charcoal crickets, but no “smart and quick” (374) fire crickets. “Oh, no,” the son yelled, “My Reeboks are ruined!” (374) Sadly enough, the son was more concerned about his shoes than the crickets. Finally, the father gave up showing his son the traditional cricket fighting game, and he said, “Listen, this was a big mistake. You can go on and do something else.” (374) One may see that the different culture background of the father and son shaped their interests. The father liked his cricket fighting game, while the son liked his fighting characters on TV (373). The different cultural backgrounds caused the father and the son to prefer different things, and their different backgrounds lengthen the relationship distance between the father and the son.

The relationship distance between the parent and the child is most obvious in “No Music Before Mosque” (567), in which the rage of the father indirectly killed the son. The talented son, Ali, wanted to worship his God in his own way by playing his flute during the religious rituals. (567) “I’d rather pray to God this way,” Ali said, “than mumble prayers that I do not understand.” (567) Although Ali was faithful to his God, his non-traditional way of worshiping was forbidden by his father, and his father reacted violently to Ali’s flute playing. “I’m going to beat him until he is black and blue and begs for mercy. And mercy he will get only when he swears never, never to play that cursed flute again.” (570)  The different ways of religious practice of the father and son resulted in a horrible father-and-son relationship, and this horrible relationship eventually forced Ali to end his flute playing by ending his own life. This is an extreme example of how religious belief can keep the relationship of the father and the son so far from each other, so far that the father can never see the son again.

After exploring the existences and the causes of the relationship distance between the parent and the child, it is abundantly clear that the religious cause is more difficult to overcome than the cultural cause. The cultural causes that built up the relationship distances between the parent and the child in “Why a Robin” (25) and “Cricket” (371) were relatively easier to overcome. This is because the mother in “Why a Robin” (25) had made a considerably big step to communicate with her daughter, and the father in the “Cricket” (371) could simply find another game to play with his son in order to shorten the relationship distance. On the other hand, the relationship distance caused by the religious cause took away the life of the son in "No Music Before Mosque" (567), and the death of the son can never be overcome.