A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers - Essay Example He has great concerns about the welfare of life of his daughter living in a distant land as a divorcee and feels that he can contribute something tangible to lighten her burden. His intentions are good, but not to the liking of his daughter! This retired man from Beijing travels all the way to visit her in Spokane, Washington. She is working there as a librarian. He plans to stay with her till such time, he thinks, she is able find peace through her trauma. The generation gap strikes! The daughter is not much enamored with the ideas of her father. Father is hurt with the negative approach shown by his daughter for his efforts to what he considers as the reconstruction of her life. In that town, he meets an old woman who has fled from Iran to USA, after the revolution. Both of them know not much of English but human emotions score over their own languages, and rare friendship develops between the two. They find a unique unexplainable horizon of hope in life, without knowing what exactly they want from each other, except striking the nearness through each other’s trials and tribulations. The daughter, influenced by the western culture has practical ideas. She wishes to remarry and gets ready for it with a Russian man. In the end, the old woman is sent to a retirement home and the father and the daughter come to terms. The relationship between the daughter and father is normally intimate. But this story reveals why it is different, due to the cultural gap between the two. The father arrives from the rigidly governed Communist China, and the social values are shaped accordingly as per the directions of the State. The position is entirely different in USA, where personal freedom is topmost in the agenda of governance. On the one side the people live with the damaged psyche, women silently bear the desperation of lost love relationships and on the other side new experiments in love-relationships continue to happen without any restrictions from the