Setting

- Choose somewhere that you can use authentic description/jargon (more convincing + can add
meaning)
- political stability reflects the emotional stability of the father (can contrast with lack of stability)

Conflict
- Patriotic father who is influenced by one side of the media (reminisces on the past a lot)
- Child is more neutral and rationalised
- Father treats the MC as a kid constantly and forces stuff on him even though MC is old enough to have
his own thoughts – Dad uses kid language ish to talk to MC
- Father yearns for what he remembers in country of origin, but can’t go back (maybe because of
responsibility for his family…)

Decision at the end

- Decides not to show opposing info to protect his father’s sense of place
- Wants to protect something bigger
- Dramatic irony
- Cast audience back to something in the beginning - eg; convo
- country of origin has changed over the years, but father still believes/remembers what he experienced
- views it in what it was and not what it is now
- Father uses the son’s acceptance as self-validation – son chooses not to challenge it to protect father’s
ideals

Values
- Half of father’s life revolves around the country of origin (maybe his childhood) and learning the
changes to the country would collapses what he’s been yearning + working for majority of his life after
immigration
- If the son were to reveal his views/info, it would evoke a sense of failure as a parent in raising the MC
- End of short story Greg suggested, lots of visual imagery
“Fools, I tell you! This world is overrun with fools!”

Even through my fluff-cushioned earmuffs, I could hear my father’s raucous voice. Though it was the
beginning of June, puffs of bitter snow drifted lightly from the gathering swirls above, bleaching the
Sydney streets with a sickly-white carpet.

How laughable it is, to think that only a year ago, us Sydneysiders would mock the very possibility for
snow to fall in this bare, sunburnt city.

Feeling my father’s minacious glare, I could only lower my muffs and turn towards the flashing headlines
on the screen of the TV.

CHINESE VIOLATE WORKER RIGHTS

UNITED NATIONS CALLING FOR ACTION
SEVERAL FROZEN DEAD WITH MORE TO COME
HISTORY REPEATS IN 2020?

My father roughly shoved the Daily Telegraph into my hands.

“Xin Xin, listen carefully. When you grow up, you must make sure you don’t turn out like these useless
politicians. Be more like Xin Ren and Tan Ma… Wu Xun is good too…”

I hated it.

I hated the way he would call me by that pet name. I hated the way he didn’t even hesitate to denounce
those who didn’t agree with him. I hated the way that he had named me after his favourite Chinese
politician, Xin Ren.

“Yes Ba.”

But what could I do?

The light cracklings of shattering ice sounded as I cooled the steaming tea. I had never liked it searing
hot, though my father would always remind me, “Xin Xin, listen carefully. When I was on patrol in China,
no fire! Can’t even boil the tea water! You kids don’t know how to appreciate good things,” followed by
a long-winded talk about the superiority of Chinese tea leaves in the 1950s.

Taking a tentative sip of the tea, its beauty was evident, though it paled against British produce. I
couldn’t bear to tell my father though, for both his sake and mine.

“Those liars!”

Specks of phlegm, saliva and hatred landed upon the newspaper, dampening and soaking the headlines
with a veil of ignorance.
Now I wasn’t oblivious.

I knew that government-approved Chinese businesses abused foreign workers, forcing them to work in
harsh, cold conditions. The same set of words would play themselves several times each day, just
rearranged and reordered each time. And yet my father had read them all, engrossing himself within
propaganda and the truth alike. One may say he was blindly defending his country, a patriotic slave, but
I knew that what he defended was not China, but a China that no longer exists.

He was a proud man, an army man. And yet the worker bee that had so laboriously gathered a fortune
of honey in distant plains was unable to return to the hive, burdened by the very thing that had led it
away. He yearned for it… and I knew it.

The waving fields of wheat…

The cleanest, most refreshing breathes of air…
The subtle croaks of frogs that would find themselves buried beneath the thinnest layer of ice in the
waterways, easily shattered with the touch of a finger…

And though we have never gone back to my father’s home, I could visualise it all, the wheat, the non-
polluted air and the subtle croaks of desperate frogs, so clearly that I could almost touch the illusory
world that I’ll never know. And to say nothing of the inevitable desire that would bite him each passing
minute, gnawing without restraint and exposing the desperation of a man on the verge of futility.

Now my father wasn’t oblivious.

Well learned, excellent mind, he had it all. However, they say that even the perfect being is riddled with
flaws. He knew of that fatal longing, he knew the malignant consequences, and yet he allowed himself
to be consumed, reminding himself everyday with anecdotes, repeating and enhancing those memories
in fear of losing them forever, deluding himself to desire the unattainable, lost deep in the past. And
each passing time I heard him proudly recite another story from his depleting bank, an urge would fight
to my throat, screaming the falsities in his beliefs and shattering this fragmented world gone cold with
time, to tell my father that it was no more.

But it wasn’t possible.

What filial son would be able to shatter that millennia long belief, that ancient memory that one could
only cherish, but never return. What filial son would put down his father’s treasure for a moment’s
worth of truth. What filial son would complain foolishly about things that couldn’t be changed. Slaying a
man with a sword is quick, but to butcher the mind through words, is a cruelty. It would take only the
slightest touch to shatter the thinnest layer of ice that lay upon the waterways in deep winter, trapping
the desperate toad within.