Short response paper Literature & Language Essay Paper (Essay Sample)

Name:
Course:
Tutor:
Date:
150,000 Candles.
‘150,000 candles’ by Justina Lee Sik Chi is a short story about a young boy, eleven years old, who is a volunteer in a vigil, maintaining order at one of the side entrance. The events in the story happen during the vigil. The boy’s parents are active advocates of democratic movement in China and as a result, the boy has acquired the spirit of politics since he was born. This boy was born a year after the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, June. The yearly vigil has then been the boy’s routine. At the vigil, 150,000 people have completed a relay of flames and are raising their 150,000 candles. The boy’s father is on stage and there are slideshow of images from the massacre. The images of slogans, red flags, protests, tears, tanks, blood. In this short story, the author shows the historical events and the way they rekindle the spirit of the people to fight for their rights and freedom.
Within this short story, there is a symbolic essay, ‘Transfiguration’ by Annie Dillard, where she heads into the mountains to read, with the hope that the solitude will reawaken her passion for writing. Instead, she finds inspiration in a moth that flies into her candle and burns. She describes the moment as one of illumination, not death: “Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater” (399). The moth is reduced to flame as the physical evidence of its brief life burns away, but in death, the moth transforms.