From Steve and Edwin
L.A essay
This is the essay about the story, The wise old woman, retold by Yoshiko Uchida, summarized by Steve and Edwin.
The wise old woman was a great story about why that we should respect the elders, we must love them; brecciate them because they have pasted some events that we don’t know. This story is about a small village in western Japan, the people in the village thought that the old people don’t do anything for them, their present in the village is just waste foods and others things they were using. So instead of take care of them, the villager decided to ban them in to the mountains to dead. But there was a farmer who really loves his old mom, which he doesn’t want to expand her away. So dug a hold in his house for his mother to live in, he took care of his mom in a secret way. After 2 years, he still live that way. And one day, a man called Lord Higa came and wants to conquer his village, he had three conundrums and wants the village to answer them, if they can’t, he will take over his village. The first question was hard, the hall village can’t solve it, so the farmer ran back home and ask his mom, his mom said that it was very easy to solve, and she told him what to do, and he do the same thing as her told. The Lord was glad and gave the farmer a lot of gold. The Lord starts the second and the third conundrum. Like the first one, the farmer asked his mom for help, and she answered them an easy way. The Lord so surprised that a small was has a lot of smart people, so he forget about the village. The villagers ask that how the farmer could can answer the conundrums so easy, and he said that because he got a little help from his old wise mother. The villagers realized that all the men of wisdom in the village can’t be good at an old weak woman. So he “banned” the rule that ban the old people in the mountains, instead they take care more about the old people.
This story told us that the people that older than us, especially the old ones, they passed some events in the past that we haven’t know, they saw the events that important, that make them wiser, smarter, and sometimes they have more experience than us. The elders can teach us something that we don’t know. Have you ever thought that there are something that we can learn on our own and don’t need the help form the elders. Like you learn how to ride a bike, sometimes you cried when you fell, but thanks to the elders, you still stand up and keep do it until it is success. Or there are homework that we don’t understand, we can ask them to help. We don’t have to talk far, look into our family, our grandparents are the great example for us. If don’t have their exist on the life, we are not present at the present, thanks to them, we have our cousins, our parents, our brothers and sisters. If talks in a simple way, the elders are wiser, smarter, stronger, have more experience than us. They communicating their skills to us, what they have learnt in the past. In Vietnam, we got Hồ Chí Minh, the one who save his life just to save Vietnam from France, and when he is old, he still visit many places in Vietnam, and he communicated to many kids in Vietnam that still young, he taught them to learn, to respect, to have fun, to study in the right way that it must be. He didn’t make them to do it right, he had a conversation with them and wait for them to fix themselves. That proved that the elder can teach the kid how to do right things in the future. The elders are not boring, because they are old, and they can’t do anything like we do, one thing they can give us is knowledge, that is the only hard, big thing that they have. They don’t need strength to be respect, they gain respect from their knowledge. You can’t just Jud people on the outside, the inside is the most important.
The big Theme you should know: the elders are not boring, they are not stupid as we thought, they are wiser, smarter, so we must respect them.
