Carson Smith Essay Collection

[Carson Smith]

Nate inspired me to get one of these going. It will be my contribution to Natopian literature. I don't have anything to upload yet since I haven't saved any essays from past years and school just started for me, but as soon as I do have one, I'll post it.

[Carson Smith]

Carson Smith
Accelerated Language Arts, Period 3
Mrs. Michaud
September 13, 2005

What makes a hero?

It seems that on every corner, evil is all that can be seen. Murders, rapes, burglaries, and
other such crimes happen several times a day in all of America’s major cities and around the
world. War rages on almost every continent. Even in books of fiction these problems can be
seen. One is left to wonder, why does all this have to happen? A select few, though, have taken
their disgust a step further and taken massive steps to make the earth a better place to live.
People like this exist in real life as well as in literature. Mother Teresa went to live in the slums
of Calcutta of her own free will. Eragon, from Christopher Paolini’s novel of the same name,
shows great courage. Then, there is Henri Dunant and his Red Cross, making a world of
difference every day in several lives around the world. Mother Teresa, Eragon, and Henri Dunant
embody the three heroic traits, respectively, of selflessness, courage, and compassion.

One trait that makes a hero is selflessness, which was embodied by Mother Teresa of the
Missionaries of Charity throughout her life. Mother Teresa gave up everything she had for the
good of others, going to live among the impoverished in Calcutta, India. According to the Nobel
Prize web site (Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work.), Mother Teresa
“[worked] among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta...” with “...no funds...”
Certainly a bold undertaking, to say the least. In her acceptance speech for the Peace Prize,
Teresa told her audience, “When I pick up a person from the street...I give him a plate of rice, a
piece of bread...” That generosity is a testament to Mother Teresa’s personality and heroism. It is
extremely heroic for a woman who had given up comfortable housing at the church’s expense,
meals three times a day, and a good job, to live in the slums to provide every single one of
Calcutta’s poor (It is worth noting here that India has the second-highest population in the
world.) with a hot meal. All over the world there are heroes who display that same selflessness.
Later in the speech, Teresa told of a boy from a well-off Indian family who refused to eat sugar,
insisting that the sugar he would ordinarily eat go to Mother Teresa and the people she worked
with. That was a true story, but really, the little boy was an excellent representation of Mother
Teresa and her generosity. Mother Teresa was certainly deserving of the beatification she
received from Pope John Paul II in 2003.

Heroes can also be found in books, and a prime example of a literary hero is Eragon,
from the fantasy novel Eragon, who shows great courage. Although he has several courageous
actions, the best example is during the battle of Farthen-Dur, a city in the fictional world
described in Eragon. Prior to the battle, Eragon is nervous about killing the Urgals, evil creatures
fighting for his enemy. Readers are told that he is “...dismayed by their numbers” and “it [seems]
like a madman’s task” to Eragon that he and his friends are “...supposed to kill every single one”
(480). Additionally, when he meets up with Durza, a dangerous enemy combatant, “fear
[touches] Eragon” (488). Despite his anxiety, though, he goes on to be successful at the battle
and in fighting Durza, and is “...consoled...” afterwards by “a measure of peace and
satisfaction...” (497). A true hero is one who, like Eragon, can courageously overcome any fears
they may have to be successful.

Another trait that makes a hero is empathy, and this is epitomized by the Red Cross and
its founder, Henri Dunant. In 1859, Dunant witnessed the Battle of Solferino in Italy and felt
very empathetic for the plight of the soldiers wounded in the battle. This prompted Dunant, a
Swiss, to organize a group of locals to help the wounded, and eventually this evolved into what
we know today as the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. The Red Cross
brings together people from around the world to support each other without regard to political
differences. A fine example of this is how, according to a September 3, 2005 article from the
Reuters news network, “North Korea’s Red Cross Society sent a message of sympathy to the
hurricane-ravaged United States...” despite ongoing hostilities between the two nations over
allegations that communist North Korea has been developing nuclear weapons. Aside from
bringing people together, though, the Red Cross has organized innumerable disaster relief efforts
that have helped and saved thousands, even millions. The most recent example is the various
projects that have sprung up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. Gulf Coast, prompting
President George W. Bush and Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco to extend their “...gratitude
to and [express their] confidence in the Red Cross...” as reported on the Red Cross web site. The
web site also reports on “Red Cross teams [that are] operating supplementary feeding centers at
four major locations in Niger to target 23,000 children under the age of five who are
considered...at risk” of malnutrition following an “...unusually dry...” rainy season in the West
African country that killed many crops and livestock, causing a deadly famine. The list goes on
and on, and Henri Dunant is truly a hero for instigating the empathy and compassion that became
the Red Cross.

There are a number of traits that make a hero, three examples being selflessness, courage,
and empathy, which are demonstrated by Mother Teresa, Eragon, and Henri Dunant and the Red
Cross. Mother Teresa displayed extraordinary selflessness and generosity through her work with
the poor in Calcutta. Eragon shows great courage at the battle of Farthen-Dur, and Henri Dunant
can be credited with the empathy that began the Red Cross, which today touches millions of lives
every year. It is nightmarish to think what a dismal place our world would be without individuals
such as these three.

[Carson Smith]

Carson Smith
Accelerated Language Arts - Mrs. Michaud
Period 3
09/07/05
Grade: A+

Summer Reading Essay

Ask an American to name an injustice, and they'll be able to give you plenty. Liberals will have the audacity to name Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay, and their 1960s hippy counterparts may add the Vietnam War. Most will include well-known examples such as Hitler's concentration camps. Some from the Vietnam War generation may even include places such as the Hanoi Hilton where prisoners of war were tortured. Few native-born Americans, though, would name Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution when asked to provide an example of an injustice. Colors of the Mountain, a memoir by Chinese-American Da Chen, is a long-overdue "inside" account of life during the Cultural Revolution. Chen was born in 1962, which was known appropriately as the Year of Great Starvation. To further complicate matters, he came from a landlord family. Because of that, his father and grandfather were often sent away to labor camps, while the rest of the family just barely scraped by eating moldy yams three times a day. Generally speaking, their fellow Chinese did everything they could to make the Chens miserable. The purpose of Colors of the Mountain is to educate readers about the Cultural Revolution and the atrocities committed then.


The primary way that Da Chen shows what life was like during the Cultural Revolution is by using his family and their experiences as an example. The Chens "...barely left [their] house..." because, as young Da's mother put it "...there were many bad people waiting to hurt..." them (4). Indeed, if the Chens so much as went out to buy groceries, they might be stoned, spat on, harrassed, or attacked, while the Communist officials stood by grinning. Most Westerners see childhood as a time of happiness, bliss, and peaceful ignorance. Few can imagine never being able to go outside and play, but that is precisely what Da Chen's childhood was--fear. It is the fear that you feel, the sympathy for the Chen family, that helps the author make his point. When Chen's grandfather goes out in the street, he was to "...look away if someone spit in his face. If they missed, he was to wipe the spit off the ground" (7). The children suffered humiliation and prejudice too. "In school, my sisters sat in the back, although, given their height, they should have been in the middle. They couldn't sing in the choir. They couldn't perform in the school plays. The kids could beat them, spit on them, and the teachers would not say a thing," Chen writes, describing the injustice that his sisters, and later he, would, endure at school. Although Colors of the Mountain is a story of one person's childhood, it is really about all the people, especially the landlord class, that lived in China during the Cultural Revolution.


In order for Da Chen's experiences to be believable, though, there needs to be some elements of the familiar in the book. Newsweek magazine could not have put it better when they called Colors of the Mountain "a defiantly happy book..." Despite the uncertainties of the world around him, Chen did plenty of things that every other Chinese child did. He prayed to the Bhudda with his mother. He exchanged traditional Chinese New Year greetings with the neighbors. He practiced math on an abacus. Chen also, like many teenagers, had an adolescence that was a time of questioning self-identity, values, and the future. Shunned by his schoolmates, he befriends a gang of hoodlums with whom he experiments with smoking, drinking, gambling, and begins to notice girls. It is the completely normal part of Chen's youth that makes him believable and helps readers understand the abnormal negative aspects of the Cultural Revolution.

In writing Colors of the Revolution, it is Da Chen's goal to educate his American readers about the Cultural Revolution. He does this by combining memories of a normal childhood with childhood memories marred by the Cultural Revolution. After reading Chen's work, one can only imagine how fortunate it would have been if the Western world awakened to the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution sooner.