Mean Girls Case

The topics I have chosen to expand on are class status and class relations portrayed in the stories Dog by Ba Jin and Hands by Hiao Hong. These two stories describe the important factors of class structure and class relations between social classes in pre-modern China. As seen in the story Hands, Wang Yamin, a girl categorized in society by her black hands, was mistreated by her fellow peers, teachers, and even janitorial workers because she was lower class than anybody else at school, as well as from countryside. The second story Dog discusses a boy who felt as though he was less than a human being, and that belief forced him to act, think, and feel that he was truly a dog. He was brutally mistreated in society, mentally and physically. We can come to the conclusion that he was treated in such a bad manner because his story is similar to Wang Yamin's account of her low class. My thesis will revolve around the idea that both authors, Ba Jin and Hiao Hong, illustrate a vast separation among the middle and lower classes and display uncivil relations among each class in pre-modern Chinese history.

The power that people create for themselves through money or personal efficiency would place them in a class distinguished as high, middle or low. Throughout the story Dog, the boy grew up in an urban area full of uncivilized people, had no childhood, and faced cold and hunger in his everyday life. Meanwhile, other kids his age were educated and loved by their parents. For this reason, the boy felt less than a person because of how the outsiders treated him. They treated him in such a violent way he began to feel and think like a dog. He said "I begged for scraps like a dog because I wasn't a human. I was a dog or something like it" (111). Americans, the "white people" who wore white caps and white uniforms with blue trim were honorable and superior to everybody else in the eyes of Dog. People passed him as if he were a lost object, or kicked and laughed at every day of his life. Yet those honorable people were beating pedestrians with liquor bottles and abused women in public. If anyone stepped on their property they would get brutally beaten up and kicked out.

The author includes some of the factors in the story how the United States and Western European countries have been unequal because of their hierarchy.

The dog was in such an environment where equality among people did not exist. Dog eventually "realized that what we call people are divided into different categories" (113). The dog discovered that he was low class, while Chinese people were in the middle class and Americans, "white people," were in the upper class. He could not be educated because of his appearance. He had "yellow skin, black hair, black eyes and flat nose"(113). Everywhere he went he got kicked out like a dog. The only thing Dog had in his life was a gold statue of a god with a missing hand who