Rooster Alarm Clock

Object: Rooster Alarm Clock

Quotes:

• “We were surprised to see how the alarm clock seized the imagination of the peasants. It became an object of veneration, almost. Everyone came to consult the clock, as though our house on stilts were a temple”(14).
• “After that historic morning we got into the habits of readjusting the time on the alarm clock. It all depended on how we were feeling, physically, and mentally. Sometimes, instead of turning the clock back, we would put it forward by an hour or two, so as to finish the day’s work early. In the end we had changed the position of the hands so many times that we had no idea what the time really was”(15).
• “On our return to the village we put on an ‘oral cinema show’ such as had never been seen before. Every single villager was crammed into the clearing in front of our house on stilts. The headman sat in the middle of the front row, holding his long bamboo pipe in one hand and our ‘Phoenix of the earth’ n the other, to time the duration of our performance”(19).
• Sijie uses the rooster alarm clock to represent that the city youths are more educated and have more control over the peasants. The city youths came into the village in order to get re-educated by the peasants but in reality the peasants do not know much about what is happening in the world around them to the extent of not even having clocks in their village. By changing the time on the clock to whatever time they wanted, it shows the power that the narrator and Lou have over the peasants in the village. When the narrator and Lou go to see a film to act out to the headmaster, the headmaster has a sense of power because he is in control of the clock.