I want to focus on the story of the Favorite of Fortune and the Child of Ill Luck part of my reading. The story begins with a princess who decides to choose her husband by throwing a ball of red silk amongst all the people that walk by her house. I am focusing on this story because how the princess chooses her husband is the same as how a woman chooses her husband in the book I am reading about the Monkey King. When I first read this story in the Monkey King I thought that this was just a random description of how someone chose their husband. But apparently this was a common thing in China in the past. The moral of the story has a little to do with predestination. The princess is doomed to have bad luck so that even thought she marries a beggar that has good fortune she still has to wait 18 years before he even returns. In that time she lives in poverty only surviving because of her mother. Even when her husband returns and she becomes empress she only lives 18 days before dying. It basically says that if you are destined to have bad luck there is nothing you can do to change it. I personally disagree with the message the story is trying to project but the story does provide a nice view of old Chinese traditions.
Bibliography: This story comes from the Chinese Fairy Tales reading unit. Which is from the book The Chinese Fairy Tales ed. by R. Wilhelm and translated by Frederick H. Martens (1921).
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