Cut from a Different Cloth: Reading and Teaching Lu Min’s “Scissors, Shining”
Posted on April 14, 2021
"I was extremely devoted to studying Master Song’s craft, surrounded by swaths of cloth and bits of thread, whiling away a boyhood like a plant dyed an unnatural hue, brightly colored, but sick inside, silently suffering."
Aided by the advantages of hindsight, Xiaotong’s narrative voice preserves and embellishes the past to tell a painful story about adolescence, desire, abuse, and the quiet desperation of not fitting in. Lu Min’s “Scissors, Shining,” featured in Words Without Borders and translated by Michael Day, is a thematically challenging and formally interesting story that would be suitable for an explication or close reading assignment in the advanced high school or college literature classroom.
