The Melodramatic Imagination

I read an article in the Chinese paper, Lian He Zaobao a couple of days back, which inspired me to do this post.

What was the article about? It was from someone who was involved in a recent Chinese essay writing competition for primary school students.

The person was lamenting the essays that were written for the competition.

Badly written? No.

It was an issue of the plots.

For example, one of the topics was “The day our teacher didn’t come to school”. Most students wrote, well, you could have guessed it, that their teacher was diagnosed with cancer, or had an accident, and from there they wrote about how much they took their teacher for granted…

Another topic was “Now I understand” (note: the topics were in Chinese. The translations are my own.) The students always understood something after some death or accident.

Of course, there were other topics, like describing your weekend with your mother, which didn’t go beyond shopping…

So what’s the issue? As the title suggests, the writer in the article was lamenting the melodramatic imagination of primary school students, and fearing for their psychological development.

In my opinion, the problem of all this melodrama is understandable, but psychological impact? This is harder to tell.

And I have the following reasons.

It’s not that students are fundamentally pessimistic. It’s pretty much to do with the way they are taught to write essays. Students are often told to write something with greater emotional impact, with more room to explore emotions, and can express more values. Like not taking your teacher for granted, for example. Writing something that has greater emotional impact, they’re told, looks better than a “boring”, essay that has got a “happily ever after” ending.

Besides, even famous authors do that, except with much more stylistic flair, of course.

The next reason is that of socialization. Students are socialized to accept certain values, and these values are expressed in their writing. For example, they could write about how the class cheered wildly the day their teacher didn’t come to school, because the teacher was one from hell, for example, but first, that wouldn’t be “addressing the topic” in the eyes of the judges, and second, it doesn’t reflect well on the values of the student.

But of course, all these melodrama is not without its concerns. For a start, it doesn’t reflect well on creativity. Think about it, even Mediacorp is into this melodrama, with all the rape and kidnap scenes in their drama serials. Society seems to be overwhelmed by this fetish for tragedy, while forgetting the value of the comedic and the light-hearted.

Just think about it, what’s wrong with writing about a shopping trip with mum?