Kiana's Blog

I’m going to be honest, Cold Mountain was a difficult read. It was slightly confusing because of the back and forth between flashbacks and present. Mainly I was just not interested in the book. I believe Charles Frazier is a good author, just not one that could capture or keep my interest. The story depressed me. I didn’t really have anything to look forward to except the idea that Inman and Ida might be together again. It seemed like a dark cloud hung over the story the whole time, and I find it hard to read a book like that. I get wrapped up in books, and I feel the emotions in the book. Cold Mountain made be feel sad and isolated in that sadness.

The title was perfect for the book in so many ways. Not just in setting but it also was perfect because of the dismal struggles that seem to pile up like a mountain. There were so many struggles for people to overcome. They never seemed to end, just one after another. I believe a lot of people can relate to the feeling of circumstances overwhelming them. I know I have for sure, it’s apart of being human. When authors write they want people to relate to the emotions in their story. This draws the reader in and makes them interested. We all just want to be understood on some level. I could relate to some of the themes in Cold Mountain and that is only reason I can write anything about it.

I can relate to the feeling I was mentioning earlier, about sometimes life presents one struggle after another. I’m not saying my life is a depressing story, far from it actually, but I know struggle and loss. I know what it is like to suffer physical loss, emotional loss, and experiencing the absence of someone you love. I have a lot of medical problems, and it seems like I collect more and more as the years go by. The book shows Inman in the hospital, wounded, helpless and lonely. I’ve been in a similar situation many times. I can relate to the feeling of just wanting to walk out. There is physically walking out then there is mentally walking out. Frazier wrote that Inman walked out, but I also think he just wanted to walk out of his mind. You can feel more trapped in your mind than you can in any place. Isolation traps you in your mind like no other. Ida feels extremely isolated in here circumstance. She moved to unfamiliar place, knowing only her father, then he passes away and she is left alone. Her love Inman is in the war, and she doesn’t know if he will come back to her. She feels that her heart is with him, and when you don’t even have your own heart, it gets pretty gloomy.

I understand the feeling of someone you love not be in your life. It is a terrible thing to do to yourself, to long for something you can’t have. We all can relate to this feeling. We have all wanted something or someone we couldn’t. The important thing about these feeling we have and the struggles we go through is how we deal with them. It seemed to me that Ida didn’t do very much about her situation, but there wasn’t much she could do. She worked with what life handed to her. What i did like was that she was honest about how she felt. I know a lot of people go into denial or mope to death, but she was like I feel this way and that is just how it is. Inman on the other hand felt the need to get away from his problems and understand them. He seemed more lost to me. There is different kinds of lonely. There is being in a familiar place with people, but in your head you alone. Then there is plain being by yourself. This book does a pretty good job showing this.

What I would really like for the author to have done was to show how Ida and Inman fell in love more. I think that would make us feel more of the tragedy of the separation. I wanted to feel closer the the characters.

Mudbound is an amazing book. It was written extremely well. I love how the author switched the point of views between six different people. I personally think that the author did a fantastic job expressing each and every characters’ emotions and personalities. The book is filled with themes that I thoroughly enjoyed contemplating.

The way she wrote the book in different characters made the situation seem more real and personal. You can live in the same place and time but experience life so differently. Having both men’s and women’s, black and white, thoughts and feelings gives you a better idea of what it was truly like for these people. I love how this gives you practice in being open minded because you never know how everyone is experiencing life. It is known that for black people in this time period life was harder because of discrimination and Jim Crow laws. It was just so refreshing to read it from a black person’s point of view. I think she writes about their lives in such a believing way. They aren’t portrayed as saints, but has real people in difficult situations.

I adore the opposites that are shown between each character. Laura does’t speak her mind and does what is expected of her, but Florence on the other hand is bold and proud. Henry is calm and silent, as Jamie is charismatic and sensitive. You got to know each individual deeply, but I think the way you got to know Jamie was special. He didn’t just tell you what he was thinking, he described it in a way that he didn’t even know himself. I think his character was the most dynamic. Henry was kind of the person you didn’t really know how to feel about. You didn’t hate him or love him. He was respectable with some questionable thoughts and actions. Laura’s side of the story felt close to me for reasons I’m not completely sure of. I think I had a fear of being her. She did’t speak up when I wanted her to and I don’t like that quality in myself. She just did whatever her husband told her which made me mad a few times. I liked when she did what was right despite of what Henry said. I was told growing up that you should submit to your husband, but I have a real struggle with that because of how stubborn I am. This story shows where stubbornness gets you. You can call it speaking up or believing in yourself, but it is necessary to express yourself despite the consequences, good or bad.

Speaking up is in my opinion an important theme in this book. Everyone needed to especially with racism going on. Sometimes speaking up doesn’t work out for you like how Jamie got ridiculed for being friends with Ronsel. Ronsel Spoke up by doing a great job in the military, but what is also important is when to not speak up. I believe there is a place and time for words. Words are powerful and should be used intentionally and purposefully. Ronsel did well in situations when we was silent when he didn’t want to be. Its not easy for some people not to stick up for themselves, but it is smart to realize when it wouldn’t do you any good. Near the end Ronsel gets his tongue cut off. This installed fear in me more than I thought it would. Its ironic that the man who did say something can’t anymore. I have so much pity for him. I would hate it if I could never speak up for myself again. This gift we have to speak should be used in a way that shows it is a gift.

This book is also about fears. Fears really do influence who we are. It influenced Jamie to be a pilot. It made Henry treat Florence better because he feared for his children’s health. It also influence Jamie to drink. This shows that fears can push you to do great things or cripple you. That is what I like about this book, it encourages you to be the best you. We saw everyone’s flaws and strengths and how they could be better. I would hope that we would look at each other this way. That no matter who we are, what we have done, we can all try to be the best of ourselves despite anything around us.

My name is Kiana. My name alone says a lot about me. My parents named me Kiana because I was born in an Arctic village called Kotzebue which was close to another village called Kiana. The village was created by King Kiana from Hawaii, who fled persecution on Captain Cook’s ship to Alaska. I always took pride in my Eskimo name and for the longest time I thought I was Eskimo, but in my defense the natives there did call me the White Eskimo. I like that my name is different because it shows how different I am as a person.

After living in Alaska for two years, my family and I moved to China. I know that moving to China is an irregular thing to do, but my parents felt that God was calling them to help the lost people of China. In China it is illegal to spread christianity. It was a somewhat dangerous thing to do. The stereotype about how ridiculously strict is true, my missionary friends have been deported or worse. My family was pretty secure though because my father was a dentist, and the government saw him purely helping medically. We lived in the huge and polluted cites, but my father would go away for weeks to remote villages to do dental work with missions team. I got to go with him sometimes to be his dental assistant which got pretty gross sometimes because some of these people have never brushed their teeth. You would be in shock if you saw the things I saw. So many people living in complete poverty and completely controlled by their government. I grew up in this, and I saw it as normal because it was all I really new. You couldn’t walk ten feet with out seeing a beggar on the ground with missing limbs or a woman in rags with her child eating out of a trash can.

I knew from a young age the truths about life. My parents told me exactly how and why things were. They would tell me that the man next to me was dying, but even he could be saved. No matter our circumstance, whether we are starving or millionaires, we all need God. I grew up seeing the pure and simple need for a savior to save people from the evil and tragedy in the world. I knew that this was my purpose in life, to help guide people to salvation. When I was five I became a Christian and ever since then I have felt Christ in my heart constantly working in me. I knew all of life’s questions because I had God and the Bible to give me the answers. I feel so blessed to know everything I want to and more. Being a Christian is a big part of who I am because I find my identity in Him.

After living in China for about eight years, we moved back to Kotzebue. We had to move back people my mother was having medical problems. It wasn’t that much of a culture shock moving to Alaska from China because an Eskimo village is nothing like the continental U.S. One street, one store, a small school, houses, and the hospital were my dad worked. It was very isolated and cold, but extremely beautiful. Alaska has amazing outdoor activities. You are so close with nature that you can just see God’s beauty through it. We only lived in Kotzebue for a year, then we moved down here to West Virginia. Now this was a huge culture shock. Its really odd for an American to be shocked my American culture, but it took me a long time to adjust. I did not want to live here. I wanted to move back to China so badly. I hated looking like everyone else. I felt like living her was going to make me unspecial. I was a famous white girl in China who knew exactly why she was there and what she was suppose to do. Here I didn’t know who I was or what to do here.

A few years after moving here, I had spinal surgery. I had severe scoliosis which was pressing against my organs, and if I didn’t get immediate surgery I wasn’t going to live. Surgery ripped me apart. I have titanium bars and screws in my back, from my neck to my butt. The pain that comes with it ripped me apart even more. This pain never leaves. I go to bed with it, I wake up with it, but it mostly keeps me up at night. The pain changed me, but I like to think for the better. It made me have to grow up very quickly. It made me ask for more truths about life which drew me closer to God. And just when I think I have a handle on it, I develop more medical problems. I know have problems where my organs don’t function properly. I have to take medications that I don’t like, and I’m on this special diet that is just absurd. I hurt a lot and it’s tough, but tough things happen. I believe that God has allowed tough things to happen so we can see the imperfection of this world and feel the need for his perfection.

 

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