The Picture Bride
The Picture Bride is a poem in which a young woman tries to empathize with her grandmother and her experiences. When her grandmother was a year younger than she was, she left her home in Korea to move to an island she had never been to before. There waited an older man, her newly arranged husband, with nothing but a picture to show him what she looked like. She wonders what belongings her grandmother took with her, and how she left her family in Korea. She wishes to know how her grandmother reacted when meeting her strange new husband. " And when she arrived to look into the face of the stranger who was her husband, thirteen years older than she, did she politely untie the silk bow of her jacket, her tent-shaped dress filling with the dry wind that blew from the surrounding fields where the men were burning the cane?" I think the narrator wonders if her grandmother untied the silk tie on her dress to welcome the wind of the her new home.
The narrator of the story tries to put herself in the shoes of her grandmother to see what her perspective would've been like. I think this poem is an attempt for the narrator to connect with her grandmother and the way she may have felt at that time in her life. It also compares the two women and the way that their lives are similar or different. We do not know how the narrators life differs, but she is making an effort to try and understand the way her grandmother lived.
It was really cool to see the comparison of what life was like for a young woman back then compared to what it was now. I know that we didn't get too many details about the granddaughter's life and how she went about her business, but while reading the poem, I compared it to how I live my life on a day-to-day basis. The changes were remarkable, I can't even imagine what my reaction would be if my parents told me they were shipping me off to a country I had never heard of to marry some man that I had never even seen or talked to! My oh my, how the times have changed! (Thank goodness!)
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