75 pages • 2 hours read
William BellForbidden City
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Heroism and Social Responsibility
Initially, Alex’s ideas on heroism are fairly limited. As a Canadian, he admires Chinese history from a distance. He is a fan of military history, so he admires generals and expert tacticians on the battlefield. He sees his reporter father as somewhat foolish. Ted has no interest in politics, and Alex considers his father’s efforts to constantly get the full story as just daredevil stunts. During the massacre, however, he himself is put in that position of needing to get the full story. Alex begins to see the heroic possibilities in journalism. Moreover, he sees the heroic possibilities in engaged citizenry. The student protesters inspire him because they face the tanks, armed only with their deeply felt convictions.
Journalistic Integrity as a Means of Democracy
Alex is astonished by how quickly the Chinese government cracks down on reporters inside the nation. Rather than telling any iota of truth, the Communist Party’s paper—the People’s Daily newspaper—begins to spin lies, ones that further engage the student protesters. Alex comes to realize that telling the truth is dangerous work. He sees this more closely when it is up to him to get the camera and the story out of the country and out to the rest of the world. Whereas Alex used to view his father’s commitment to capturing a story as foolish, he now understands firsthand how freedom of the press quite literally can mean life or death for those in politically tumultuous countries.
Western and Eastern Cultural Values
When Alex is exposed to the daily lives of the Chinese students, he starts to rethink his life. He questions what he has accomplished, embarrassed that his life predominantly included watching TV and aligning his military figurines. He considers the perils the Chinese citizens must face and realizes that as a Westerner, he has taken for granted the democracy his country affords him. When he sees the students risk their lives to stand up against tyranny, he also questions his values, wondering what he would be willing to take a stand for or to even die for. He starts to see that the relative comfort of his life has allowed him to avoid many of the problems others confront regularly, such as safety and freedom.
