综合英语（二）（教学 ppt课件）Unit 1 My Father’s Shadow.pptVIP

Unit 1;My husband and I were flying to Hawaii from New York City to show our five-month-old son, Timmy, to our parents for the first time. But what should have been a mission of joy filled me with apprehension. For five years Id hardly spoken to my father. Loving but stern in the manner typical of Chinese fathers, he had made particular demands on me, and though we were very much alike, wed grown very far apart. When I became a teenager, my father held up my mother as a model of feminine behavior. But she was gregarious and social, while I preferred books to parities. He pressed me to mingle with his friends children. I insisted on choosing my own companions. He assured Id follow in my mothers footsteps and enroll in the local university to study teaching, and that Id marry into one of the other long-established Chinese clans on the islands and settle down, as he and my mother had. ;But I didnt settle. As bullheaded as my father, I escaped to the University of California, where I fell in love with a haole, as we called Caucasians from the mainland. Gary had blue haole eyes and sandy haole hair. I announced that we were getting married—in Berkeley, not Hawaii. No large, clamorous clan wedding for me. My parents came and met Gary just two days before our small, simple wedding. Afterward we moved to New York, as far from the islands as we could get without leaving American soil. ? My fathers subsequent silence resonated with disapproval. He didnt visit; neither did I. When my mother telephoned, he never asked to speak to me, and I never asked for him. We might have gone on like that, the habit of separation hardening into a permanent estrangement. Then Timmy was born, and I felt an unexpected tidal pull back to the islands. ;On the long flight to Hawaii, memories of my childhood, when I was my fathers small daughter, came flooding back. I was three years old, running behind him as he walked between the banana trees in the plantation town where he taught high school. Wh