Theme and Significance

Ties that bind, ties that break

Themes

• Traditions: there are a lot of traditions mentioned along the story, as arranged marriages or "being all fixed up" (pg.9), "embroidering" that means women just sitting for hours while poking a needle through a piece of cloth (pg.12), education allowed only for men, family school for women, impediment to women for dinner with men in the same table, traditional thinking imposition when Ailin's father said that he considered not all new ideas were strange (pg.23) and the most important: bound feet only imposed for women.

• Gender role: Chinese history has had a big difference related to the gender role. Women have always been considered lower than men. Men have always had education, family and economic privileges. Also, women are the only ones who have to change their behavior and even support some painful physical changes in order to find a wealthy family or more specifically a wealthy husband.

• Determination: Ailin's determination for become an educated woman and not a follower of her country traditions is the real meaning of the story. Since she was a child she was thinking about the injustices for women and the real reasons for it and thanks to her determination she could become a talented and recognized Chinese woman.

• Family and Social class: being a wealthy or model family in the Chinese society is the most significant there because each family history has been kept through the years. For this reason, they continue their traditions to preserve a status or a "perfect" family.

The significance of this book in the literary world

It has had some awards as:

ALA Best Books for Young AdultsWINNER 2000

California Young Reader MedalWINNER 2004

Texas TAYSHAS High School Reading ListWINNER 2001

Illinois Rebecca Caudill Young Readers AwardNOMINEE 2002

The significance of the title

The title refers to the process that women have to do for being considered a respectful woman, which is bind their feet. However, the word "break" means that this ties can be overcame. 

Source

* http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/119716/ties-that-bind-ties-that-break-by-lensey-namioka/9780440415992/

Ties That Bind, Ties That Break

                                                     Year of Publication: 1999

Number of pages: 154

Editorial House: Random House

LENSEY NAMIOKA

She was born on June 14th 1929, in Beijing, China. She is the daughter of a linguistic (Yuenren Chao) and a physician (Buwei Yang Chao). 

Lensey attended grade school in Cambridge and she was excellent at mathematics. Before she started her career as a published writer in the 1970s, she was a mathematics instructor. His father worked at the University of California - Berkeley, where she met her future husband: Isaac Namioka. They have 2 children. 

She was really interested in the Samurais' history, then she became a well-known writer because of the genre of her novels, as: adventure-mystery, humorous and juvenile. Also she writes about the two sixteenth-century Japanese samurai warriors and families of Chinese immigrants living in Seattle.

Her first writing was The Samurai and the Long-nosed Devils, in sixteenth-century Japan and she gain more followers thanks to her novel Ties That Bind, Ties That Break. 

Sources:

*Lensey Namioka.  goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/26612.Lensey_Namioka

* Lensey Namioka (1929) - Sidelights: http://biography.jrank.org/pages/1242/Namioka-Lensey-1929-Sidelights.html

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