Being in a community is in human nature and considered a necessity by many. Communities are a symbol of togetherness; a group, and they all have something in common. Not fitting in can be very hard, so many people often have to change who they are in order to be part of a community. This whole concept can be viewed through four short stories; The White Umbrella, The Stolen Party, Hello My Name Is , and The War of the Wall. The White Umbrella talks about a Chinese-American girl who sees a white umbrella that she longs to have. The Stolen Party talks about a girl in Argentina who attends a rich family’s birthday party and realizes everyone sees her as nothing but a mere worker like her mother. Hello, My Name Is talks about a boy who is shifting from his South-Korean culture to his American life and the experiences of how he embraces both in their unique ways after having rejected one or the other for many years. The War of the Wall talks about a painter lady who comes into a town to paint a mural on the wall that the neighborhood kids have used for a long time, and they rejected her until they realized she dedicated the wall to someone that was equally important to them is it is to her. All of these stories incorporate community and the need to belong in different ways, but all of them have a similar aspect, which is that they all have at least one character who doesn’t fit in and their peculiar journeys.
Many people feel the need to change their identity in order to fit in. This is reflected through every single story in different ways. In The White Umbrella, the narrator wanted to change her identity to be like the popular girls at school, which is shown when she describes a girl at her school who also went to her piano class who was popular, beautiful, and most of all, believed to be the owner of the umbrella. However, when the narrator realizes that the umbrella was the piano teacher’s all along, she felt a smaller need to change and be more popular. In The Stolen Party, the narrator believed her identity to be one of the kids who fit in, but when everyone on the party looked down on her because of her mother’s poor status, she realized that she won’t be able to change her financial stability and that she wasn’t one of the popular kids. In Hello, My Name Is _, the main character wanted to change his identity as an American and never embraced his South Korean side, but in the end, he realized that you can never change where you’re from, but we can balance out two cultures. The War of the Wall mainly focuses on the fact that the painter lady was not from the neighborhood, but she made no effort whatsoever to change her identity in order to fit in, although everyone was discriminating against her for being herself. Changing our identity can happen in many ways, but we should all change for the better and not for the worse.
Some people like who they are but change because of the social pressure put upon them. Social pressure is basically when a certain society or community is prejudiced and discriminates against a certain person or a certain group of people, forcing them to change in the process. In The White Umbrella, the main character does not face a certain or specific social pressure, but the fact that this girl in her piano class was beautiful and perfect pressured the narrator indirectly to change who in order to be similar to that amazing girl. In The Stolen Party, the narrator is discriminated against because of her mother's poor status, making her feel the need to blend in even more. However, this social pressure is different from most others because the pressure that is put upon the narrator is to be more like her mother and more like a servant instead of a normal person who can just hang out with friends. In Hello, My Name Is _, the narrator feels the need to change his South Korean ways of doing things in order to blend in with other American kids because he knows that they will be prejudiced and racist towards him if he does not adapt to the American culture. In The War of the Wall, the painter lady receives a lot of social pressure with everyone telling her or showing her that they want her to change and be like them, but she does not change and stays who she used to be before receiving all that hate and blatant discrimination. Everyone is pressured to change by society, but it’s our decision of whether we want to change or not.
The root of every single part of someone belonging in a community and whether they can fit in is change. Change can mean different things for people and is not always easy to accept. In The White Umbrella, the narrator wanted to change her current living situation by covering who she truly is with cool accessories such as the umbrella. She ended up realizing that change is not necessarily good in this situation, and that she didn’t need to change. The Stolen party s
hows change when the narrator changes the way she sees the rich community. She does not change for this community, but she changed the way she viewed them. At first, she used to think she fit in and thought of them as her own kind, but later came to realize that it was not the case at all. In Hello, My Name Is _, the narrator changed who he truly was in order to become ‘more American’ but then later changed the way he views his South Korean culture. At first, he did not accept it and wanted to fit in with the other American kids, but later on in his life, he realized that he didn’t need to adapt to the American culture fully just so he could be liked and appreciated. In The War of the Wall, the painter lady was pressured to change and fit in multiple times, but she never did. However, the community/neighborhood faced change when the wall they’d always known changed for the better. Change happens in communities through different forms, and they all result to different outcomes.
In conclusion, being in a community means many things, and we can see these things through the 4 short stories. The message in all of these books is mainly that sometimes we don’t like to accept who we really are, so we try to change and blend in, without really realizing that the only person we’ll never be able to truly fool is us. We should be more like the painter lady who knows what her goal is and will not suddenly stop trying to accomplish just because the journey might be hard. Sure, it might be best sometimes to be in a community and to fit in, but we have to always remember who we truly are, and we cannot deny some parts of us like our culture or our origins just because we might not like them. These four stories demonstrate that it is normal to want different things and to feel a need to change and be better in order to be more popular, but at the end of the day, we’re just us. I believe that the same lesson can be learned from all of these different stories, which is that life is not always easy, and sometimes we have to take risks and be different even if it means some people won’t like us.
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