Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers, and to build their literary analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the bulleted outlines below. Cite details from the text over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. Explore the use of pictorial writing and images in the text.

• How does the author use Chinese language characters to give further depth to some of the stories? (topic sentence)
• Examine the relationship the people in the stories have to written language. How does the written word connect them to their past? Why is it important to keep this writing alive? Using specific examples from at least two stories, explain how the stories may have felt different if the characters had not been displayed on the page.
• In your concluding sentences, summarize how the inclusion of Chinese characters supports the themes of The Essence of Memory and Erasure of the Past and/or Storytelling as a Universal Constant.