What Can Be Learned from the Novel “the War Between the Classes”

“The War Between the Classes” is a very interesting novel, I never imagine that I could finish the whole book within one week. Many active characters in this book are impressive, such as Amy, Juan, Hideo and Adam, actually Otero is the most interesting character in this book, he is the teacher of Social Studies, and designed the “Color Game”, which is an experiment intended to make students aware of class and racial prejudices. There are so many things that can be learned from this novel “The War Between the Classes”.

First of all, the multiple cultures can be known from this novel. Amy comes from a Japanese family, which is conservative and traditional. Bonsai is the tradition of Japanese heritage, which is passed on from generation to generation in Japanese family. In general, Japanese are difficult to accept the people from other cultures, for example, Amy’s parents refused to accept Hideo’s marriage with Sue just because Sue is not Japanese and Hideo did not get permission from them to marry Sue (absolutely Hideo would never get permission). Adam’s family are living in the neighborhood of Upper Class, they normally have holidays in mountain area with other Upper Class families every year. Juan comes from Latino family, they are even poorer but they are rich in closeness to each other. They are warm-hearted, like to help others. Juan’s mother asked for a day off in order to offer supports to Juan and his friends. It is interesting to know different cultures and different behaviors from this book.

Secondly, due to the different cultures, people normally stand in their shoes to think about others, which usually result in misunderstanding, even prejudice and sometimes racism. The prejudice always exists because people like to judge others by their color, their dress and even their accent. People like to classify different people and treat themselves in one class, so they unconsciously exclude others from different class. It is obvious that Amy’s parents have prejudice on Sue and Adam because of different cultural backgrounds. This is also the reason why Adam, Amy and Juan are living in different neighborhoods. Male normally has prejudice on female, for example, Adam feels natural to ask Amy to type his paper but feels awkward when Amy asks him to do the same thing. Actually based on my experience, prejudice is not that unacceptable, but racism would be much more dangerous. Justin and Melissa are a kind of those people with tendency to racism, they usually treat other colors as inferiors and call them with nicknames, and they even do not want to address other colors directly. Racism is dangerous and can result in fights and war. All people need to be open-minded and respect other cultures, in order to eliminate prejudice and racism.

The last, courage from two characters is very impressive to the readers. Otero is not described too much in the novel but he is the most important person in the novel, he is so smart to realize the problem of Classes and designed the game that helped students understand what is behind. Otero is very brave and full of courage to promote his Color Game in the school, to let everybody face the problem and finally solve the problem. The second person in this novel with great courage is Amy, who shows strong leadership to protest the division of the Classes. She first broke the rules to talk to the inferior classes and she believes that people from different classes can make friends. Then she posted the posters of ALL COLORS UNITE with Juan in school at night, finally she called for all Orange students and some Light Green students to make posters. They successfully distributed red armbands to the whole school.

From the novel “The War Between The Classes”, we can learn the multiple cultures around us, the prejudice existed among all of us and the courage to break down the barriers and unite all classes. It means that we need to respect different cultures, to face those improper social phenomena and to have courage to unite different people to fight with prejudices. This novel is extremely helpful to the immigrants and encourages the immigrants how to survive in the war between the classes. This novel should be promoted in the high schools and post-secondary education institutes, to let students have open-minded and mutually respected. It will help build up harmonies in all communities in Canada.