Linda Sue Park is a North American writer who wrote A Long Walk To Water and A Single Shard. These two stories can be compared by how Linda uses the connection between fiction and reality in the stories by relating real persons to characters. It’s noticeable how the same characteristics presented in the characters are also visible in people from the same time period. In both books, Salva and Tree-ear, the main characters, are orphaned teenagers and this leads to different challenges, but a similar lesson about resilience. Salva lives in Africa, specifically in South Sudan, during a civil war, and Tree-ear lives in Asia, in Medieval Korea, in contrast even though the stories try to teach the same lessons, these are presented through different situations.
Many people from South Sudan during the civil war got raped and pregnant, so they used to abandoned their children when they were born. Salva wasn’t abandoned, but he watched his parents being killed in front of him, he was forced to fight for his country because the adults didn’t want to run the risk of dying during the conflict, so they used children to achieve their goals. He was one of the kids that faced this problem in the country. The northern troops invaded and destroyed school buildings, in order to catch children to work for them. The southern Sudan civilians that could escape from the attack, used to leave the children alone in the desert, because they used to think they would mess up more than help. “He is a kid. He will slow us down”. “Another mouth to feed? It is already hard enough to find food”. “Why do they leave me without waking me? I would not have been any trouble-I would not have complained!… What will I do now”? (p.15). We can say Salva was created with the goal of representing the kids that suffered in this period of Sudan’s history, he stands in for the mind, the fear and the hope of those wronged children by showing what they felt in this situation that traumatised most of this children generation.
Having someone to take care of you makes the whole difference, if you’re not able to adapt yourself. Tree-ear was already an orphan as a child, due to this, he had to learn to be resilient in the face of situations, because he never had anyone to show him what is right and what is wrong. Tree-ear lives under a bridge in Korea, along with his partner. Tree-ear unlike Salva, has the freedom to choose what he wants to do or not. This shows how different their lives are, both of them fight for survival, they need to find food and shelter as themselves, but Salva doesn’t have an escape for that, or he finds someone that could help him or he will die of hunger and cold. Although Tree-ear has more freedom to make his choices, even though he doesn’t have that much option, he doesn’t have money and people often don’t trust him because of the clothes, and discriminate against him because of how he looks. Like when he is looking at some budgets in a store and he is called a “Thief!” even though he was not, in fact, stealing, and he tries to defend himself,”Please! Please, honorable sir, I was not stealing your work—I came to admire it!”(p.16/17), this shows how people react against him even when they have never talked to him before. Salva also faces this struggle, people deny talking to him just because he is an orphan, ” Wait, are you an orphan”? Salva answered angrily. “I was not an orphan, I had a father, a mother, I had a family!”. We can say that Tree-ear is judged early just because of how he looks and dresses himself, people think he is a bad person because he is an orphan and a lone kid. In contrast, Salva is judged because of his age, people left him because he was a kid.
Even though Tree-ear has a “better” life than Salva, both of them suffer because of a battle they can’t fight for. These struggles are also related to where the story is set. Tree-ear lives in a city in Medieval Korea, so theoretically he has more access to food, shelter and people. On the other hand Salva is alone in the middle of the Sudan’s desert, where it’s harder to find food and a place to hide. Salva and Tree-ear carry the same lesson during their stories, but in different ways. They indirectly show that in life there are battles that we are unable to fight for, there is nothing we can do about, it just happens. For example, both main characters were orphaned as a kid, and they were “obligated” to adjust their lives to the environment they lived in. They needed to be resilient. The author tries to convey the idea that even though there is often no choice, knowing whether to adapt to the situation is crucial to successfully solving the problem. In conclusion, we can state that Salva and Tree-ear were created to be a representation of the kids that lived in this time period. They were created to serve as an example of braveness and resilience, to send the same message, even though their situation was different. But both of them suffered from something they couldn’t do anything to change, it was their reality. And despite all the difficulties they had to deal with the situation like adults, it was just children with their future lost due to a problem that was not theirs.
In conclusion, we can state that Salva and Tree-ear were created to be a representation of the kids that lived in this time period. They were created to serve as an example of braveness and resilience, to send the same message, even though their situation was different. But both of them suffered from something they couldn’t do anything to change, it was their reality. And despite all the difficulties they had to deal with the situation like adults, it was just children with their future lost due to a problem that was not theirs.
