Umbrellas and Bottles: Teaching Welty’s Mythology in the Hong Kong Classroom

Few critics acknowledge Eudora Welty’s work as world literature and as accessible to readers from outside the United States. As the author and his students learned while reading Welty in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China, her core literary values—the imagination at play, creative inspiration, and moral independence—correlate to local predicaments facing readers in vastly different times and places. The author’s experience teaching Eudora Welty in Hong Kong also offered a specific example of how her writing transculturates capably beyond the historical context of the American Civil Rights movement she wrote within, and as applicable to a variety of global contexts and contemporary issues. The students’ shared “realization” of the mythical properties of everyday objects Welty stories depict activated a collective search for consensus in the classroom, a search that builds community rather than divides it.