Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret senses, revolves around a girl and her chinese immigrant half sister. The main character, Olivia first encounters her sister, Kwan as a 7 year old. Being a young child, Olivia finds it difficult to understand her sister's cultural difference. One specific example is Kwan's spiritual beliefs, and chinese superstitions. Kwan claims that she has "Yin" eyes and is able to see ghosts. This at first scares Olivia, resulting in Kwan being sent to a psychiatric ward.While in western culture, Halloween is celebrated, belief in ghosts and spirits is absent from everyday life. For the most part, in western culture ghosts are feared, but in Kwan's case she sees ghosts as beings that are there, a part of her daily life. In the film "Spirited Away", a young girl is also faced with many spiritual encounters that put her on a similar level to Kwan.While Spirited Away and The Hundred Secrest senses differ in many ways plot wise, they both share the cultural backgrounds and spiritual understandings in their characters. Both characters share a sense of spirits as beings, and at some points friends who are no more than a part of their everyday life. In some ways this shows the difference between western and eastern culture in regards to a belief in spirits. While western culture spirits are often seen as ambiguous and mysterious, asian culture often sees spirits as a part of life, or its absence.
The way you connected the two different mediums through similarities and connections was well done, as you not only looked at the obvious similarities, but the deeper and more profound correlations too.
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