Nian Liu

The Mirror and the Mask

This story felt like one of those child folklores where there are three reoccurring events that happen and in the end a moral or conclusion is developed. And so it did in this story where it ended with the poet killing himself. What I didn’t understand at first was why the kind liked the poem when the poet himself lost his taste in writing a new poem? Later I found out that, this wasn’t the case. It was the items that the King gave the poet that reflected three things. 1) The mirror that reconfirms a person’s existence, 2) The mask that conceals the truth and 3) The dagger which in the end kills the poet. The theme learned from this story was that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What’s pretty or not only determines on how a person perceives.