The Shining Mountain

749 Words3 Pages
The Shining Mountain This little short story which easily can be viewed upon as a fairy tale, due to various characteristic elements, is about this ordinary girl with quite the extraordinary name and with great paternal expectations weighing her down. Pangma-La is the daughter of a famous Scottish mountaineer, who doesn’t hesitate to train her in a way so that she can continue his successful legacy. There are several hints in this story to point out for us that we are in fact dealing with a fairy tale here, and for some of us it might even seem fairly obvious. So let us dig deeper into Pangma-La and her adventurous endeavors. Father and daughter relationship Pangma-La´s father has great expectations for her. He wants her to be a strong, magnificent mountaineer like himself. Pangma-La has a hard time living up to these expectations and her mother is reluctant to the father’s attitude towards training her. The father´s ego eventually leads to him living his life through his daughter, which is bad for her future identity as an individual human being. That is why we should feel incredibly happy for Pangma-La to have this tough loving mountain goddess to teach not only the father, but all of us a valuable lesson about parenting. I am sure that from the day Pangma-La learned the truth about her name she was afraid of disappointing her obsessed father. That would be the main reason for her to be doing all the things he wants her to do, to become this younger female version of himself. But I guess we all want to impress our parents in one way or another, right? To answer my own question: yes, but this kind of accomplishment only leads to Pangma-La being temporarily happy and satisfied with herself. Because she is not actually doing anything she wants to do. She is nothing but a tool or a puppet if you will, controlled by her father to make him feel better about
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