They tried to make it clear to the boy that you should not learn anything else besides the Chinese culture; everything else to them was abnormal. "This woman at the spinning wheel is also a foreigner, we use the right hand to spin but she uses her left" (Hsiang 12). The young boy is caught between two cultural identities, the identity he is learning in school and the identity his family members tell him to be. His family has the right to teach him the Chinese culture traditions as well as allowing him to experience new cultures. Without the experiences and education of a new culture this boy will be ignorant to many aspects he will soon approach in life. The affect that this family has on this poor boy relates to why it is very important to define their identity throughout understanding, for the boy will be unaware of new civilization. Secondly, poverty is unfortunate but is the true reality that many individuals have to face. For example, the country boy came from a poor family who did not want to send him to school because they thought "he gets to be at least half as useful as a grown-up by the time he is eight or nine years old," but were forced due to proclamation. The country boy has to face the reality of living in poverty and he has to find his own individuality. He needs to learn how to get out of the same mind set his family has. They are stuck believing that because they live in poverty no one in their family will be able to succeed in life. The family has him working on a farm making money to survive and succeed, but what they did not know is that it is his education that will take him out of poverty and make him successful. It also happens to be that Mabry comes from a poor family in which his mother was struggling "working 24 hour a day cases as a practical nurse" to be able to provide a life for herself and her children. In this case he and his family knew that the only thing to do about it is to get an education and that even built within him a "proud feeling.