When reading The Tale of the Tiger Woman, the reader will experience the feelings of sympathy, empathy, repulsion, and confusion. The repulsion will affect the reader due to the girl realizing that her brother was killed and eaten by the tiger woman when the tiger woman gave her a snack “but in fact it was a human finger, cold and clammy” (CFT 27) and when the girl noticed that what “she thought was a rope was a long intestine” (CBT 27). The reader feels sympathy/empathy for the girl due to the situation she is in as well as the fact that her brother has just died. The feeling of confusion will come from the fact that when the girl gets in a tree to try and escape the tiger woman and instead of the tiger woman going up the tree herself, the tiger woman leaves to get other tigers to do it for her which allows the girl to escape. The question in many readers’ minds might be like that of my own; “If the tiger woman is actually a tiger, why did she not go up the tree herself?”

In the 21st century, the function of reading has began to be geared more towards education rather than enjoyment and that is shown through the value of reading due to the decrease in children reading books for enjoyment rather than having to read for school. There are plenty of novels, plays, poetry, etc. still has the ability to transport someone to a different world and spark that reader’s love for reading but other types of media and technology, like video games and phones, have slowly began to overtake the traditional literature and encourage kids to no longer read. The change from literature to technolgy has been shown in different studies of the behaviors of children and teens. An example of this is, from the article “The Real Reason Kids Aren’t Reading More”, is that by the year 2021, social media usage in tweens and teens have rose drastically, to where tweens spend five and a half hours a day on social media while teens spend eight and a half hours on social media. This shows that technology has slowly become a more prevelent type of media in children which, depending on how it is used, can prevent a child from gaining the reading skills they would otherwise obtain if they were reading some type of traditional literature.

Source: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/the-real-reasons-kids-arent-reading-more/2022/03