Daniel Favano Chinese 0868 Sec, 001 Mangione Adaptation to a changing society has been a recurring topic.

. Literary masters across the geographic spectrum have written about one's struggle, or complete inability, to adapt and tolerate a society in which their basic functioning is seen as obsolete. William Shakespeare once wrote, to thine own self be true. One can argue that a person suffers from social obsolescence because they are incapable of admitting that they cannot adapt to new environments. China is in no way an exception to these circumstances. Many of China's cinematic and literary works touch upon this subject, both past and present. I present to you two different situations, in which the man's inability to adapt to the new society leads to his downfall. The movie Cell Phone is set in a society that has modernized, and the use of cell phones has played an integral (and almost second nature) element in modern socialization. The story The Possessor or The Possessed by Ma Jian takes place in a society where an editor has to deal with the pressures of a society affected by the open door policy. Both have specific elements that emphasize the notion that one cannot adapt to society without adapting one's true self first. These elements include: Emphasis on privacy or secrecy, the need for dominance, ignorance or inability to accept one's true fragility, and age. In my Religion in the World class last semester my professor, Dr. Leonard Swidler stated that there was an axial shift taking place that was dated around the late 1980's. This shift was taking place in the form of individual consciousness, to global consciousness. This global consciousness causes people to question their own individuality, and consequently, their privacy. On a global scale, privacy plays some element in a single person's life. Numerous news reports of celebrity deaths, cyber-bullying, and other incidents all have one common element: the breaching of privacy. Ma Jian, in the story, shows privacy as an essentially fictitious thing. The editor's privacy involved manipulating the power that he longed to have. His privacy gave him the motivation one needs to have to enable his uncontrolled, animalistic behaviors. For example, when the textile worker reminds him of the intense damage he caused on her in their previous meeting (p. 99), this action was completely unlike the editor outside of these private situations. His privacy is invaded by his wife (p. 104), which supports the notion that Ma Jian did not believe that Privacy was a thing a person could attain and preserve. In Cell Phone, Yan Shouyi is a man who does not realize that his inability to remain private is due to his cell phone. Like The Possessor, Cell Phone displays action, when perceived as private, to be animalistic and uncharacteristic of the character in public. Yan's affairs with Wu Yue are a clear representation of this. He, like the editor, plays an important and impressionable role in society, and both change personalities in the dark. Feng Xiaogang portrays the idea of privacy as a difficult thing (if not impossible) to attain when there is a cell phone in the equation. Xiaogang, unlike Jian, portrays privacy as a once possible thing, but like Jian it has all but dissipated. Each Of Yan Shouyi's fatal mistakes were due to the cell phone breaching his privacy. Both of his failed relationships were due to his cell phone. This raises the notion that one cannot be truly private in an advancing world that is continually becoming more globally conscious. In order for a person to successfully adapt to a progressive society, one must give up a portion of their privacy.