For this Yopp & Yopp activity, I have chosen the Double Entry Journal activity. I thought this activity would be appropriate for a non-fiction book. I am sure most of you have done double entry journals, but for review, I will explain. While reading, you find a quote that resonates with you, you write it down, and then you explain why you chose that particular quote. It may be because it made you question your own ideals, or you liked the way it was written, or it taught you something new.
For this during reading activity, please find 3 quotes you like and respond to why you liked the quote.
For example:
Before babies are born they live in the sky where
they fly among the clouds. The sky is a happy place
and calling babies down to earth is not an easy
thing to do. From the sky, babies can see the course
of human lives.
This is what the Hmong children of my genea-
tion are told by our mothers and fathers, by our
grandmothers and grandfathers.
They teach us that we have chosen our lives. That
the people who we would become we had inside of
us from the beginning, and the people whose
worlds we share, whose memories we hold strong
inside of us, we have always known.
From the sky, I would come again.
This passage is from the very beginning of The Late Homecomer. I especially liked this passage because it sounded really lovely and melodic. Also, it is very close to what I believe. This shows me that even though I am not Hmong, I, as a Caucasian American can have beliefs that are similar to a group of people so very outwardly different from me. This though reiterates to me that we are not much different from each other.
Your quotes will probably be much shorter, but this passage was too powerful to not comment on. Enjoy the book!
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“My father said, “Your grandfather was buried on mountains that look like those.
ReplyDelete“There was no need to answer. I had never been on a real mountain. I had only heard of it all my life. And I knew that my grandfather had died a long time ago, when my father was just a baby. I thought it was a good thing, that even if we are only babies when our fathers die, we always remember the places where they are buried. Some day we could find our way back if we wanted to, to say thank you, and to say hello, and maybe to tell them: this is my daughter and she has never met you and she did not know where you were buried but I am showing her now so she will help me remember”(p.96).
This passage is from the author’s early years in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. Like Kao Kaila Yang, my mother wanted me to have a connection with her mom who died before I was born. Although I never met Grandmother Hagerty, we traveled to her Kentucky grave to pay our respects. My mom always said that I was a gift from her mother because I arrived a year after her death. Mom felt that it was important for me to understand the kind of woman my grandmother was, including seeing the state that was special to her.
“From the moment we arrived, I knew that my family had survived a great war to bring me to this country. I understood that the conditions in Thailand and the camps were hard for those who knew more than I did. But for me, the hardness of life began in America. We are so lucky to be in this country, the adults all said. Watching them struggle belied this fact. We are so fortunate to be young, new lives opening before us, they believed. And yet the life in school that opened before me made me feel old in a world that was struggling to be young. A silence grew inside me because I couldn’t say that it was sometimes sad to be Hmong, even in America” (p.151).
This quote comes from Part III “The American Years.” The passage made me question the American ideal. Yang realized the American ideal of youth wasn’t consistent with the Hmong reverence for age and wisdom. I hope that we Americans learn to appreciate the values of other cultures and adopt more of them as we see their benefit through stories like this one.
The young immigrant perspective was also insightful. I have heard it said that immigrant children adapt quickly to America because they are immersed in it. this passage gives a different perspective on the experience. It took Kao Kalia Yang much longer to feel a part of America than I thought it would.
“After many false beginnings, I wrote about what mattered to me. I wrote about the love I felt I knew: Love is the reason why my mother and father stick together in a hard life when they might have an easier one apart; love is the reasons why you choose a life with someone, and you don’t turn back although your heart cries sometimes and your children see you cry and you wish out loud that things were easier. Love is getting up each day and fighting the same fight only to sleep that night in the same bed beside the same person because long ago, when you were younger and you did not see so clearly, you had chosen them.
“I wrote that we’ll never know if Romeo and Juliet ever loved because they never had the chance. I asserted that love only happened in life, not in literature, because life is more complex” (p.199).
This quote comes when Kao Kalia Yang finds her voice through her writing in high school. It gives me hope that one day I can touch someone’s life like her teacher did.
I can also identify with Yang’s insights on love. After twenty years of marriage, I agree with her overall belief that love is a decision that people make throughout their life, regardless of the obstacles that you face along the way. This is not the romantic love that the media portrays. The fact that this young woman observed this love in her Hmong family, a people who seem so different from me, is powerful in letting me know that love is a universal truth for all of us.
Natalie, The double entry journal is exactly right for this powerful memoir. I'm glad you explained it and gave such good examples as anyone in the world might come to your delightful blog in search of ideas for teaching literature!
ReplyDeleteNancy, as you often dom, you've set a high bar for blog buddies responses with your poignant quotations and comments. With them you capture the important ideas that love is not a magic happenstance that brings happiness, but a choice we make over and over regardless of obstacles-and that finding a new home in America when one is forced to leave one's true homeland is often, probably most often, very difficult and in many ways heartbreaking.
“Moonlight mingled with electric light and entered our sleeping room with a pale kind of watery glow that left shadows along the cold exterior wall” (93).
ReplyDelete“Time became a blur of days in the sun, heat coming off the cement floor, heat coming down from the sky, seeping into my hair, warming its way into my head. I disliked the heat” (100).
I had a really hard time trying to decide between these two quotes, so I just decided to include them both. I really like the imagery in these two quotes and the way Yang uses language to create this imagery. In the quote about time and heat I liked how she connects her memory of the time passing with the heat and then succinctly states in the next sentence how she did not like the heat. I liked the contrast between the flowing image and the abrupt, direct assessment of a part of the image. It was very striking to me.
“In English, his voice lost its strength. The steadiness was gone; it was quiet and hesitant. Did all Hmong people lose the strength of their voices in English?” (118).
I think this quote makes a really good point about what it feels like to go to a different environment than you are used to. It implies that you may be comfortable, strong, and secure in one setting, but when you relocate to a new setting that confidence and self-power dwindles. Although I have never lived in a region or a country in which I was unable to communicate in English, I have lived in different places and had to navigate new cultures. I can relate to the experience of trying to feel your way out in a new culture and how you feel initially weaker than from the place you came from. I can only imagine how this feeling would be compounded when you have to learn a new language as well as a new culture.
“This was when I started collecting my grandma’s stories. I began to realize how our lives in America would be our stories. I started to understand that one of the many truths that governed life: by documenting our deaths, we were documenting our lives. The Hmong had died too many times, and each time, their deaths had gone unwritten. There were no testimonies. The witness grew old, and they died, and life continued, as if they had never lived…I wanted the world to know how it was to be Hmong long ago, how it was to be Hmong in America, and how it was to die Hmong in America—because I knew that our lives would not happen again” (118-119).
I am really interested by the theme of how powerful stories can be and how they can outlast the life of the authors. This quote really struck me because it speaks to the idea of stories contributing to a larger understanding and by bearing testimony of an individual’s experience, it allows that experience to continue. This quote also suggests the motivation behind Yang for writing her memoir and what she hopes to accomplish by telling her stories and the stories of her family. She emphasizes the importance of seizing the moment and telling the stories because her experience is unique. Later generations will have their own stories to tell and document, but this is her experience; this is her story.
1. "One day, she would tell her brothers and her mother that she still had the photos of them from before the war. She would tell them that she would never forget them because the way they were burned into her heart." (37)
ReplyDeleteWe carry so many things in our hearts, but only the most profound ones get "burned" there. I love this passage because, even in the middle of her flight from the approaching soldiers, her thoughts were with her family and those she loved. That's what our hearts do, as Yang shows us over and over in her beautiful memoir.
2. "I imagine bodies turning to dust. I imagine bodies, looking as they were in life, different people's faces and forms, walking about the place where they had lived, wondering where those they love have gone. Their spirits are like the wind blowing through the grass, grass that was green at the bottom but lighter up near the top, translucent grass tips that appeared pink in the late afternoon light. Sometimes, as I go through the motions of my life, I come across the smell of grass and water and I travel back to Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. It would be nice to find the scent in a bottle of shampoo or conditioner, in perfume - something that I could uncork and take inside of me, borrow forever." (63)
Poetry infuses Yang's memories - this passage is so lovely! She holds so many fond memories of places of transition, which illustrates her presence, both in the moment and in memory. She connects life and death here in a way that only someone who has seen both can do. This memoir is full of these types of comparisons, illuminating the richness of existence.
3. "Even now, in the warm summer nights, when the wind is warm and sweeping, I look inside of me, somewhere that nestles in my heart, and I can find that night, safe and warm, close to my stomach, beating in my heart like it is alive." (125)
Even amidst the apprehensions of coming to Minnesota, and all the other strangeness she had experienced to this point, Yang is capable of holding this moment of uncertainty as a cherished memory, a place she carries with her forever.
There are so many moments like these within the memoir, it was almost impossible to choose only three. The thread that connects all of her memories seems so strong, golden, alive, much like her heart that seemed to write the story down.
"[My mother and father] insist that in a time when there was no room for choice, they had chosen each other. Together they had gone for a walk with no end in sight" (19)
ReplyDeleteI loved this passage when I read it and still remember it after finishing the novel. First of all, it is just a beautifully written passage and well formed analogy. This is just one of the many examples of Yang's beautifully written words. Besides that, I love the idea of walking together into the unknown. When Yang describes how her mother and father had gone walking that first day and her mother just didn't want to let go of her father's hand, it made their love so simple and yet complex at the same time. The way she describes it gives their life a whole new context. It also allows the reader to see that, at the time, something as simple as walking together symbolized so much more.
"[my grandma and I] both wanted to be free again-she from theis barbed wire place with no trees and going to a new country, and me from the dead woman's nightly visits. Both our spirits were lost, unsure of the way to freedom-this thing that we did not know we had ever owned until it was taken away by our faith and our fear and the things we could not control" 110-11).
I love this passage because it addresses that cliche, "you don't know how much you love someone/something until it is gone," with such beautiful wording and meaning. This is one of the places where Yang infuses her culture into the story to describe how she was feeling at this moment. This also brings in the theme of family ties that Yang incorporates throughout the novel. She and her grandmother are both so lost and in need of so much for different reasons. I love the last line because I feel like it sums up so much of what her different family members seem to be feeling at different times in the novel and it is, again, so beautifully written.
Somehow I forgot my last two quotes, so here they are:
ReplyDelete“But for me, the hardness in life began in America. We are so lucky to be in this country, the adults all said. Watching them struggle belied this fact….A silence grew inside of me because I couldn’t say that it was sometimes sad to be Hmong, even in America” (151).
This quote to me is reminiscent of the idea that in America the streets are paved with gold and everyone is able to come and make their dreams come true. What nobody tells those who immigrate to America is that it takes a lot of hard work to make the American dream; and even then, it doesn’t always come true. That last line is so powerful because silence is something that Kao talks about struggling with in America. This emotion is something that I feel like so many people could relate to and understand whether or not they are immigrants. Sometimes silence becomes the solution for people to cope with the problems and struggles they have in their lives. The fact that Hmong people are sad in America just shows that even when your dreams seem to come true, they may look and feel different than you expected them to.
“Mother, I didn’t forget you. My hand is all caught up in yours. Together, we are typing on the keyboards of time. We will pick up the same warm breeze, the winds of summer. Our dreams are coming true, my Hmong brothers and sisters” (274).
I feel like Kao focuses so much on her grandmother and her father in this novel, that her mother sometimes gets overlooked. Not only is this a beautiful way to bring the end back to the beginning where Kao talks about her mother’s dreams of the future, it also comes back to mention that her mother was an influence in her life and in her writing. When I read, I felt like her mother was such a strong figure, leaving behind her family, finding her place in her new one, creating a life with a husband she hardly knew, caring for her family the best she could, having to go through six miscarriages, being strong when there was talk of her husband taking a new wife, and working in a factory in America instead of being able to fulfill her dream. I feel like this passage talks about how Kao’s writing this book, in a way, is fulfilling her mother’s dream because she was not able to. Her mother’s dream of typing is so close to Kao’s love of writing, telling stories of her history that her mother worked so hard to protect and carry with her.
Again it is a pleasure to read your responses to the blog activity. You have each chosen quotes that show how Yang's precise use of language, how her poetic sensibilities enrich the memoir and go right to the heart of the reader. Your love of language and literature will inspire the same in your future students. I'm so glad you will be ENGLISH TEACHERS (you too Tracy-you are fated). BF
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