Both authors are discussing the aspects of journalism versus personal writing (memoirs), and how the two can sometimes have to be blended in order to tell a specific story. Debra Dickerson, who wrote for The Record at Harvard Law school, was accustomed to writing about topics that affected other people, or stories taking aspects from other peoples' lives. Rarely was she to put pen to paper and create a personal work. However, after her nephew, Johnny, was shot at the age of sixteen and later learning that he would never walk again, she published a work in which the horizons between journalism and memoir writing were blurred.
No, the piece was not about her in particular, but it was her close family. Her nephew recounted the story of how he was shot in the back, and lay in the road waiting for death, fully conscious. Then, breaching into the more journalistic side, she anonymously interviewed Johnny's shooter, Dale Barringer, while he was in prison, and took the opportunity to learn about his story and his background, and found that he and Johnny had much in common. Mainly, they both lacked a father figure in their lives to guide them and help them to decide what was wrong or right. Johnny would live to be a well brought up individual, as far as we can perceive from the reading, whereas Dale struggled with doing the right thing, and grew up to be an angry, violent, drug-dealing young father of five children.
By taking these two peoples' life stories, Dickerson shows us how people from a similar background and upbringing can diverge onto very different paths.
Loung Ung similarly uses journalism to tell a personal story in an almost first person form. At a young age in Cambodia, she escaped the war and what would have been her upbringing there by coming to the United States with her brother. Her sister, however, was not so fortunate, and grew up uneducated, forcefully married with five children, and living in very poor village.
Ung wrote the book Lucky Child as a way of translating the words and memories of her sister into not only English, but into a way that would make sense for the reader. By having two different understandings for both American and Cambodian cultures, Ung feels responsible, in a way, to bridge a cultural gap between the two.
Ung would worry that Lucky Child would spark controversy over its 'dual narrative'. While she told a story almost as if from her own perspective, it was really an attempt at piecing together the bits and pieces of her sister's life, which showed difficulty in that her sister had no real measurement of time other than the rising and setting of the sun, the change of the seasons, and the harvests that came with them.
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