Dickerson & Ung

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.

Clutter 'Twitter' post

At this particular point in time, I presently find many of the words of my personal thoughts to be redundant #theenglishlanguageceasestolive

I've spent the majority of the past week at home on Long Island looking after my mother since she broke her leg last sunday. It's proven to be a major learning experience for my family, but especially for myself I feel. The week began with the general stress of the situation, and I was dealing with it by myself from my dorm room in the city. My father called me monday evening to ask me to come back home for a couple of days to help out, which I was willing to do, but wished that I didn't have to, since I had made plans this week that might have had to be canceled.
            After two days of helping my mother go about her daily routine and taking her to the hospital for a CT Scan, I was ready to leave on thursday, but as soon as I'd boarded the bus back to Manhattan, I was overwhelmed by a feeling that I was doing the wrong thing, and that I needed to stay in Sag Harbor with my family and put my own plans aside. It wasn't until I had reached Manhattan that I called to apologize for leaving, and I felt like I had abandoned my family in a time of uncertainty. I am leaving out some personal details, but I assure you it was a very emotional day for everyone. Within two hours I was on another bus heading back home, and my conscience felt cleaner having done the right thing.
             Maybe I've grown a lot more from this than I realize, but either way it was good for me to come home, because my mother has been having issues other than the leg. She's been on percocet as a painkiller, and has had a bad physical reaction to it, we believe. She's currently in the hospital after experiencing tremendous abdominal pain, but there's no sign that it's anything very serious.
             I had a poor experience with percocet, as well, although it was prescribed for me after having three wisdom teeth taken out. It turns out, it is not uncommon for patients to have a dysphoric emotional reaction to it, which my mother and I both had. Hers was an extreme sadness, while mine was more of easily triggered aggression, although I was reduced to crying as well at one point, after which I took the rest of the percocet left in my pill bottle and threw it away. After she and I have both had those experiences from the regular prescription dosages, we cannot fathom why people would take it recreationally.

Response to Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue":

I went to a high school with a lot of Chinese students. It was estimated that at least 50% of the population were Chinese, and because of this, communication with my classmates could be difficult at times, since few of them spoke what native English speakers would consider to be 'perfect English'. Like Amy Tan, I would also have to simplify what I was saying for a good portion of the time. I would have to break down sentences and find ways to explain a word or a phrase that would make sense. In this way, I can relate to what Tan describes as a separate form of English when she says, "It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with." However, since I did not always have to simplify my English, it would remain a challenge to communicate sometimes.
                  Many of the Chinese students would use simpler English the way that Tan's mother does, as shown in the conversation quoted in the reading.

"The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people."

                  This is how a lot of conversations would be spoken. Sometimes I would understand perfectly what the students were trying to say, and sometimes I would have to ask them to repeat themselves several times. I would also sometimes forget to simplify my English, yet I found that many of the students that spoke in 'broken English' would not have much trouble understanding me. I think this is because they manage to pick through the sentences and put together the words and phrases that they did understand and determine a meaning from that form of translation.

The best way that I can relate to Tan's situation growing up would be to talk about my father. He was raised in England, and although he speaks English almost indistinguishable from our own, there are still certain barriers. Mainly these barriers lie in the meaning or pronunciation of a word, or it can be the lacking of entire phrases.

"...people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service..."

While my father's situation has never been as bad as that, there have been moments where I've had to resolve a situation quickly before it can turn into a mess. These situations however are usually comical. The best one I can think of at the moment was when my family went to the beach one day, and my father very loudly exclaimed something along the lines of, 'Next time we should take the kids water-boarding.' My father innocently meant boogie boarding in the water, without realizing that water-boarding is a form of torture, so it was easily shrugged off, and we now look at these little mistranslations as something funny that sometimes occurs.