Week 6: How reading can change lives

This week I had to read We Should Never Meet by Aimee Phanbefore Wednesday to turn into Kris because I wasn’t going to be in class on Friday. I read about 80 pages throughout four days. This was a phenomenal book. It didn’t have the crying-reach-out-to-my-estranged-siblings power Forgotten Country did but it was so powerful in other ways. How the different stories connected together, how imagery and dialogue were used to enhance the stories made it so SO powerful. I had to read up on Operation Babylift and I had to ask Jackson for some backstory on the Vietnam war which filled in some of the gaps for me since I don’t know this history (for obvious reasons tbh because I grew up in the US going to public eurocentric white people school lolz).

One of my goals was to read and think critically so that I can make more thorough annotations. Since I turned in the book, I don’t really remember what I annotated… I do remember how I tried to link the stories together, I wrote about how every character in the book was suffering under white supremacy and impacts of the Vietnam war which made their personalities and actions very complex and loaded with this historical and present trauma. The character Vihn, on the surface, is a very unforgiving character because of the way he treated Kim and then how he played Bac Nguyen. But I wrote that Vihn was suffering too. Just like the other characters he is struggling to survive, being entangled in his past and living in the US. How he mistreats Kim and seeks out Bac Nguyen, pretending to be a friend, robbing his family and his house and then attacking him shows how vicious impacts of war is… to hate and rob your own people, knowing how to do it, knowing how to get away with it – shows how entangled he is in internalized hatred and the system of racism. That was probably my favorite chapter because it evoked so much emotion from me.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and if I had it with me or took notes for me to keep I could write more. But because of these past couple of days and losing the original Rock post, I’m going to sign off.