Essay Questions

Why is Bich considered to be “dead” to the family?

The memoir is yet another glimpse into the turbulent mix of culture class and generation gap awaiting immigrant families who bring children into America. Although America likes to forward the idea that family means everything, the truth is that by the second half the 20th century the family dynamic in America was a mere shell of whatever it might once have been. Thanks to the metaphor of social mobility and literal mobility which increased with the building of the highway system, the tradition of intergenerational families living in close proximity to each other—if not within the same household—was no longer the norm well before the arrival of the author and her family.

By contrast, Asian culture in general, but especially among the smaller nations facing economic or political turmoil, put a much greater emphasis on family unity. It is never entirely clear what exactly it was that Bich writes in her diary which causes such an extreme response by her mother in the wake of her invasion of her privacy by reading it, but the suggestion is that it was likely nothing more than unusual than having pre-marital sex. While such a revelation might have been met with hostility for American parents at the time, in most cases it would not have led to a daughter moving, a mother attempting, a father telling his children they no longer have a sister. Such is the difference between cultures of different countries.

What act of violence immortalized in the song “I Don’t Like Mondays” is briefly alluded to in one panel and toward what possible end?

In describing the apartment in San Diego which her father moved into as her parents began living separately even while still remaining a parental unit to some degree, the trajectory moves from inside the apartment outside toward a more expansive vision of the city as a representative of America at large. Pete Wilson is identified as the Mayor who would become the Governor she grew to hate. The city’s huge naval base brings up memories of the war they escaped and some members of the population are revealed as being seriously xenophobic and racist.

And then there is the panel showing just the back of a young female looking out a window holding something that is indeterminate, but which the reader knows is a rifle because of the accompanying text informing us that the very same month they moved in, a 16-year-old girl fired a rifle at an elementary school across the street, killing two and injuring nine. Her response to queries about why she did it became the title of the iconic song by the Boomtown Rats. The understated quality of the juxtaposition of Mayor Pete Wilson going on to implement harsh anti-immigrant laws as Govenor to what was in 1979 the unprecedented and then-shocking act of Brenda Spencer opening fire on defenseless schoolkids becomes a powerful indictment of what America has become since then. The passage of time and a wholesale sea change in politics and social conventions have made America a place where Spencer’s crime and Wilson’s xenophobic legislative agenda can no longer adequately be described as shocking without qualifying the word by attaching the suffix then-,

The illustration of Brenda Spencer is part of a larger strategy for the book’s minimalist illustrations which softens the details of its characters. What is the goal of this strategy?

It is never left in doubt to the reader that all the major and most of the minor and supporting characters are Vietnamese. And yet, in most cases, the difference between those characters and the occasional Americans is not substantially portrayed through the detail of the drawings. In more than just a few instances, in fact, it is difficult to determine any particular ethnicity or nationality. The minimalist approach to conveying facial characteristics serves the initial purpose of not wasting effort on the artist’s part of reiterating what is already known: the characters don’t have to “look” specifically Vietnamese to in each panel merely to remind the reader that they are.

More to the point of the strategy is that by adopting a more diffuse approach that suggests rather than constantly reminds is the intended consequence of manipulating expectations of stereotypes, softening the potential for bias and discrimination, and engendering empathy and association. Although it would going too far to say that minimalist deprives the characters of their unique cultural association, softening the lines and allowing background colors to occupy the space where finer anatomical details would does serve to universalize them to a certain extent.