Blog 1

I wasn't sure of what I was suppose to write about in this blog, and I'm still now sure, so I'll talk a little about the different readings we had.

The first story I read was "The Gift of Years" by Vu Tran. I actually enjoyed reading it, even with the lack of chronological order. Normally that would have drove me up the wall, but in context of the story, it fit. The narration was from the father's, Lam's, point of view and him remembering his youngest daughter Mai. our memory doesn't flow chronologically so it made sense that the narration of the story didn't either. Thankfully, Tran makes each change in time clear and I was never confused/irritated by it. As for the overall story, although not much happened over a course of many years, I still found it interesting. I enjoyed the internal conflict within Lam's character and how he questioned his own and favorite daughter's innocence in his son-in-law's death. From the beginning, I as the reader was set up with the image of violence and Mai. Once I read her husband had drowned, I immediately thought the worst of Mai and thought she had pushed him in the river, despite the fact there was no evidence to believe that. The very first image of Mai we were given was of her watching her brother being beaten and offering no help to him. This image rose up again when I finally learned that she had not directly killed her husband, but offered no help to save him either. She did think about getting help, but was unable to do so. This made me rethink her character when she was younger and think that the reason she didn't help her brother before was because she was too scared and had no idea what to do. After all, she was just a child at the time. I thought the end was absolute genius when we learned that once of Lam's fondest memories of Mai was actually not of Mai. It made me rethink all of the "memories" he had of her and realize (with some after thought) that memories are not completely valid and cause us to judge that person in a different light.

I also enjoyed reading "A New Kind of Gravity" by Andrew Foster Altschul, though, at first I thought the narrator, Charlie, was female and I'm not sure if it was simply because I'm a girl or I associated him with one of my favorite characters, but it took me a while to realize that he was actually a he. Aside from that bit of confusion, the rest of the story was fairly clean cut (ignoring the fact I also didn't know where Charlie was working for a few pages). Like "The Gift of Years", I found Charlie's situation to be really interesting and unique. Working in a women's help center is not an everyday profession and it was interesting to see how it worked (if the story is accurate to real help centers). What I found really interesting was the different interactions Charlie had with the people within the help center. He had a set of rule to abide by when dealing with the women, while his relationship with Horace and Camila were completely different and unique. I loved Charlie's relationship with Camila even though I was always wary of a bitter, maybe sweet, ending between them. The situation simply called for it and I couldn't imagine it going well. The ending wasn't really sad, but more so realistic. That was something else I liked about the story, it was real. I could imagine each even actually happening somewhere, sometime, and that helped draw me into each event.