And sometimes, a simple melody, comforting and reminiscent of happy times, full of love and companionship, is much better at effectively conveying someone’s feelings. Sometimes, they can’t express all that someone wants to say. I think this was Vuong’s way of saying, “Sometimes, words are hard.” And they can be. But she was simply unable to articulate the words of comfort she desired and instead turned to something that was simple and unfailingly effective: music. As it was the only song his mother knew in English, I think the mother was trying to bridge the divide that had grown between herself and her son. Uncharacteristically, the mother comes to his aid, not by consoling him in Vietnamese, but by humming the song “Happy Birthday.” As Vuong wrote, it wasn’t his birthday. This theme of cultural disconnect comes back when the son endures the death of his uncle, experiencing somewhat of a hallucination in public. So by writing a letter to his mother that he knows she’ll never read, he sets out to lift the weight off of all his painful memories and thoughts of his mother in an act of catharsis. Nothing he’ll say or do will reach his mother, and so with no other choice, he resigns himself to this troubled relationship with her. The mother says she doesn’t need it, but she doesn’t realize that she’s inadvertently severing one more potential connection with her son. When he attempts to teach her, the mother, enraged, physically hurts him, as he is reversing the familial hierarchy. With this, Vuong also seems to make a commentary on the challenges of immigration (specifically from Vietnam) and the divide created by it, exploring the unwillingness of the mother to learn and adapt to American culture, while the son moves forward with little tethering him to the past. And the frustrating and painful disconnect between the mother and son illustrated in the essay is perpetuated through the cultural differences that prevent the mother from comprehending the words and feelings of her son. I learned the son grew up with an increasingly volatile and unstable maternal relationship, at times enjoying peaceful, compassionate times together, but other times enduring abuse at the hands of a mother suffering from PTSD, herself a former victim of domestic abuse and a witness to the horrors of the Vietnam War. I all too quickly judged and thought, if you have something to say, why not say it? As a result of fear? Because you simply couldn’t?Īfter quite an emotional read-through of the piece and a couple minutes of processing, I understood a bit better the purpose of the act described in the title. I was surprised to learn it was because his Vietnamese mother did not know how to read or speak English, and even further perplexed at the seemingly futile act. Scanning across the mouthful of a title, I thought, why? Why would she never read it? I immediately concluded that she was either deceased or that the writer had zero intention of publishing it at the time of creation. I’d never heard of Ocean Vuong, but a quick Google search that revealed an upbringing that I could identify with intrigued me further. I was browsing through the timeless, vast essay reservoirs of “The New Yorker” when I stumbled across this work. A quick disclaimer: this essay was extremely packed and I would love to spend days unraveling it for you guys, but I’m only going to focus on the title of the work and its significance for this first post.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |