Brief Summary of Yan Kao Kalia´s The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir

Lia Lee born and raised in America, but brought up as a Hmong, faced health issues specifically epilepsy. Her parents who practice the Hmong culture had a different view on how to handle Lia critical condition. Hmong did not believe in traditional medicine but believed in Txiv neeb, person with a healing spirit. Not only do they believe in a person with healing spirit to help cure their illness but also consider epilepsy as power; “Their seizures are thought to be evidence that they have the power to perceive things other people cannot see, as well as facilitating their entry into trances, a prerequisite for their journeys into the realm of the unseen” (Fadiman, 1998, p.21). Right at this moment is where you can tell conflict is going to occur.

In the context of the two chapters, particularly chapter 13 Code X, I felt that the doctors respected the Hmong’s culture in an humble and professional matter that deserve applause since in previous chapters, it seemed that they had a lack of engagement with Lia’s parents.

They were both in love with the idea of being in love but not with the person they said they

My parents are Hmong refugees that immigrated to the United States after the Vietnam War in the 1970s in search of a better life. In their eyes, America is the land of the free and where dreams can become reality. In Laos, my parents lived an agrarian lifestyle with very little education. Despite their lack of education, they realized that education held the key to success. Throughout my life, my parents emphasized the importance of education and did their best to guide my siblings and me. This was not an easy task for my parents because of the cultural adjustment that they experienced, but they managed to instill in me invaluable character qualities such as patience, perseverance, hard work, sacrifice and courage. I am the third youngest out of twelve children, and I will be the first to receive a Graduates degree.

The ‘love’ in their situation could also be said not to be love at all

We live in a society that has increasingly stomped on love, depicting it as cruel, superficial and full of complications. Nowadays it is easy for people to claim that they are in love, even when their actions say otherwise, and it is just as easy to claim that they are not when they really are. Real love is difficult to find and keeping it alive is even harder, especially when one must overcome their own anxieties and uncertainties. This is the main theme present in Russell Banks’ short story “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” as well as in “The Fireman’s Wife,” written by Richard Bausch. These narratives, although similar in some aspects, are completely different types of love stories.

Love is something we all long to have, but it is among the emotions which subvert our judgement to it’s will. In Jodi Picoult 's The Storyteller the main character Sage falls in love with Adam, a man who is already married. She knows that what she is doing is wrong, but continues due to the fact that she feels so strongly attached to him that it doesn 't faze her.She knows it is wrong, but love is what fuels this affair. She eventually comes to her senses and leaves him, but it took Leo falling in love with her and he grandmother’s story about life during the holocaust to make her realize this. Love is to a thunderstorm as rational judgement is to the light of the sun. One obscures and hides the other.

Falling in love with someone and marriage is often a goal in which many people seek to attain in their lifetime. In Yiyun Li’s story “Extra,” Granny Lin an unmarried fifty-one-year-old with financial troubles takes advice from a family member and take cares of a rich and sick widow in an attempt to inherit cash when he dies but while doing so falls in love. Similarly, she soon develops a loving attachment with a student while working as a maid at a school. Granny Lin quickly develops these strong feelings with these people because she has never been exposed to this kind of relationship with a person. I argue that Li characterized Granny Lin this way to portray the message that love can have many definitions.

     In contrast to these fairly pessimistic views on love, the author describes an instance in which a couple found true love. Mel tells an anecdote of an old couple that was admitted to the emergency room after a very bad car accident. The two people were wrapped up in full body casts, and as a result they could not see each other. Mel noticed that the old man was very sad, even

With their absence, their world might as well be hell. Love is a plight in the human spirit so profound that it empowers us to obtain courage and build bridges with it to reach one another. For centuries, many people have opinions on what caused the infamous melodrama of two star-crossed

Love is a feeling that comes to fruition between two people and the story behind the growth of love between two people is often associated with the culture of their society or societies. In their short story, “Family Stories,” authors Steven J. Zeitlin, Amy J. Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker discuss the impact and importance of oral stories passed down through generations. They state, “[Oral stories] are relevant to … history not only because they convey some factual information, but because they often capture the ethos of an era” (10). This “ethos of an era” refers to the culture surrounding a story because culture describes the actions of a collective society and as such strongly influences stories. Culture, especially, influences love stories

Cindy sawyer was born in Vietnam, but she soon immigrated to the U.S when she was only five. When asked about her feelings towards the big move, she simply stated, “I don’t remember moving here, it feels as though I have always lived here”. She went on to mention how she easily adapted and could learn everything quickly. Her happiness shone through her gratifying expressions. Although, as we went into deeper detail of her family, Cindy’s happy mood began to taper off. She had an undeniable amount of trouble trying to generate the right thoughts about a hard time, “I was never close with my parents, which distanced me from my family and destroyed our relationship”. She pointed out that this was a regrettable period in her life. Thus, Cindy

One of the most prominent themes in literature is love. No matter where or when you look in history, the theme of love is ever-present and ever-explored through storytelling. Asian literature is no exception. Some of the most popular texts to come out of Asia involve stories of love, and they incorporate a lot of the same elements. This can be seen through an examination of four texts: R.K Narayan’s version of Valmiki’s The Ramayana, Kālidāsa’s The Recognition of Śakuntalā, Wang Shifu’s The Story of the Western Wing, and Tang Xianzu’s The Peony Pavilion. While each of these books tells a unique and compelling story, they also have several components in common. All of these texts deal with love at first sight, love sickness, and the arrangement of marriage. Because of these shared plot devices, they all depict an idea of love that is rather shallow and superficial. To illustrate this, this paper will provide a brief summary of each story before conducting a textual analysis.

Literary work is often sourced from an author’s inspiration or passionate feelings. Bao Ninh, the well-known Vietnamese author, develops his historical fiction novel The Sorrow of War using the motif of love to develop his novel. Bao’s novel unravels the life of a man named Kien, who as a young soldier and later as a writer, struggles to embrace the savageries he has witnessed in during and post Vietnam war. The novel follows Kien as his internal struggles begin to hinder him from losing those whom he loved and the memory of traumatic events of Kien in the war. Bao uses the motif of love to create the hidden character of Kien as he develops along his emotional journey.

While a cliche of love poetry is for it to be enchanting and fantasy-like, modern romance could be anything but romantic in a world of post 9-11 stresses. In David Lehman’s “When a Woman Loves a Man,” he expresses his own experiences with modern love. These experiences shared display not only the ups and downs of love, but the falling into of complete and unconditional love. Through the vividly depicted tellings provided by Lehman, it displays the progression and development of one modern couples maturing relationship through multiple episodes that take course throughout their time together. In addition, by investigating these episodes, it is arguable that this poem is about a man learning to love a moody woman.