When the Emperor Was Divine #9

Although this story is about a Japanese-American family who had to relocate to an internment camp it has a lot to do with the idea of the American dream.  The family in the book had lived in the United States for many years and even raised the children to speak only English because they wanted to become known as American citizens.  Most of the people of Japanese descent had well paying jobs and lived a very American lifestyle.  They admired the culture and all they had always wanted was to be recognized as members of the American lifestyle.  The American dream is to have a good job, live in a nice house, and be recognized as someone who is well respected and successful.  The family in the story makes a decent income and lives in a nice neighborhood in a regular American community.  The only part of the American dream they were missing was that they were not recognized as members of the country and they were looked upon as less than the white citizens.  When the relocation signs were first posted around town a man ran into the boy in the family and asked him, "Are you a jap or chink?" The fact that he asked him where he was from using crude language shows the lack of respect he had towards the boy's ethnicity and treated him as if he were less of a person.  I believe the author is trying to say that sometimes it takes more than money and a nice house to achieve the American dream, and that if people don't respect you than it is hard to feel like you've achieved the American dream.  When talking about the history of the United States people rarely mention the hardships that Japanese-American people had to go through.  People usually refrain from mentioning any events that have occurred in our society that are now frowned upon.  If anything this story could help people see what it was like for the Japanese and how it is morally wrong to generalize a whole race of people just because the nation is in panic mode. 

When the Emperor Was Divine #3

The animals in this story play a significant role in the lives of the family and have a lot of meaning behind their presence.  The white dog in the beginning let the reader know that the Japanese relocation was a very large part of the lives of the three main characters and showed how their possessions would not necessarily belong to them when they got back.  The woman killed white dog because she knew that the dog would live a very poor lifestyle for the remainder of his life, and wanted to put him out of his misery.  The dog and the pet bird that was set free represent the sacrifices the family had to make due to the law that was enacted.  The act of killing white dog also revealed the nature of the mother and how she was very stoic and in a state of some sort of lost hope.  A short while after she had already performed the deed her son was calling the dog's name and she did not respond.  The author said, "She was cutting apples."  The woman showed no sign of any emotion and just continued to prepare for the move.  The reoccurring theme of horses throughout the novel have a different meaning to the characters.  The horses mainly play a role in the boy's life and not so much in the lives of his mother and sister.  Since the boy was younger, when they lived in the horse stables, he had a distinct fascination in them and seemed as though he even had some sort of bond with them.  On the train the boy really wanted to see wild horses running around freely and untamed.  "He watched the horses as they galloped toward the mountains and he said very softly, 'They are going away.'"  His reaction to seeing the horses was one of awe and inspiration.  The boy almost wanted to be like the horses where he could be free and not have to be told where to go and where to live.  The horses also symbolize how the Japanese were treated like animals in the way that they were held in captivity like the horses in the stables, because they themselves had to live in horse stables.  The turtle in the book was another animal the boy could relate to.  They were both forced to live in some sort of a box and were dependent on somebody else in order to live.  The turtle was neglected by the boy and was forgotten to the point to where it died because it had not been fed enough.  The boy and the other Japanese people at the camp were also neglected by the Americans and treated below reasonable standards.  Everyone at the camp was just like the turtle in the box only they were remembered enough to be fed.

American Dream?

I do not believe that this is supposed to be a story about a girl achieving the American dream or anything close to that.  When people speak of the American dream they are referring to becoming successful and owning a house in a nice neighborhood.  Precious never really ends up successful at the end of the story she is just in a better position to become successful than she was at the beginning.  I see this as a story of both hope and despair, but not strictly one or the other.  This is definitely a story of hope because she starts out living with parents who abuse her and treat her like a slave.  She also starts out with very little education and no incentive to learn.  Throughout the book she learns to read and write, she learns that she plays a major role in the life of her children, and she builds relationships with people her own age and has a positive role model in her life now that Ms. Rain is her teacher.  When Precious speaks of her baby Abdul she says, "I'm gonna make sure your smart when you grow up." She says this because she feels that she is stupid and wants her children to become educated and to not be like herself.  By the end of the book she understands that she can amount to something as long as she stays on the right path.  This is also a story of despair due to the fact that at the end of the book nothing is really resolved.  Precious still lives at the halfway house, she still hasn't scored high enough on the test to get her G.E.D., and she has H.I.V. Throughout the whole book it describes how she was abused for her entire life, and ended up getting H.I.V.  The ending is not too hopeful because even though Abdul's life will be better than hers, she still has a hard life ahead of her and will most likely die within a few years due to the disease she contracted.  The ending is bittersweet because there is more hope than there was in the beginning, but there is still a lot of despair and doubt about Precious. 

Identity

The first time Precious gave birth she was far too young to be a mother.  She really didn't understand what it meant to have a child, and did not know anything about being a mother.  Precious did not even help raise her fist child because she was not ready to have her own kids when she was still a kid herself.  At this time period in her life she was completely unaware of who she was and did not really have her own identity.  Precious was basically another product of the environment around her.  When she was sixteen years old she had another baby only this time she was slightly older.  Even though she was only sixteen, her view of having a child had been altered.  She came to realize that she needed to raise her children better than she was raised by her parents.  Throughout the novel, Precious grows to realize all of the things that are wrong in her life and wants to start changing the outcome of her future.  She begins to want to learn how to read and write in order to be able to read to her baby and allow her child to become more intelligent than her in the future.  Her main goal is to raise her child in a better environment than the one she grew up in.  Becoming a parent basically made her motivated to learn and caused her to mature a lot because now she realizes that her children need a better mother than the one that raised her.  Even though her mother beat her and treated her like a slave for her whole life, and her father raped her since she was seven, Precious almost seemed to have forgiven them.  After Precious began doing well for herself at the new alternative school she enrolled in, she said, "I don't hate mama. I don't hate Karl neither." She specifically says that she does not hate her parents even after all of the years of abuse.  I believe the reason Precious does not hate her parents is due to the fact that she has now matured more than they ever will.  She realizes that they are a product of the way they grew up, and even though what they did was wrong, that is how they were raised as well.  By experiencing severe abuse as a child she now knows exactly what not to do when raising her children.  Precious can use her knowledge of abuse to allow her children to have better lives than anyone else in her family.

Push

In the beginning of "Push" it starts out with telling the story of how Precious had her first child at the age of twelve.  The fact that she was twelve was the first shocker in the book.  It turned out that the father of her child was her own father, and he had been raping her for years.  Her mother would also beat her all the time and treat her like a slave around the house.  Due to the harsh nature of her upbringing she wound up very uneducated and was far behind her class at the age of sixteen.  All of these events are supposed to show the reader the harsh reality of the lives of some people who are born into poverty and deprived.  Precious is supposed to represent everyone who were abused and left uneducated and eventually left to become almost nothing in the eyes of the world.  Because of the way Precious was raised, and because of the cruelty she was shown as a child she herself became cruel and mean to the people around her.  She said that in school people would yell at her and call her names because she was so tall and so big.  She grew a distaste for most of the people in her life simply because no one had ever shown her compassion.  She also had a very low self-esteem and this is shown through her when she talks about how she knows she's nothing, and she agreed when people called her stupid.  Frankly she never thought she would amount to anything because nobody ever told her she could be anything if she tried.  Precious basically grew up with all of the wrong morals and wasn't even sure of what was right or wrong.  Not only did she not know how to treat other people, she also did not know how it felt to be treated with sympathy.  During her first pregnancy, a doctor was acting very nicely towards her and she said, "No man was never nice like that to me before."  It is crazy to think that the first time anyone was nice to her before was by a man who was only doing his job.  This captures how deprived she was as a child and how warped her view on the world must have been.  In the very beginning she seems like she is a tough bully of some sort, but in reality she only acted that way due to her appearance.  She was actually a sensitive girl who did not know what to make of the things that had happened to her in her life.  Precious is one of the many abused victims of society who are lost because of their mistreatment, but she is also one who understands she is lost and wants to find her way.

Fun Home

Alison Bechdel focuses on the theme of sexual confusion and coping with it within a family and society.  The father in the family is always shown as a very feminine man who had a strong interest in gardening and decorating the house.  He was also very concerned with his own appearance regarding his clothes and his appearance at public functions.  He would mask his true identity by making it seem as though he were just a regular father with a wife and family.  In reality, the father was not entirely sure of his sexuality but found himself attracted to men his whole life.  There had been signs of his double life ever since Alison was a child, but she was unaware of it until she was around 20 years old.  He was especially interested in teenage men and would hire them as baby sitters or landscapers in order to try and hit on them.  He would even go on trips to visit with young men while his wife knew what he was up to the whole time.  Alison's father was very distant from her during her childhood, possibly due to him being unhappy with not being able to be himself because he thought society would not accept him.  He would use Alison to help him decorate or clean the house but other than that he did not pay much attention to his children.  When he died his family all agree that it was a suicide, and it was most likely because he could not deal with being someone else in order to be accepted.  Before he died he and Alison had a connection where they both talked about their homosexuality.  He admitted being afraid of not being accepted by saying to Alison, "There've been a few times I thought I might have preferred to take a stand.  But I never really considered it when I was young."  This shows how at one point he had thought about coming out but instead decided that he would not be accepted for who he was.  From a young age, Alison became interested in very masculine things and acted almost like a boy.  Her father would try and force her to dress more like a girl should but she never really liked dressing like a girl.  I think he did this because he used to dress up like a woman when he was young and did not want his daughter to be like him.  When she went to college she discovered that she was a lesbian.  She told her parents and neither of them severely disapproved, and her dad even said, "At least your human, we should all experiment."  He basically accepted this fact and they even bonded because they had something so big in common.  Although it was not long before her father died when she found out he was gay, they talked to each other more in that period of time than they had in their lives.  They finally seemed to bond and understood each other more than anyone else.