announcements

1. Community Reflection Paper Due 11/12! • Papers are to be 3-4 pages long, typed, double-space, 12pt font, with works cited. • Students will briefly summarize the event they attended. Pertinent details may include date, location, sponsoring organization, occasion, and audience. • Students will relate the event they attend to any of the readings, overarching questions, and key themes of our course. • The two major questions to consider: How does this event present a sense of Asian American identity and community? How is it an attempt by Asian Americans to make home in San Diego? announcements

2. “He spread his hands wide open, and said, in Vietnamese, to anyone who could understand, there were things he had lost grasp of” (118) • “’I don’t understand you’” (119) • “’Do you understand?’” (122) • Can you ever understand? • Can you ever name a loss so large that it seems to swallow you whole? • “He made himself small” (122) the failure of language

3. Why is the father linked to the image of the bones of birds? (124) question 3

4. I stood outside, looking in through the open window. He looked small. I thought of the bones of birds. I thought of a prized pebble in my palm. I closed my hand into a fist and pressed it hard against my body. (124) the bones of birds

5. nu’o’c space & time (dis)locations

6. What are the settings of the last chapter and how could that explain why the author entitles it “nu’o’c”? question 1

7. “In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and ahomeland are one and the same: nu’o’c” • What experiences are beyond translation? • What does it mean when the word for “home” and for “leaving home” are one and the same? • Where is home? And what are the psychological repercussions when home is nowhere? nu’oc

8. Multiply shifting settings: • A day in Ba’s life – watching tv, picking up Ma, getting lost in his thoughts (156) • The days when the narrator’s brother died – Ma coping with the loss, narrator attempting to understand (136) • Narrator returning to Vietnam (154) • First spring in San Diego • Collision of past and present, Vietnam and San Diego • Why dislocate space and time in such a way? How does it relate to the epigraph, to the word “nu’o’c”? space & time (dis)locations

9. Why does Ba constantly consider the image of the woman on the news? Why does he want to go help her (152)? question 2

10. “It was these shots that stayed with him the longest” (128) • “He would drive to wherever she was and offer her his help, his hands” (157) • Loss as connection between Ba and those on TV • Wildfires in San Diego • Ambiguous conflict in Europe • The burning rice paddies of Vietnam • Ba’s response  universality of loss and necessity for compassion • Insistence on common humanity and dignity of all those rendered far away and foreign loss & universality

11. What is the final image of the novel? Why do you think the author chooses to end the story in this way? question 3

12. “As my parents stood on the beach leaning into each other, I ran, like a dog unleashed, toward the lights” (158) washing to shore