What Happened Between Hai and Taoyu?

    Taoyu lives as two different people. Through his external appearance he lives as a promising young diver, but in his head he lives as a misunderstood teenager. Much of his life has been putting on a show. From a young age his whole existence centered around performing well at diving and never once did it center around his personality. To everyone else he was just a young athlete ready to be molded into the next star that coaches could take credit for. Leaving him to only be appreciated as a shell of a human. He has no room to emotionally grow, which leaves it all up to his mind. 

    Though never fully addressed where the root of his internalized homophobia comes from, Taoyu definitely expresses that he feels shame in his sexuality. Towards the beginning of the text it says “before each leap, Taoyu repeated a plea. That the water would cure him of his desires” and later on it says “Taoyu knew only that what he was feeling was wrong” (110,118). He feels perverted for liking his best friend, though his feelings are completely normal. Leaving his feelings to be bottled up in his head, a perfect recipe for a false reality. His crush on Hai as a person turns into a crush on the version of him in his head. He ends up feeling a much deeper emotional connection to Hai, than his best friend is able to to provide. 

    Neither Taoyu nor Hai is the villain in this story. Maybe there were some points where Hai could have responded better to Taoyu, especially when he found out his mother had died, but he simply had a different view of their relationship. Since Taoyu lived in head and Hai could not pick up on social cues at all, their relationship was never going to work, of course unless something changed. Taoyu cannot communicate through his words how he really feels about Hai and he depressingly watches him slip away. Hai on the other hand is unknowingly incapable of being what Taoyu needs. Taoyu cannot help being raised in an environment where he feels ashamed to express his sexuality and Hai cannot help being who he is. A sad, but realistic perspective of their relationship is just that circumstances kept them apart.

    Their relationship as a whole is a mixture of unrequited love and bad timing. We will never know if Hai ever had feelings for Taoyu so it is hard to label this as unrequited love, but there were definitely one-sided feelings involved. Circumstances were not on there side, but honestly this is not surprising considering it was a queer love story. Heterosexual love stories do not face the added layer of homophobia. Since we know the most about Taoyu, it is clear to see that he was not comfortable with himself or his identity. He appeared to grow up under the belief that he was sexually immoral for liking boys. All of these aspects culminate in a sad story of failed relationship. 

Grief and Memory

 The Significance of Grief

Q: What is the significance of memory in this story of grief?

In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “Black Eyed Women” a major and consistent theme is grief. The narrator herself is a ghostwriter for other tragedies. Her job is to listen to the memories from survivors and turn them into books, all while hiding her name from the public. Victor Devoto, a client of the narrator, is the first example of memory and death merging together. As the narrator puts it “his body there but not much else” (2). Though Victor survived the crash which took his family, his mind is still stuck there. You would hope he could find happiness in the memory of his late family, but his grief consumes him only leaving him stuck with his final memory with them. A sad, but common place where grief and memory coexist. I believe Viet Thanh Nguyen connects grief and memory through other examples like this. The main death’s in this story are abrupt and unexpected, the family did not have time to prepare, therefore their memories of their loved ones get stuck and only focus on the day of their death rather than the life they had before. 

The narrator sees the ghost of her brother the same way she remembers the day he died, though it is clear there is a difference in the pain he is experiencing. As described on the 7th page, she sees him bloated, pale, wearing the same clothes he passed in, though at this point his body shows the effects of time. His brother's ghostly body still exudes the smell of the sea where he was left and the smell of the boat where his life ended. The narrator and the ghost of her brother have not confronted one another since the day he died, which illustrates why he appears to have stayed the same. Her vision of him is consumed by the way she last saw him. 

Evidence of this theme is even more heavily placed on her brother’s transformation. There is a change in him when there is a shift in their relationship. I personally view it as acceptance of his death, which the narrator was unable to accomplish before. The change begins small with her replacing his clothes. The narrator is particularly stuck on the question of how he died and she lived, a form of survivor’s guilt. That question fogs her brain and has kept her in a cycle of unrest. Her brother’s final visit is what frees them both. He can move on as he is no longer stuck in the memory of his death and the narrator can accept her brother’s and regain the connection they once had. It is his final answer which seals this freedom, “You died too, you just don’t know it.” (17). The narrator finally has the answer to work through her grief and finally accept what happened to her family. 

Grief is a difficult thing to deal with and I really like how Viet Thanh Nguyen approaches it. He is able to so eloquently describe the different stages of grief, specifically acceptance. Acceptance is not equal to being okay with death, but instead from this story we can gather that acceptance is the ability to move forward. The narrator will never be okay with her brother’s death, but she has now accepted the change in her life allowing her to move on. 

Being Friends

The circumstances of Ronnie, Mini, and Caroline’s relationship may not be relatable to our reality, unless someone has actually summoned a spiritual mother before, but Alice Sola Kim provides a really great story about teenage girls and friendships. She takes away the stereotypical teenage girl tropes and just allows her characters to each be their own person. Their trio is not perfect, they all have opinions of one another that they keep in the back of their mind. For example they always drop Caroline off first to talk without her, they refer to Mini as “a total bitch” for being sharp, and Ronnie is judged for her inability to be open with the rest of them. They still all love one another though, they still care. Their differences do not manifest as conversations behind each other’s backs, but rather in their own thoughts and analyses of one another. It is their differences which made the friendship dynamic work to make a refreshing take in the world of highschool friendship stories. 

        The friends are all different which creates some awkward interactions. There are moments where they seem angry at one another or that they do not fully like one another, but Alice Sola Kim does a great job of encapsulating moments of joy in friend groups. These memories that will stick with them for the rest of their lives even though their friend group has ended. It is incredibly realistic for highschool friendships to end, just as middle school and elementary friendships ended, but it does not mean that those happy memories disappear.  At the end of the story the girls return to where they first met, though in different circumstances. Mini and Caroline think that “maybe, bringing it all back full circle would help” (71). They recognize the memory they had before of them all laughing together about an inside joke. There is no great reunification of the girls, but it gives an overall sense that it was worth it for them to have once known each other.  

One of the best lines in the story is “She once loved them too, you know. Then her mother turned our head and we walked away” (71). This sentence clearly shows the new change in Ronnie. With the mother now partially animating her, she has a double consciousness. One which is her teenage self and one which is an adult. The mothers advice eventually leads her to turn away from her friends and it gives insight into how we may reflect on our friendships as we get older. The mother has a broader outlook on Ronnie’s life, and we may never know whether or not it was a good decision, but the mother obviously felt as though Ronnie’s childhood friendships were meant to be a memory of the past. Ronnie loved the Mini and Caroline who did not know the truth about her, but now because too much has changed it is hard to picture rebuilding. Ronnie built her friendships on an already unstable foundation of guilt and shame and that is what eventually led to the downfall. Neither Ronnie, Caroline, or Mini could ever see each other the same after participating in summoning the mother. 

The significance of having good, realistic depictions of teenage girls is so society overall will see them with more depth and that young people themselves can find something to identify with as they navigate their own relationships. Ronnie, Mini, and Caroline are normal. They are not hypersexualized, their femininity is not part of a punchline, and their interests are not made fun of. They are just teenagers trying to understand themselves. Their circumstances may not apply to everyone, but at the core Alice Sola Kim provides us with ideas of friendship that are realistic to our reality. 

The Downfall of Aristocracy

An aristocratic family appears to be its own world. The idea in which wealth and status run through the blood. The determination of superiority comes down to who you were born to. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Roderick Usher and his sister are the last pieces remaining to their bloodline. They live within the horrors of isolation, which is in part due to their status. Pressured to preserve the remaining memories of his family, Roderick confines himself to only the world of his family. Paranoia and anxiety control his life. He shows no indications of outside relationships, though at any point he could have pursued one. Almost as if he and his sister are confined to a preternatural force which prevents them from venturing out of their world. Aristocracy fuels an environment of isolation which cannot stand the test of time. 

    The Usher’s were unsuccessful in keeping their image. The narrator recalls a time where the Usher’s presented the prestige of a high class family. They had been known displaying themselves “in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity,” (Poe 178). The Usher’s former days play into the illusion of greatness which aristocracy puts forward. Hereditary ruling becomes inconsistent overtime, with generational leaders changing. One era may be filled with prosperity, but the next in line could completely change the story. Though children born into aristocracy are given the access to the highest forms of education, there lies a complete disconnect between the ever changing society and the isolated family of nobles insistent on keeping their blood pure. In the case of the Usher family, it seems they were stuck in the past. The people outside of the Usher grounds continued to grow. The people labeled inferior to them in the aristocratic system are not catastrophically ended when the house falls. Yet from within the story, the death of Roderick and Madeline appears apocalyptic. 

The visual of a crumbling mansion described in the beginning of the story presents the perfect picture of decaying aristocracy. A mansion usually will show all the signs of wealth. Bigger than other homes, it boasts its status to its community. The Usher estate however, gave a different impression at the end of its life. The narrator recounts “an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn,” (Poe 179). The mansion was filled with anxiety and decay just as its inhabitants spiraled into the end of their life, along with the end of their family. Limiting wealth to hereditary status led Roderick and Madeline to their grim fate. The Usher home ended with the same dramatic fate as the remaining siblings. Madeline brutally escaped being entombed hanging onto the last string of her life to then go and collapse upon her brother killing him. The house experiences the same collapse ending only to be left in fragments at the feet of the narrator. 

Madeline and Roderick represent the scraps of aristocracy. The Usher family once proved noble, but generations passing and the pressure to have a line of direct descent led to their demise. The Usher’s fell victim to isolation. They were the isolated wealthy class, who lived in their own world within their mansion. The world around them developed, but they were too distant to keep up. Roderick and Madeline were left to live a life of paranoia and disease, confined to their family's legacy in the name of status, tradition and purity. Aristocracy in this story represents more than just background information of characters, it is villainous. The root of the Usher family's success eventually turned on them when put against the test of time.