"Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" ~Nam Le

My overall impression of "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" by Nam Le was that it has stuck consistent with other short stories that we have been reading in this class because of its asian origin.  We have read many other short stories that are either written by a person other than of American heritage, or involve foreigners somewhere in the story.

The first part of the story that immediately jumped out at me was on page 6, "I'd told Linda only the previous night that he was coming.  We were at her place  Her body was slippery with sweat and hard to hold.  Her body smelled of her clothes.  She turned me over, my face kissing the bed sheets, and then she was chopping m back with the edges of her hands."  I usually find excerpts or scenes like this really interesting and fun to read, which is probably it ultimately stood out to me. However, the subject matter of what is actually going on in the scene (she is giving him a massage) is different from what I actually thought was going in initially (intimacy).  The way that Nam Le begins the scene with his description of her slippery body that is hard to hold because of sweat leads the reader to believe that intimate relations are happening, but then it turns out that she is really just turning him over to give him a back massage.

The second phrase that I connected with was on page 14, "Southern-style shredded chicken salad, soaked in vinegar and eaten with spotty brown rice crackers."  Although this is an extremely random sentence to trigger my thoughts, the whole reason I kept thinking about this was because of "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town".  The whole story was about a fried chicken joint in China and here we are talking about southern fried chicken in another asian story.  I also found it ironic because the more that I thought about it, I realized that a lot of random chinese restaurants will sell fried chicken.  It made me curious as to why this trend exists.

The last excerpt that stood apart from the rest was on page 16, "There were bodies on the road, a baby ith only the bottom half of its head, a monk, his robe turning pink.  I saw two bodies with the ace of spades carved into the chests.  I didn't understand it.  I my sisters didn't even cry."  First of all, the imagery here was excellent, despite the fact that it was forcing me to picture brutally disturbing things.  I thought it was purely awful that the Viet Cong did such things and do not understand how the human race can be so ravage and heartless.  I was also very confused as to how his sisters were not crying and that people were spitting and laughing.  Personally, if I were to see such a thing, I would absolutely be scarred for the rest of my life and would most definitely not be laughing.

Vocabulary I was unfamiliar with:
defeatism: a person who expects or is excessively ready to recieve failure
consecration: to make or declare
attenuate: reduce the force, effect, or value
connex boxes: portable containers
eddies: circular movements of water