Superman and Me
In this short story, a young Indian lives a life without education and has striking contrasts from the lives we have currently. Alexie lives in a society where they were expected to fail in the non-Indian world, but Alexie refused to fail. Alexie’s discourse community did not encourage their children to receive education and this affects the community as a whole because their limited knowledge cannot support the community forever. Alexie shares this story of how he wants to be different and how much he desired to read. Similarly, for writing our papers, we could bring up a circumstance that limited our productivity and explain how we dealt with it because of how much our lives differed from our peers. We all have different stories to tell, and we do not have the same origin beliefs.
Mother Tongue
In this reading, Tan gives a piece of her personal life with her family and explains that her mother spoke “broken” English. Tan understood what her mother tried to convey to her even if it was not using the sophisticated English we currently use. However, not many were kind to her and criticized her for the way she spoke English. Tan would have to talk to other people in her place in order to cover for her mother’s “broken” English. Not all of our families have something this sort of circumstance where a child had to speak in place for their mother, so it’s important to bring that up because we do not all have the same experience. My experience is very similar to Tan’s case because I have to translate English into Cantonese just so that my parents could understand what the phone was trying to ask or for what the letter was trying to tell her. It isn’t always easy, and some do not have to go through these difficulties that make these experiences unique to write when we write our paper.