(Michael Brigando) Alexie and Tan

Today’s readings have quite a lot in common with each other. Both “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie and “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan are both narratives of the authors’ learning english, whether it’s from a simpler form of English, or from a different language altogether. It’s fairly easy to assume that both authors, by having formal English as their second language, come from minority groups, and the audience learns that Alexie is a Native American, and Tan is Chinese by the end of each narrative.
I think one of the most important things to point out about both of these narratives is in the structure of the narratives themselves. They might both be about the struggles minority groups can face when taking on the American system, but they aren’t sob stories in any way. Both stories start out on a fairly positive note, and even though the struggles are mentioned, they aren’t emphasized in a way that says “feel bad for me”.
I think this point can really help us with writing our narratives in a fashion that doesn’t seem cliché. When one thinks of the structure of a narrative, they think that it usually surrounds the writer’s struggles, and how they overcome them to create the person the writer is today, and this can be true to an extent. But if you focus on said “negatives” too much, it becomes uninteresting, and could even show signs that you might not be fully over the fact that these struggles were present (in a psychological sense).