Birds Of Paradise Lost Essays Examples

Andrew Lam is successful in showing his readers the amount of hardship that can thwart the well-being and happiness of people of the society in his seminal literary work, Birds of Paradise Lost. Here, the author engages in showing the lives and struggles of the Vietnamese refugees who were compelled to come to a new land for survival. The author intriguingly uses food as a type of power in the stories of the book. The main characters are challenged to comprehend their identity and are left to embrace the new culture somehow so as to survive in the new place. The element of humor in the stories makes things all the more intriguing for the readers. The characters fight with the problems of life with a dash of humor to ease them off. All the while, the characters try to reconcile with their identity and self being placed in a new culture and ambiance. The stories can be holistically taken to be very tragic in nature as they show the problems of the characters and their struggle to overcome the issues. One finds the story, Close to the Bone where a father tries to cope with the challenges and bring up his daughter. Again, Show and Tell has this kid who is laughed at in the school for his linguistic incompetency. Another man merely survives working in a sex shop as shown in Lover and Leather. The time went quickly because the stories were all very intriguing and engaging in nature. While I was reading, I was moved by the vehemence of struggle of the characters portrayed. There are expressions like “eat and be resilient”, “air smells of fish sauce” and “shittiest food” that show the recurrence of food in the stories and the association with culture and identity. These expressions show the cultural shock and the power of food. I finally understood that food worked as a cultural marker and also as a trait of cultural identity of the Vietnamese refugees in the book. I figured out that all the stories point to the struggle of the characters to establish their identity and ethnicity after being displaced.