Example Of Essay On Birds Of Paradise Lost

In the book, Birds of Paradise Lost, the author, Andrew Lam goes on to portray the Vietnamese refugee community and their struggles of life. Truly, it is extremely contextual to find that this book’s every short story portrays food as a form of power. This goes on to invoke nostalgia in the stories. The stories deal with the thematic content of national identity. The author shows how humor is utilized as a way of coping with the hardships of life. Every character goes on to deal with the need of some type of reconciliation as the narrative progresses. The tragic stories work to portray the irrevocable alteration of the Vietnamese refugees as they deal with emotional issues. As such, one finds a story like Lover and Leather, where Mr. Le is shown to repair harnesses and other items in this sex shop while in the story Show and Tell, the young kid gets bonhomie and laughter in the school for the mispronunciations and broken phrases. Stories like Bright Clouds Over the Mekong and Slingshot have dialogues that tend to engage the readers. Close to the Bone and Step Up and Whistle show how a father struggles to raise his daughter in the new place. The stories by Lam delve deep so as to identify the key issue that shows how the displaced people refused to take themselves to be displaced. Lam pens in a story, “air smells of fish sauce and ground pepper” portraying the cultural shock of the character of the story, Mr. Le. Again, he pens in Hunger, “Eat and be resilient” signifying how food is the ultimate solution to poverty and alienation. Again in Yacht People, I found the expression, “eat the shittiest food” showing the cultural difference and issues of assimilation of the refugees. The stories decipher the issue of migration and cultural shock apart from the matter of assimilation into the new ambiance. While I was reading, I started to think about this thematic consistency as I went through the stories in the book. I figured out that the stories raise the issue of cultural identity and effects of displacement on the individual as I read the last couple of stories of the book.