Hot Dogs and Wild Geese

Pg. 10
“At an age when most parents are guiding their kids toward independence, my mother was hanging on to me for dear down.”


In Children of the River, Sundara is the person that the whole family goes to because she knows the most English. But Soka also didn’t like that Sundara seem smarter than her even Soka was older. She feels that she should guide Sundara rather than the other way around. When I was younger and even sometimes now, my parents would go to me if they needed help understanding English. Whether if it was reading letters, writing letters back, making calls, I was the one to guide them.


“I always encouraged my mother to learn English, but her talents lay elsewhere. Since she had never learned English in school, she had no idea of its grammar. She would speak entire paragraphs without verbs.”


This is different now because they offer English classes in other countries. I know this because I have cousins in Vietnam that were taking English as a class like how we can take Spanish, French, Latin or American sign language as a second language. It’s hard if you don’t try to learn English in America because it could lead to a lot of misunderstandings and no valid communications. Like in Children of the River, at the beginning of the book where they received a letter and took it the wrong way.