Weekend Task

As far as general topics/themes that I see Diaz and Hong Kingston writing about, one is familial relationships - the families of the narrators in both stories (especially in the Yunior stories for Diaz) are of extreme importance to the narrator as a character and to how the story unfolds. Another theme is race/ethnicity - how it impacts the lives of the characters for better/for worse. Also, the theme of gender roles is definitely present, especially the complex roles of women. Lastly, poverty - how people deal with it, what they do in order to get more money. So although White Tigers and Drown are superficially very different, they do cover some of the same themes.

Angles/approaches... for Diaz, he slips in some of the most important themes in very sneaky places, but for some of them, very frequently. Take poverty, for example. Yunior tells us repeatedly how poor he and his family are, and yet it is rarely the focus of the moment. And since we hear about it so often, we become a little desensitized to how awful it truly is. This goes for some of the other themes too, like how frequently Yunior mentions his dad's violent behavior. Diaz makes us grow accustomed to these things. Maybe because the characters in the book have lived with them for so long, they've gotten used to them too?

Hong Kingston's angles and approaches are a little different. She talks about many of the main themes with a sort of... passive quality, which contrasts drastically with her harsh words in the Afterword. Unlike the characters in Drown, Hong Kingston's narrator expresses little distaste at her role as a woman or the way her family treats her. We don't get much of her feelings/ideas regarding those main themes really at all. It's like the narrator is sweeping them under the rug - maybe Hong Kingston is trying to show that this is what people like her have to do.

Prompts:
1. Write about the nastiest thing anyone has ever said to you and how you responded.
2. Write about the kindest thing anyone has ever said to you and how you responded.
3. Write about something that someone in your life has always expected you to do that you either intensely like or intensely dislike doing.
4. Write about your most prized material possession and why it matters to you so much.
5. Write about the physical feature that people most often identify you by.

FFW
I have particular interest in the topic of familial relationships. I have a pretty interesting family that I think might be interesting to explore in writing. I'd want to work on thinking about not only how my family affects me, but also how I affect them. I think I've always thought about the former more, so in turn it'd be nice to think some about the latter. Also: how have they propelled me forward in my life? How have experiences with certain family members differed from those with others? How has my family affected/altered my outlook on life?
I also think poverty - or more widely social classes - might be interesting too. I've never been poor like the characters in Drown, but being middle class, for as long as I can remember, I've always taken special interest in visiting the homes of my rich (or superficially so) friends. And I've grown up with a group of pretty wealthy opera folk. This could be intriguing to unravel. Particularly, how has being around people like that affected my opinion of my own life? How has it made me feel? How has it made my parents feel?