This post is kind of all over the place. It's just some things I was thinking about when I was looking over the reading again and some questions that came up for me.

I have enjoyed a lot of the reading for this month. One that I really enjoyed a lot was Mango. It was also pretty cool how the short story and the poem, written at separate times, tied into each other so well, as if they were meant to be a part of each other.

This short story was one of the first ones that we have read that has had a male narrator. The only other one that I can think of off the top of my head is M. Butterfly. It’s interesting that most of the novels and short stories we have read are written by women and have female narrators or protagonists. But that’s another conversation. There were some interesting points that were brought up in the discussion of this story in class.

When I started reading the story, after the page (like someone said in class) all of these images and words popped up in my head. It was as if there were trigger words within the piece that made me think of militarism and war prostitution and sex exploitation without explicitly stating that this was during wartime Vietnam. Since it is told through the lens of a child, the child is not going to know exactly what it means to be a prostitute to American soldiers in wartime Vietnam. The child refers to all the soldiers as his mother’s clients, clients he see in his home and outside the home. He also has a close connection to the soldiers because his father is a soldier and one of his mother’s clients. So in a way he finds these soldiers who come into his home both bothersome and intriguing. I know the discussion of whether the mother was a “good mother” came up in our class discussion, and for me that discussion was kind of disturbing. I hate to generalize, but it seemed like there were people who thought that she was not a “good mother” because she was a prostitute. I find it interesting that people can say that without acknowledging that being a prostitute sometimes (most of time) is not by choice. A lot of women don’t go into prostitution because they want to, but there are larger structures that force women into it. I don’t think that it’s okay to say that you prefer one son over the other to their face, but I also don’t think that should gauge whether you are a “good mother” or not. And another thing is is that I put “good mother” in quotes because I don’t know what characteristics constitutes a good mother. Is it what you see on TV where the mom stays at home and takes care of her children all day, cooks, cleans, etc.? Or is the mother in the story not a “good mother” because she is a prostitute? I thought it was interesting that the discussion went in that direction, to come to the point where it was said that she wasn’t a good mother because she was a prostitute. I guess I expected more, especially after reading about Korean comfort women and military sexual slavery during times of war. Obviously, prostitution/sexual slavery is not always voluntary, most of the time it’s forced.

And another thing completely off topic. I went to Manzanar on Saturday and at the evening program there was an opportunity to reflect on the day and the discussion a little before and we wrote down on a piece of paper for 5 minutes whatever was running through our mind, a train of thought exercise. After, people were given the chance to present their writings and some people chose to immediately make their piece into spoken word. They would go up to the front and perform their piece of writing, and some would perform it in the normative slam poetry way of being really intense. It just reminded me of what was brought up in class about how there is such a culture around slam poetry and a lot of spoken word (whatever that is) sounds the same. I couldn’t help but smile when I heard people acting the same way as the culture surrounding spoken word because we had just discussed it in class. It brings about the question of what is then considered to be spoken word and what isn’t included in that. Is only spoken word if it is presented and performed in a particular way? Why is it that people who perform spoken word feel the need to perform it in that way? It was just interesting to watch some people just read what they had written and others “perform” their piece.