First 10 sentences of vignettes

        The best memories were those with my family. Like the old fishing trips, crossword puzzles, and holidays that brought us all closer together. I am now eighty years old and have had my share of memories.

          I began writing letters to my wife since marriage counseling before I married her when we were young, and am writing one now. It seems that you would run out of new things to say to your spouse, but I don’t. I have written her a letter for every holiday, birthday, after every fight, and just when I want to make her smile. By going back through them, I have noticed they have gotten better every time that I wrote one. So far, there are 201 letters, each exceeding 3 pages long.

“Tom, it’s time for your medicine,” my wife announces as I hurry and write at the bottom: ‘You know I love you to the moon and back, Shirley. Love, Tom” and slipped it under the bills. I really dislike taking my medicine; I have to take it every day and multiple times a day.

JLC: The Twenty-six Malignant Games Summary

Rules of the Game
Waverly Jong goes to a Christmas church party and everyone receives a gift; she got a lifesavers box and her brother Vincent got a chess set. This chess set was used all the time by her and her brothers and she ended up getting very good at the game and then her brothers stopped playing against her because she would always end up winning. While Waverly was walking past their neighborhood playground, she spotted men playing chess and took one of them, named Lau Po, up on a game. This man showed her all the tricks he knew and she joined competitions, winning every one of them and her mother finally started acknowledging her skill for the game. She became a national champion. 


The Voice from the Wall
Lena St. Clair lived in an apartment with her family. While laying in bed, she always her screaming and yelling from the neighbors next door; she always convinced herself that the woman was beating her daughter to death, and when she would see the girl the next day, she would tell herself that she is back again. Lena's mother became pregnant and later had a miscarriage after complications and her mother later admitted that this was the second time that she had killed a son of hers. Lena felt bad, but not as bad as she felt for the girl next door. She secretly found joy that they were more miserable than she was.


Half and Half
Rose Hsu becomes nervous when she has to confront her mother and tell her that her and her husband Ted are going to get a divorce. This triggers a memory of when Rose's family was at the beach a while back and Rose was instructed to watch her younger brothers. One, named Bing, ventured off and was going to their father who was fishing in the sea, while the other two stayed back and were playing around. The boys started fighting and Rose's mom told her to watch them and in those few moments that she was away from Bing, he was swept out by the sea and never to be found again. Everyone made up reasons why it was their fault and the guilty mother and Rose came back again to look for Bing, but they couldn't find him. Her mother proves a point that fate is "shaped half by expectation, half by inattention", which is why Rose think that Ted sent the request for divorce. Rose looks at her mother's bible, rarely used, and looks to the back where her mother had written a list of deaths and under it lied a name, "Bing". 


Two Kinds
Jing-Mei remembers back when she was a child and her mother wanted her to become a child prodigy, like a Chinese Shirley Temple. This want involved harsh piano lessons and make up artists. Jing-Mei had a performance and she completely did not care about it and only liked how she looked in her hair ribbon and new dress; she screwed up the piano performance and her mother was very disappointed in her and realized that she didn't want it like she did. After the performance, Jing Mei thought that she would be done with piano forever, but she wasn't and her mother still forced her to do it. After much resistance, Jing Mei asked why she had to and her mother responded, "There's two kinds of daughters. Daughters that are obedient. And daughters that have their own mind they follow. And in our household, there's only an obedient daughter." Jing Mei was surprised and later when her mother died, she remembered what she said and she took home their old piano and remembered all the notes and played it perfectly.

SAT Vocab Sentences

1. I ran to the drinking fountain due to the fact that my mouth was arid.
2.The assiduous woman adopted the puppy because she loves animals and she felt bad because no one else wanted the puppy.
3. We ran to an asylum because it was hailing outside and our car broke down.
4. The benevolent boy always had a smile on his face after he performed a caring act.
5. The camaraderie between the two women was so strong because they have known each other since they were in grade school.
6. The teacher censured me for hole-punching my paper; they like it untouched. 
7. A clairvoyant person can claim to know what day their mother will die. 
8. The coach yelled at the team and told them that they need to learn how to collaborate; adding that there "is no I in team." 
9. The young man showed compassion towards his mother when he held her hand for months in difficult times.
10. The short road trip ended up being circuitous because my uncle had no idea which city he was in.

Cry: the Beloved Country Coded Passage

Passage:

Jarvis sat, deeply moved. Whether because this was his son, whether because this was almost the last act of his son, he could not say. Whether because there was some quality in the words, that too he could not say, for he had given little time in his life to the savouring and judging of words. Whether because there was some quality in the ideas, that too he could not say, for he had given little time to study of these particular matters. He rose and went up the stairs to his room, and was glad to find his wife not there, for here was a sequence not to be interrupted. He picked up the Abraham Lincoln and went down to the study again, and there opened the book at the Second Inaugural Address of the great president. He read it through, and felt with a sudden lifting of the spirit that here was a secret unfolding, a track picked up again. There was increasing knowledge of a stranger. He began to understand why the picture of this man was in the house of his son, and the multitude of books.Key:

        Repetition
        Symbolism
Blue text is 3rd person
        Imagery
Underlined is longer repetition
Red text is alliteration
       Odd diction/wording

Cry: Gender Roles

Alan Paton develops gender roles in his novel Cry the Beloved Country through typical societal sexism. He demonstrates these roles through the characters in the story. A man's job in society is much different than that of a woman's. Men owned businesses, "His brother John, who was a carpenter, had gone there, and had a business of his own in Sophiatown, Johannesburg" (36). This expresses that in society, it is a man's job to own businesses and to do the "dirty work". A woman's job is to serve everyone around them, without complaints. Women wear dresses and men wear pants, "...I has meant it for your new black clothes, and new black hat, and new white collars" (40). It is usual for a man to wear these certain outfits, for it is fairly abnormal not to. Gender roles discussed by the author differ from those of South African society. In South African society, gender roles do not matter, meaning that both men and women do the same type of work and wear the same type of clothing.

Power in LOTF vs. The Power of One

Power is shown in Lord of the Flies by William Golding and in the movie The Power of One. In Lord of the Flies, the character Jack is in control of the other boys in the tribe. He gains this authority over the others by tempting them with his unusual theories and exploiting them through their universal fear of the beast. Jack maintains this power by threatening the boys and trying to prove his strength and leadership skills. He does this by showing support and adventures. This power structure is destroyed because the conch shell breaks and all civilization is gone. In The Power of One, the older boys at the Nazi camp have control over PK. These boys take control over the young one by coming to the realization of their size differences, considering how they are the biggest at the camp and he is the littlest boy there. They remain in control by continuously hazing PK, such as peeing on him and killing his chicken. The power structure in this situation is destroyed during the chicken scene when the adults come in and demand them to put PK down.

LOTF Symbolism Passage 3

In the third passage, symbolism is shown through Henry’s footprints. Golding wrote, “His footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.” In this citation, the “they” that the author is referring to is the creatures that swarmed the sand areas where Henry’s footprints seep down. The boy felt an incredible sense of power when he distinguished the fact that he could place his foot down freely overtop of the bugs, without them saying anything about it. It is his footprints that brought him this sense of power. Well aware that power over the boys wasn’t attainable, Henry enjoyed this unordinary over ruling of things. This feeling has been sought out by the boy ever since he came to the island. 

Elements and Effects-Passage 1

The point of view that Golding uses for the first passage is in third-person. "He snatched his knife out of the sheath and slammed it into a tree trunk. Next time there would be no mercy. He looked round fiercely, daring them to contradict. Then they broke out into the sunlight and for a while they were busy finding and devouring food as they moved down the scar toward the platform and the meeting" demonstrates that the third-person is indeed present in this passage. Writing this passage in this point of view is vital in order to set the scene as if the audience reading it were one of the boys. The effect of this is to make the readers more emotionally connected to the book in order to captivate them.