This week, I am writing about the reading Mango by Langworthy. The first impression I received even before I started reading was the author’s name. His last name is very interesting. I do not know where he got that from. After reading a few pages into the story, I found out that his mother was a prostitute and he does not know who his father is. Since he does not know, I assume that he just made up that last name. However, there may be a meaning behind the last name.
I decided to write about this reading instead of Rico because the content of this story is very interesting. It talks about life of two little kids living with their mother who was a prostitute. It was about how they lived back then. I was about how his mother made a living out of everyday prostitution. I am not trying to say that prostitution was a bad thing back then. Sometimes, people just had to do what they had to do to survive.
I found that it interesting how the children know about the nature of his mother occupation but they do not have any action about it. They did not feel angry neither embarrassed about what their mother did for a living. Maybe it is because they were exposed to it on a daily basis that it seemed normal to them. Maybe it is because she had to do it to feed her children. They even found it funny to sneak and watch their mother serving the clients which I found disturbing. However, they were good children. Obviously because the author grew up into a writer whose writing we are reading right now.
I do feel curious about what the author actually thought when he was a child about his mother. However, what seemed odd to us was not to him. Instead, he was always more curious about his father because he has never seemed him. I would be too if I was him. On this matter, I believe that it is possible that even his mother did not know exactly who their fathers were. If you imagine how many clients that their mother served in a year, they number would be insane. Back then they did not have good contraception, especially in Vietnam which was at war.
The last passage of the reading was particularly beautiful as there was a moment of truth which came to the author that is – time. “I knew time as the moments Sa and I roamed the streets and harbors… Time was when we peeked through the cracks… Time was the number of water drops plunking into cistern… Though I didn’t know how to read the moving hands, I knew that it was a gift, that the watch was mine.” (Langworthy 236) When he talked about the “gift”, I believe that it was not the watch that he was talking about. Time was his gift. His childhood was odd but beautiful; it was the best gift to him.
Although this week's reading is related to the Vietnam War, and I am from Vietnam, I didn't write about the war. Instead I do have a trailer from a movie called We Were Soldiers which I would recommend to anyone. Obviously the movie presented the history with a little bias (that is - the US soldiers were far more superior to the Vietnamese soldiers), it was still a good movie:
Well at least we still "own" the French though lol, just kidding:
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