ipl-logo

Inside Out And Back Again Quotes

835 Words4 Pages

Having to leave your loved home is hard for everyone. In Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again, For 10-year-old Kim Ha flees Saigon she feels the same emotions. War forced her family to flee to America to find a loving and strange new place. Kim finds a new family to guide her through a new journey despite new struggles and hardships. Thesis: In Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again Kim Ha’s thoughts and actions show her resilience and spirit. In Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again Kim Ha’s thoughts and speech prove that she is a spirited person. When Ha first arrives in Alabama she sees cowboy and immediately thinks positively about how nice and amazing he will be. In the text “I love him immediately and imagine hi to be good-hearted …show more content…

After a long day of school, Ha feels she is limited to doing things and hates this fact and feels she is good enough to do whatever she wants. In the text, “I HATE BEING TOLD I CANT DO SOMETHING BECAUSE I'M A GIRL”(Lai, page:214). What this quote shows is that Ha hates being told stuff because of the way she looks our her background but, even when being told things she proves to be confident and resilient and can do whatever she sets her mind to. This quote truly shows how she is resilient because she proves to everyone later on in the story that she can learn English, she can adapt to a new life, can make friends, whatever she sets her mind to. Furthermore, Words can hurt especially means one’s from other people but Ha is fed up with this and decides to turn the tables. In the text, “My heart lifting , I run and shout bully, coward, pink snot face”(Lai, 219). What this quote shows is how Ha will bounce back even with the things said to her or what has been in her life that has caused difficulties or challenges and no matter what kind of these challenges happen she will never back down in fear and accept that life is full of challenges and that she needs to learn from them, especially in her new life. This quote also shows how Ha does not let uncomfortable things stick with her and no matter what they are she will let them go and not worry about

Show More
Related
1263 Words | 6 Pages

”(Lai,1). Ha is also a very rebellious person when she is living in Vietnam because in Vietnam she directly defies her mother. Also when she defies Mother it isn’t one little disobedience it is Ha defining her religion and her culture because it is something her culture does. And finally Ha in Vietnam is comertable as show when she regularly goes to the market alone and how at her school she feels very compatible, because she bullies the other girl who had her desk. “I used to like making the

Read More
937 Words | 4 Pages

In A Viet Cong Memoir, we receive excellent first hands accounts of events that unfolded in Vietnam during the Vietnam War from the author of this autobiography: Truong Nhu Tang. Truong was Vietnamese at heart, growing up in Saigon, but he studied in Paris for a time where he met and learned from the future leader Ho Chi Minh. Truong was able to learn from Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary ideas and gain a great political perspective of the conflicts arising in Vietnam during the war. His autobiography shows the readers the perspective of the average Vietnamese citizen (especially those involved with the NLF) and the attitudes towards war with the United States. In the book, Truong exclaims that although many people may say the Americans never lost on the battlefield in Vietnam — it is irrelevant.

Read More
930 Words | 4 Pages

This evidence shows that Ha’s life changed to dependency reversal, which means that she became independent, by translating into a  language she’s not fluent in at that time. Ha had to rely on herself and help her parent out at a young age instead of her mom helping her out. This case was similar to other refugees. Transition Sentence:   The experience was intense knowing that she was independent which is the same for other

Read More
970 Words | 4 Pages

As the L.A. Times reports, “Until recently, the county’s most visible Asian cluster was Little Saigon, once-sleepy central distract transformed by Vietnam War refugees into a bustling shopping and dining destination.” By working together as a community, the Vietnamese managed to overcome their social barriers and achieve great successes in Orange County, which was an amazing feat for a refugee group that started out with nothing. Little Saigon is a reminder to the Vietnamese Americans, of a history and story of a people who lost their homes, families, and dignity and came in 1975 to get it all back. It was a place where successful people willingly scrubbed toilets, pumped gas, and washed dishes came to reclaim their lives. As Quach Nhut, now a prosperous pharmacist in Westminster, listened to the Fall of Saigon on the radio while he was in the refugee camp, said, “I thought Saigon was lost forever.”

Read More
569 Words | 3 Pages

Nguyen Phan Que Mai does an excellent job of portraying the struggles of families during the Vietnam War within her novel, The Mountains Sing. Within the novel, themes emerge regarding the way in which one may overcome devastating events. Symbols in The Mountains Sing are used to convey that a dependable family can withstand any capacity of hardship. This allows the author to emphasize

Read More
1292 Words | 6 Pages

Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.

Read More
439 Words | 2 Pages

Many people fled because it was too dangerous, and it was not safe and their lives were in danger. All of Voung Thanh’s father's, brothers were lucky enough to escape all at once but Voung Thanh’s father was not lucky enough to escape, he had tried to escaped 7 times but he was jailed twice. The first time that he jailed was for six months and the second time was for one year he payed money to get out of jail. In 1984 Vuong Thanh’s father, left Vietnam he was on a small 8m long and 3m wide, unseaworthy boat with fifty other people crowded in it.

Read More
419 Words | 2 Pages

The message Thanhha Lai is trying to convey in the poem “Saigon is gone” is that the event was chaotic causing the people to fearful and distressed. For example, when Ha and her family are on the ship taking them to America a helicopter flies above. Ha describes, “People run and scream, communists!” (68) The author used specific actions to infer the people were scrambling in distress, because they’re fearful their lives will soon end.

Read More
1109 Words | 5 Pages

She faces racism, discrimination, loneliness, and, over time, a growing sense of love for her new home. Ha’s life is turned “inside out and back again”. Before Ha had to flee Saigon, she was headstrong and selfish, but she was also a girl who loved her mother and couldn't wait to grow up. She wanted to be able to do something before her older brothers did it, and do it better. But most of all, Ha wanted to fit in, to be liked.

Read More
813 Words | 4 Pages

Regret is a powerful emotion that has the ability to scar someone for the rest of their life. Moments of regret can come from relationships, self-made decisions and life changing events. The idea of regret also applies to “A Marker on the Side of the Boat” by Bao Ninh and “On the Rainy River” by Tim O’Brien. Although these two literary pieces are very different in many ways, both authors describe the experience of the Vietnam War as a time of regretful decisions that negatively impacted people of both the American side and the Vietnamese side. Both authors tell a story about a character that recalls of flashbacks of the war, where they grieve over the past decisions that have affected them for the rest of their life.

Read More
1307 Words | 6 Pages

“Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” Nam Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” is categorized in “ethnic story” narrated his Vietnamese life in order to meet an upcoming deadline even though finally he can’t submit his story because his father burns his work. Throughout the story, Nam the narrator talks about “the past” which he experiences when he was young including the recent experience that he has got from his father reunion. Not only does the story tell us about the past which, but it also shows a connection of time between past, present, and future. Likewise, the story shows the relationship between son and father which is the main theme of this story; and shows how the past is important and affect to them differently. Also, the story of the past could lead to the end of the story that can be interpreted like a prediction of the direction of their relationship in the future.

Read More
1402 Words | 6 Pages

The narration beautifully illustrates the struggles of being pushed into a foreign world, where people look different, have other traditions, other norms, and speak an entirely different language. Based on her own childhood experiences as a migrant from Hong Kong, Jean Kwok tells the story of young and exceptionally intelligent Kimberly Chang who finds herself doing the splits between a life in Chinatown, wasting away as a sweatshop worker and living in a run-down apartment, and striving for a successful career at a fancy private school. Kimberly translates herself back and forth between a world where she can barely afford clothes and a world where, in spite of her intelligence, she 's supposed to look the part as she reaches for higher education. It is a tale of survival and beating the odds, but ultimately, it is also a fragile love story in an unforgiving environment. The narration is raw, honest, and authentic, with the Chinese culture being cleverly woven into the storyline.

Read More
972 Words | 4 Pages

In Duong Thu Huong’s Paradise of the Blind, Hang has been placed on a path of self-sacrifice and duty by her family. Her life unfolds in stages- childhood, young adulthood, and her eventual role as an exported worker in Russia. With each of these shifts in her life comes a shift in setting and a shift in her emotional state. Hang’s changing emotional state depicts her “coming of age” and her growth as a character. Setting is important to creation of shift in the novel, and is often described in detail.

Read More
897 Words | 4 Pages

In both the film and short story, the characters go on a journey with hope for a better future. In The Boat, Mai was sent away from her home in communist Vietnam in hope for a better home and new life. After the war North Vietnam dominated, they started controlling the south and introducing their communism and forcing people to comply with the new rules. Mai’s father was sent to a re-education camp where he was forced to become a communist.

Read More
702 Words | 3 Pages

In spite of the tribulations mentioned prior, refugees lives will turn “back again” as they commence to feel a sense of normality once they have attained the skill to become resilient towards said tribulations. Resilience channels itself in many forms, such as standing up to a tormentor. This is how Ha becomes resilient when she attains the intrepidity to defend herself against a tormentor that attends her school, which she denominates as”Pink Boy” due to the actuality that he is an albino. This young man has ridiculed Ha predominantly for her physical appearance, which has humbled her to a significant extent. The tormenting involved verbal derogation and invasion of personal space.

Read More

More about Inside Out And Back Again Quotes

Related Topics

Open Document