The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger The Author and His Times J.D. Salinger was born in New York on January 1, 1919. Salinger was the middle child of three, and the product of a mixed marriage between his Jewish father and his Irish/Scottish mother, which was not socially acceptable during this time period. In his youth, Salinger was not successful in school and was thus shipped off to boarding school. After boarding school, he attended university for only a year before traveling to Europe. After returning to the United States, Salinger sought another attempt at higher education. At Columbia University, he met Professor Whit Burnett, who recognized Salinger’s writing skills and greatly influenced Salinger to publish his work. Shortly …show more content…
The segments that depict the struggle between Lia’s parents and Lia’s doctors help the reader empathize with both the Lees and the doctors. This personal story also helps the reader explicitly see the troubles of cross cultural medicine. The segments that relate the history of the Hmong people help the reader to better understand the Hmong and the Lees: their beliefs, their values, their way of life. The Hmong’s historical tendency to immigrate or fight in the face of threat parallels the tendency’s of the Lees to fight the doctors’ orders or to ignore them altogether when they believed Lia was being harmed, which can only be seen through the flashes between the Lees story and the Hmong’s story. The author separates the two different stories by consistently switching off on chapters about Lia and chapters about the Hmong. This clear separation makes her novel easier for the reader to understand. Within the story of Lia Lee and her battle with epilepsy, the events are told in chronological order, from Lia’s birth up to when she became brain dead. However, the author does include flashbacks into the lives of Foua and Nao Kao Lee, Lia’s parents, which helps the reader to better understand them. Knowing about the Lee’s life as farmers in Laos, reading about their dangerous escape from the Communist regime into the refuge of Thailand and then their forced immigration into the United States is essential to conveying the author’s message about the difficulties involved when two cultures