Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice

Melissa Chow
1st June, 2017

              This week's reading was regarding the short story, "Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice". To be honest, it was really hard for me to follow the true meaning of the short story because I didn't learn a lot about Vietnamese War. I'm sure there were a lot of treacheries that could connect to the father's actions in the past and during the story. One of things I connected to previous readings was the fact that this was indeed a reading about family ties which a previous author was a bit critical of before. But anyways, there was clearly a lot of tension between the father and son in the reading. I felt the son was more of the stereotypical Asian American who, having been raised in a different environment from his family, does not empathize with his parents' struggles. That's what I think the main driving factor for the story was. The son just made assumptions for his father's actions and that kind of created this sour relationship between the two. I totally thought that the son really hated his father for abusing him. The fact that the son was hesitant to talk about his father in front of Linda (his girlfriend?) showed that the relationship between them made him uncomfortable. But I think eventually his writer's block forced him to look deeper into his father's past and that's where the title comes from. Like, the title comes from his father I believe. Particularly pride and sacrifice.