Have you even had a pain which you want to escape from? In Tan Le’s Ted Talk, her mother escaped from Vietnamese by a boat during the Vietnam War. Her mother has a pain which make her suffer a lot. She says “My mother suffered from nightmares all about the boat.” She scare and fear about lives of the boat. She doesn’t have any ways or idea about how to flee from the pain. In Birds of Paradise Lost, written by Andrew Lam, he shows how Vietnamese immigrants escape from their pain though humor, denial, and suicide both during and after the war.
Lam uses the humor to show readers how the immigrants escape from their pain in the story,“Yacht People”. For example, “When Americans say maximum capacity is forty-five, Vietnamese automatically add a zero to it.”(130) Maybe the readers think it is funny that Vietnamese add a zero to the maximum capacity, but it is what the narrator’s pain is, which is he …show more content…
Mr.Nguyen tries to deny his pain. “His mind goes blank. He trembles a little. He wonders who’s crazier, he or his cousin?” (87) His mind goes blank because he thinks himself already forgot or denied this pain, which is very awful. This pain comes back to his mind when his cousin asks him to tell his story on American TV. In addition, he thinks it's crazy that someone want him to share his story. He is trying to repudiate his pain or history. He doesn’t want to think about it, and he thinks time can help him to overlook his pain. “ ‘I will tell a little but not too much,’ he says in a whisper, “but please, not much.”(90) When he says it, it is not says to his cousin or the reporter. It is tell to himself that he is trying to convince to himself that he doesn’t have to think it back. Even though he agrees to share his story to others, he doesn’t want to tell a lot because he doesn’t want to think back what he experienced on the boat. He tries to escape his pain by decline to believe this