The Jacket By Gary Soto Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The Jacket By Gary Soto - Essay Example There were some kids who would call me names like geek and make fun of my eyeglasses all the time. The unsolicited public attention and other people’s opinion made a significant impact over the way I felt about myself. There were times when I felt really angry for being different from other children. Other times I pitied myself for being left out of the crowd. All I ever wanted was to be accepted by other people for who I am. After spending some time coming up with reasons for why other people thought of me differently, I realized that the lenses of my old pair of eyeglasses were even thicker than the glass of our aquarium at home. I decided to convince my mother to buy me another pair of eyeglasses made of thinner glass and black colored frames. While I was growing up, receiving a new pair of fashionable eyeglasses was always on my wish-list. As my father passed away while I was in elementary school, our income was not sufficient to financially support the daily needs of my family members. Aside from me being the eldest, I also had six other siblings my mother was taking care of. Because of financial limitations, I had no other choice but to understand my mother’s situation. For almost five years, I wore my old pair of eyeglasses everywhere I went. Due to a lack of other options, I had to face the humiliation of wearing my old pair of eyeglasses to school. During the five years I forced myself to wear my old pair of eyeglasses, I managed to accept the fact that I needed to feel comfortable in them even though they had made me look down on myself for some time. Because of my desire for acceptance, I pretended as if nothing really bothered me. By cleaning my old pair of eyeglasses without even looking through the lenses, I acted as if I was wearing cool and unique eyeglasses. When I reached the eighth grade, my large blue rounded eyeglasses started to blur

First they killed my father Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

First they killed my father - Essay Example The memoir named ‘first they killed my father’ presents to the reader the history of khamer rouge terror in Cambodia through the story of a little girl from Phnom Penh who expresses the story in dreams and nightmares. In the beginning of the story, loung belongs to a family of three sisters and three brothers and life seems to be in good shape. Their father works in a good government office and their family is wealthy. In the whole book, the writer uses the theme of dreams and nightmares to bring out the clear insight in the understanding of ‘the terrible descent the family makes during and after the revolution in Cambodia’. She explains the experiences of her life as a child with minimal exaggeration and hence brings out the picture of the situation perfectly. During this period, the government is overthrown, their life gets to a turning point and the family is forced to move to a camp where they live with food rations and fear. Loung begins expressing the situation by a dream about food on New Year’s Eve and imagines about the death of a teenager named keav and dreams about the coming back of her Pa. In her dream, she views herself sitting alone on a table that is filled with all the types of foods she desires but she says she is afraid that the Khmer soldiers will take her food away(Ung,2000). In this dream, she passes the knowledge that in this period, the issue of food shortage is rampant and she explains that there are many deaths due to starvation. This kind of information from the memoir takes the readers emotion making the source more effective since the knowledge is more memorable (Howell & Prevenier, 2011). The memoir is written from the first person perspective and she draws the reader’s attention by the way she d escribes the struggles and pains that her family is going through. Memoirs can therefore be a good source of historical information since the person describes situations that