Ghosts By Danticat

In the article "Don’t blame the eater" written by Zinczenko, he argues that fast food is the main reason why so many teenagers are suffering from obesity in United States. He explains that many companies will use advertisements to deceive customers. For example, a company’s website offers a chicken salad with less than four hundred calories per serving; however, they don’t label everything that the salad has In the first label. They will use separate labels in the products that the salad has on it, so the costumer gets confused and thinks that he is actually eating a four hundred calories salad that is "healthy". However, he is actually eating a seven or more hundred calories meal.

In the poem, All The Dead Boys Look Like Me, Christopher or Loma Soto uses literary devices to develop the theme of feeling hopeless because people like you are hopeless. The speaker of the poem is a queer person of color. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker states “Last time I saw myself die is when the police killed Jessie Hernandez/ A 17 year old brown queer// who was sleeping in their car.” Soto uses a metaphor comparing the speaker to Jessie Hernandez because they are a part of the same community. Jessie Hernandez was shot due to their identity, which helps illustrate how the entire community is targeted when one person is making it difficult for most to believe they have a future.

After reading the novel Twisted, written by Laurie Halse Anderson, I have become more aware of how different emotions and attitudes that people have can positively or negatively affect how they’re viewed by society. Furthermore, an individual’s attitudes and actions can also change their perspective of the world and the quality of their life. Early on in the book, we are introduced to the main character Tyler, who is an emotional, unpopular, and insecure seventeen year old senior who is hoping for things to change. Throughout the story, we follow his emotional rollercoaster filled with his thrilling highs and devastating lows. After researching astrology signs and their true meanings about specific traits, I have decided that Tyler fits within the Cancer symbol.

Dave Schultz, 1984, wrestling Olympic gold, two years later, dead, right outside his car. FoxCatcher, is a non-fiction novel, which takes place in the 1980s. The book, is written by Mark Schultz, and David Thomas. The author, and the brother of who the book is about, teamed up to produce a novel, and a later film of the chaos that lead up to Dave’s death.

Have you ever thought about how difficult it might be to go into a different country knowing absolutely nothing, not even language, and something horrific happened to you or anyone in your family?  Don’t you think you would feel so powerless, so helpless, so clueless? This happens commonly and it has never had any attention brought to it, at least not until 1998. Anne Fadiman wrote a book entitled, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. This demonstrated a collision of two complete opposite cultures, but they both have the same goal to help the child get better.

On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling was fatally shot by Blane Salamoni, a Baton Rouge police officer, in a convenience store parking lot. Salamoni was responding to a call about a man brandishing a gun and thought that Sterling fit the description of the suspect. However, when Salamoni arrived at the scene, he immediately became violent in his use of force on Sterling. Body camera footage shows Salamoni “slamming him into a car; twice ordering the second officer, Howie Lake II, to use his Taser; and threatening to shoot Mr. Sterling with a gun pointed at his head” (Fausset, 2018). Also shown in the video is Sterling doing his best to follow Salamoni’s orders although he was being pushed around by officers for the duration of the encounter.

Imagine being captured and trapped in a camp, in North Vietnam, for six years filled with days of brutal torture and agonizing boredom. In Leo Thorsness’s novel, Surviving Hell, Thorsness and his fellow soldiers found a way to not only survive, but to thrive. Through numerous events and experiences, the soldiers survived by utilizing any means possible, both mentally and physically. It was their hope and optimism that kept them going. This can be seen when Thorsness plots his walk home.

The Spirit Catches You ​The Spirit Catches you and You fall down centers on Lia Lee, an epileptic Hmong Child who is caught in-between care of her loving parents and the responsibility of her caring doctors. Her parents are traditional Hmong’s who are hesitant towards American medicinal methods compared to Hmong traditional methods. While on the other side stands her American doctors, who were educated in American Universities and are for the most part are very much against treating Lia with anything besides the practice they’ve been educated on. This paper will first provide a short summary of the book which will mainly include the Hmong involvement in the Vietnam War. Followed by two anthropological concepts.

The spirit catches you and you fall down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures by Anne Fadiman illuminates the dilemmas, as well as barriers, persons of various cultural backgrounds can encounter daily, specifically when residing in a foreign habitation of different practices, perspectives and beliefs. This book highlights the difficulties one family must face during a clash between Hmong family cultural beliefs and western medicine. Fadiman (1997) brings our attention to these harsh realties that one can encounter when persons are unintentionally culturally incompetent through sharing the story of the Lia Lee and her parents, Nao Kao and Foua, who look for guidance from western doctors to assist their spiritual

The Power Behind “Just Walk on By” In Brent Staples article “Just Walk on By”, Staples shares his thoughts on the way marginalized groups interact. He uses his own experiences as a young African American man to shed light on how people can have implied biases that affect the way they treat other people. Staples does this to demonstrate how society develops preconceived notions in the minds of individuals about marginalized groups, primarily African American men, which are often a flawed representation of the people within these groups. The rhetoric he uses is key to developing an understanding persona and an emotional appeal that exposes the implied biases of people without alienating or offending the audience, to whom-- among others-- he attributes these biases.

In the song “Stand Up” by Cynthia Envo she says, “So I'm gonna stand up, take my people with me, together we are going, to a brand new home, far across the river, can you hear freedom calling? Calling me to answer, gonna keep on keepin' on”. In this song lyric, Envo shows that she is going to fight for her rights until she possesses them. To maintain self-respect and pave a path for future generations it’s crucial to stand up for what you believe in.

I need my monster, by Amanda Noll, is a fiction story about a boy named Ethan trying to find a new monster since his usual monster named Gabe was on a trip to go fishing. The author uses concrete language and sensory detail to describe Ethan’s experience. On pages 4-24, of I Need My Monster, Amanda Noll’s description of the sounds and sights of the monsters helps the reader understand what their personality or looks are like. Amanda Noll shows the personality of the monsters through the use of concrete language and sensory details. Noll describes the sound of Gabe as, “His nose whistling.”

On September 11, 2001, tragedy struck the city of New York. On that fateful day, two airplanes were hijacked by terrorists and flew straight into the twin towers. Each tower fell completely to the ground, taking thousands of lives with it and injuring thousands more. Not only did that day leave thousands of families without their loved ones, it also left an entire city and an entire country to deal with the aftermath of the destruction. Poet, Nancy Mercado, worries that one day people will forget that heartbreaking day.

In the short story “Red Cranes”, by Jacey Choy, the author describes Mie as a young girl who has big dreams. Choy describes Mie’s feelings about her father hearing some red cranes and was very upset that her father had not woke her up. In the short story “The Firefly Hunt”, by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, the author describes Sachiko as a young girl who is determined to accomplish things no matter what it took. Tanizaki describes Sachiko’s excitement about finding fireflies.

Finding one passion could be tricky. Sometimes we confuse passion with skills, passion is something that you do and enjoy no matter how tired or even if it doesn’t make you a millionaire. Skills are something that you are good at but you don’t enjoy, one will continue on this path because we need to pay our bills. This doesn’t make it right or wrong but we should be happy with ourselves doing what we enjoy.