5/4/3/2/1 NOTES # 6

5) *At this point, Mai is boarding an airplane heading to Hartford, where they-she and her uncle- would head to the house in Farmington.

*Before Mai left Saigon, it had been "hit by rockets several days before" (94). Perhaps this could have provoked the final decision that the family made of coming to America besides the other fact of education.

*Mai did not know any political activities going on in her country because she was thirteen when her mom first told her that there would be no debacle, but the opposite happened.

*"A communist victory was practically inevitable and preordained as early as 1973, when South Vietnam had had to sign the Paris Peace Accords under considerable American pressure."(95). This quote shows us the history behind the Vietnam war and also help us to better understand the novel because it becomes a historical context.

*During most of her childhood and juvenile life, Mai was completely into a world dominated by her mom as she explains in the quote, "mine was still an unimpaired world in which my mother's words were the complete truth.

4) *Why is this novel going like back and forth?

*How is it that Mai is now coming to the United States again?

*How involved was the United States in the Vietnam War?

*What is the Paris Peace Accords?

3) *Debacle: catastrophe.

*Tarmac: black top.

*Hum: whine.

*Stillness: motionlessness.

2) *Simile: "People sat like scarecrows in their assigned seats" page # 96

*Metaphor: "the red apricot glow of rocket fire still glued to the far end of the sky". Page # 96

1) Right now Mai apparently has going back in time and has started to tell us the story of how and why she came to the United States. Nevertheless it got me confused when she just changed setting from one chapter to another, but this change of setting wasn't only of radical places but radical time.