Show and Tell

         I'm starting to run out of things to talk about so I'm just going to talk about some of the literature that we have read recently. So far, I think my favorite piece of literature that we have read is Show and Tell. I liked that it was really simple and easy to understand but also had so much meaning and emotion behind it. We read in Takaki all about the wars and political conflicts in Southeast Asia but to see the effects of war on a little boy uprooted from the only home he has ever known and forced to attend school in a foreign country was really powerful to me. Reading about how Cao behaved in class, especially when he was taunted by the other students, really made the stories of the refugees more personal and more significant. I also really liked how the story showed how people from different ethnic backgrounds can resolve their differences, understand one another without a common language, and even become friends. Robert and Cao develop a sort of nonverbal communication (which, as we learned in class today, is high context) throughout the story and eventually Robert is able to tell the entire class how Cao is really just like any other kid. He grew up in a small village with his family. He attended school and had friends that he played with outside just like many of the kids in this class did. However, due to things beyond his control, namely war, Cao was forced to move away from his family and friends and become a stranger in this new land called America. This story really just made me think about how we often judge people before we really even get a chance to know them and how, if we just took the time to learn more about them before making our judgments, we might very well learn something in the process, and maybe even make a friend or two.