University:
Whitman College
Course:
ENGL-200 | IIntroduction to Literature and the Humanities
Academic year:

2021
Views:

97

Pages:

1
Author:

Alma Stephenson

To Speak is to Blunder Response I found this article interesting in a way I could both relate to and sympathize Li. When she starts off to describe her dream as “nothing extraordinary” except for one thing: the women she talked to spoke in English. She begins to explain how this is very peculiar. She proceeds to compare herself to Nabokov. Like him, she felt her mother tongue was just a part of her and she did not want it to define her. She explains later in the article, that other Chinese immigrants would be disappointed in her English because it wasn’t “native” enough. Other writers would just tell her to give up on English because it wasn’t her native language anyway. She didn’t care. Throughout the article, I found it interesting how she describes her experiences with her suicide attempts. I found this odd because you would think to be immigrant that you would want a fresh start, not an abrupt ending. Nonetheless, she describes having morbid dreams that would take her back to Beijing. When people would ask her about her home, she says she could form a “meaningful answer.” (186)

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