In Response to, “Ngo’s Day In the Life”
This article follows a California inmate whose family has
immigrated to America from South Vietnam. The story follows him for an entire
day as he vocalizes his thoughts on his imprisonment, family, grief, worry and
others. To me, it seemed that the two most repetitive ideas conveyed by the
inmate were the grief he felt whenever he would add time to the sentences of
other inmates and the constant dilemma that his parents immigrated to America
in order to give him a better future to escape a life of imprisonment, when ironically,
their son must suffer through a life of imprisonment. Could this “American
Dream” be behind his grief in knowing that by extending a fellow inmates
sentence, he is just adding to the dismal thought that they are not living up
to the reasons behind their immigration? Either way, the inmate still feels the
grief and seems to almost blame his parents near the ending of the day. He
compares his parent’s visits to him in prison as if they are praying at his altar.
It seems to me at this point in the story that he has internalized the thought
that his father escaping a life of imprisonment in South Korea has caused him
to become a scapegoat and is almost a martyr for his father. The final part of
his day is a dream in which he is participating in the Vietnam War and is
killed by his father. There is definitely more to this than what I am
interpreting, but is this him truly blaming his father for his empty life in
prison?
Aaron Handa
Section 002
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