Notes Of A Native Speaker Analysis

Are you a banana? Am I a banana? Can anyone be a banana? I wouldn’t consider myself to be a true banana, but I can still connect with other bananas. Eric Liu explains his personal opinion of what being a “banana” (Liu 101) means to him in his memoir, “Notes of a Native Speaker”. Liu’s thesis, in my opinion, was written as a revised quote previously foresaid by William Shakespeare. It read, “Some are born white, others achieve whiteness, still others have whiteness thrust upon them” (Liu 101). Liu goes on using examples, definitions, and narration to explain why he doesn’t consider himself and the other millions of people in America who have an Asian heritage to be a part of an indigenous class. In the end, Liu concluded in his memoir that because …show more content…
Examples such as: listening to National Public Radio, marrying a white woman, being a child of the suburbs, and vacationing in bed-and-breakfasts were considered to be the stereotypical things that white people seem to do. This was well written and humorous for me to read. It blended well with the transition to the next part of the memoir. This included a true story example that as Liu stated, “made me smile” (Liu 102). Liu explained that he found an old photograph of him when he was starting out as a freshman at Yale University. He took another stab at being humorous by writing about wearing all the wrong things in the photograph. He judged himself in the photo by writing the phrase “I look like I was: a boy sprung from a middlebrow burg who affected a secondhand preppiness” (Liu 102). He goes on to include how different he looked in his freshman year compared to his senior year at Yale. When Liu decided to write and include these personal stories, it practically shaped the rest of his …show more content…
He takes the story of when he found a photograph of him in his freshman year of college and compared it to another photo of him during his senior year of college to introduce the idea that “what happened between those two photographs is that I experienced, then overcame” (Liu 102). I believe that what Liu meant by this was that he went from being an introverted, nervous, shy guy to being confident, more experienced, and according to him, “more than a bit elaborate” (Liu 102). He comes back to this story throughout the memoir to basically explain that when people get put into certain situations it’s only partially because of “color” (Liu 103). It’s mostly because of their actions and behaviors put them in those situations, and it’s their actions and behaviors that will get them through those