Mrs. Gianola
UW 240
30 March, 2015
Masks, Journey of Identity Discovery
Would you agree that stubborn, weak, and trivial are some of the ultimate descriptions that women have been described as throughout the ages? Born in 1973, Dao Strom is a Vietnamese American writer who used roughly of her own personal experiences to produce the fictional novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof. This story is about a young troubled Vietnamese women, Tran and her family as they struggle to resettle in a rural city in California. Their fight for an identity and acceptance of questionable cultural norms by society is one of many the mystifying immigrant experiences many others have faced. Throughout this work of fiction the author writes the perspective, experience …show more content…
An example of this comes when the extended family together and the author described their appearance and behavior as such, “All this adornment, all these mourning accoutrements-to me, it was as if our relatives had put on what they thought were the adequate masks of grief (pg. 119 Strom)”. Here, the clothes and makeup are referred to as adornment. The word adornment, suggests decoration and excess which is the opposite of the notion of wearing jewelry and fine clothing as a sign of respect. Further the expectations of society are described as masks suggesting that the folks of the same society where merely putting on a show because they were fearful of society assuming, that they do not know how to properly behave and respond to this social and climatic …show more content…
“A world of Asia, the book was called in his mind the title coincided with the landscape of the movie, dark jungle and greenish mounds of mountains shaped like large reptiles backs at the edges of murky waters (Pg.134 Strom)”. This quote reflects the character falling into the making of stereotypical inferences and connections to a geographic area with which the character has a muddled history. There are many aspects to Asia than the forests of Vietnam. The frame of reference reflects how individualized and narrow sometimes a person’s view can be of a particular place with which they have an emotional history with. In this same paragraph there is a discussion of movies which reflects the psychic consequences of cultural displacement because movies reflect one perspective of a history and that perspective is usually highly dramatized and eccentric. This dramatized stance of a situation is reflective of the other events and themes in the book where characters strive to exaggerate their feelings and appearance to try to fit in and project their place in the