I D Want You To Love Me Viet Thanh Nguyen

Improved Essays
In the short story “ I’d Want You To Love Me” by Viet Thanh Nguyen, it is told in the point of view of a woman named Sa, also known as the professor's wife, who has been married to her spouse for over 40 years. Her husband suffers from a condition that is similar to Alzheimer’s disease which makes the sufferers lose their memories slowly. She is left with the tremendous responsibility to take care of her sick husband but, is often faced with the emotion of jealousy, loneliness, and isolation as her husband continues to get worse. Taking care of her sick husband is an expectation that Sa has taken on but unfortunately the responsibility of doing so has lead Sa to become mentally and emotionally exhausted of it. Love is a key factor for …show more content…
The mention of this person named Yen symbolizes the sadness, fear, jealousness, and loneliness within Sa because Yen can be anyone from a friend to a potential love interest before the arranged marriage they entered. The idea of a person who she is in love with and cares about is thinking about other women in his foggy mind makes her think that he cares more about this person than her. He mentions all of the memories of the time he was with Yen with fondness in his tone. “When he turned to her and smiled, she saw gumdrops of mucus in the corners of his eyes ‘ You loved those brown sugar cones, Yen. You insisted that I hold yours for you so your hands wouldn’t get sticky.’’ (118-119) is a repeated jab at Sa because it seems to her all he can think about is Yen and not her. This causes the burdens placed on her to increase because she knows that it is not his fault but the diseases. Therefore she unable to argue or bring it up to him because he would quickly forget and repeat the same action again. In turn, this decision causes her to keep it pent up inside herself again just for his sake. To add to the increasing stress her worse fear has come true when he says “ Oh? Your name isn’t Yen?.Then what is it?”(119) . The fear of being forgotten makes it even harder for her to believe that she is important to him. Sa is unable to explain the problem to him …show more content…
Her character is shown to have a lot of wisdom and knowledge on what love is supposed to be which is fueling the decision to stick with her husband. The traits that she loves is in her husband is also within her as well such as hard-working, reliability, responsible, and brave but these traits are responsible for the downfall of Sa life. She puts in a great amount of work into taking care of him because she believes that by doing so will negate the feelings she has throughs him now which are feelings of dread and frustration. When leaving her job she says “ When her shift ended at noon and she gathered her things to go home, she always did so with a sense of dread that shamed her. She made up for it … by preparing the house for emergencies with great energy, as if she could forestall the inevitable through hard work.(108)”. She takes these emotions and ignores them because she has a very strong sense of responsibility and love towards her husband, therefore, does not want to leave him in his time of need. With her sense of loyalty, she takes on the name of another woman at the end sacrificing her self-identity because the only way to stay with him would become

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Regardless of cultural boundaries, women around the world have commonly faced paralleling issues with regards to gender roles, identity, and cultural norms and traditions connected to their native homes. Despite the distance, such issues have affected women across various social ranks, ethnic groups, educational backgrounds, and relationship status. This goes to prove that no matter the region, culture, or background, women around the world have faced similar oppression and biased views based on their gender. An example of this oppression was represented in The Joy Luck Club and The Year of the Elephant, where the main characters, Rose Hsu and Zahra, overcome the struggles of subjugation and failing marriages to ultimately find their own strength…

    • 1727 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Letter in Life: the role of Pearl and Chillingworth In the corners of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, stand two fascinating characters—Pearl Prynne and Roger Chillingworth. Both of these characters are intimately connected with the protagonist, Hester Prynne, as her illegitimate child and her estranged husband.…

    • 1057 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    To live life to the fullest means to work, be joyful,to grow, to have power by means of standing one’s grounds, and to stay true to one’s self through all the hardships one encounters. By maintaining all these factors one can assure themselves a fulfilled life according to their standards and motivation in activities that symbolize who they are. However when one’s passions and state of mind begin to suffer by the hand of another, their mental state of mind begins to crumble, and in certain situations, crumbles hard and fast, leaving behind an almost irredeemable normalcy that once was. In ¨The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, a woman is not only belittled and ignored by her own husband, suffers from what she believes is mild…

    • 1508 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Comparative Essay The Yellow Wallpaper and The Story of an Hour both focus on themes of women in marriages feeling trapped and suffocated, while showing the effects of illnesses that become more pronounced through the relations to their respective spouses. Through personal observations and narratives the two wives in both stories express similar relations to both of their husbands, which is internal toleration. “And yet she had loved him-Sometimes. Often she had not” (SH).…

    • 1431 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Even if one were to suggest that their husbands, and situations were extremely different, it is important to comprehend that the feelings of a marriage unfulfilled and the feelings of imprisonment were indeed felt by both women. Both of these characters provide the reader with realistic insight into the problems that can potentially be faced within a marriage. Although both found unfortunate ways of escape for their imprisonment, it can be of extreme value to understand the struggle and experience of both women. For it is through these two women, that society may be able to learn constructive ways to cope and deal with complicated marriages and relationships and optimistically come up with a greater and more hopeful…

    • 1503 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Rohan Gajjar First year seminar Fall’17 Summer Read Paper “It’s What I Do-A photographer’s life of love and war” by Lynsey Addario is well written and briefly describes not just her life but also the life of the other photographers, journalists, the writers, the local interpreters, the militants and the victims of the war. She briefly describes how she was treated in a male dominant society in the middle east where the women are not allowed to work and they needed to be accompanied by their husband or a male companion all the time if they want to go out. They can’t go to school, neither go to work. They need to stay at home all the time and take care of their children. They can’t even talk eye to eye to any male and if they do so,…

    • 763 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the book, Krik Krak, a series of short stories, the author Danticat utilizes juxtaposition to create miserable characters that in return, create the overall mood of brooding throughout the book. The misery that the characters had because of what they went through, caused the mood of the short stories to be brooding. The terrible struggles that the characters had went through in Haiti had put them in such a dilemma. Haiti was in a state of great reformation and so it affected people negatively. Brooding is showing deep unhappiness of thought or in other words darkly menacing.…

    • 1326 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The unnamed wife in “A Sorrowful Woman” by Gail Godwin is a dynamic character because in her relationships throughout the story, she reveals herself as a woman is overwhelmed by the responsibility of having a family at the beginning of the story and changes into a character who is accepting to her duties at the end. Throughout the story the unnamed wife could not decide what path she wanted to take in life. The weight of starting a family started weighing down on here and it started to affect the relationship she had with her son and her husband. The biggest thing that bothered the woman was her son.…

    • 686 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Even though it helped the trouble in her marriage, it didn’t save it. She went on to divorce Jaimito and to follow her dream of becoming a successful sales…

    • 448 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Antigone Round Character

    • 259 Words
    • 2 Pages

    She is insecure and bitter towards her femininity. And her weakness followed her to the end, when she had hanged herself out of her own suffering during her ruthless punishment. Unlike our protagonist…

    • 259 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The narrator’s predetermined emotions were swayed, causing her to return back to her introverted nature. The author portrays this character as a naive character that is easily influenced by her emotions which is shown through her thoughts and actions. When the main conflict is introduced, the reader can depict the protagonist’s inner conflicts, her emotions towards her mother and how her character develops. The main conflict that the narrator is faced with occurs…

    • 485 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout the story, these elements give a sense of knowledge of what is to come at the end of the story and relate to why she feels selfless in her own life. As her husband thinks she has gone into a “rest cure” depression all she wants is to be free from control without being jailed within marriage. The fact that women had no control over words or thoughts during the mid-eighteenth century made a huge impact in this story of how she lost her mind in such writings her husband might of thought would work. During this time, this story was to rescue women from the “rest cure” by providing what happens…

    • 953 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The short stories, “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston and “The Storm” by Kate Chopin both portray the conflict between a woman’s family responsibility vs. personal desire. The leading characters, Delia Sykes in “Sweat,” and Calixta in “The Storm” both experience conflict dealing with personal fulfilment and social restraint in a male dominated society. Unlike Calixta, Delia is a faithful, married God fearing woman who diligently works to maintain the home. However, throughout the course of the marriage, Delia grows tired of the abuse she endures, and the love she no longer feels towards her husband. In contrast, Calixta, the main character is the wife and mother who fulfills her duties in her own time and manner, is unhappy and restless in her marriage…

    • 814 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    What Is Patriarchy?

    • 2057 Words
    • 9 Pages

    The Indian social system, with just a few exceptions, is dominated by patriarchy, which advocates male governance and female subordination. The better share has always been in the control of men and women have to be contented with the minor role and have to be restricted to the background. In this system, a woman is projected to mould herself in the pattern of the family into which she is married and ultimately fuses her identity with that of her husband. As Sudir Kumar Arora predicts: Inevitably, she becomes the shadow of her husband and follows him throughout her life.…

    • 2057 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Kapur Novel Analysis

    • 905 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Kapur brilliantly portrays Shagun as a modern, bold, and daring woman who fights against social norms for her own sake but in the process, her identity gets fractured which brings distress for her. Like all her novels, here too, Manju Kapur has given sensational beginning to the novel. Kapur opens the novel as following: January 1st, 1998, the couple lay among stained sheets and rumpled quilts, eyes closed, legs twisted together like the knotted branches of a low growing tree….Eventually they dragged each other off the bed and into the bathroom.…

    • 905 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays