Inside Out And Back Again By Thanhha Lai

Great Essays
Inside Out & Back Again
This report is based on the book Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai. A
Historical Fiction based on the war that happened in Vietnam in the 1950s to 1970s. A story about a family that is fleeing their country, Vietnam because of the war. They went to the United States to seek refuge. Published by Harper Collins Publishers and was a New York Times Bestseller. The book also won several awards including National Book Award and Newbery Honor Book Award.
Kim-Ha is the 10-year-old narrator and main character living in Saigon during the
Vietnam War. Ha is named after Vietnam's Golden River (Kim Ha), a place her father and mother once strolled in the evenings. She is the daughter of her mother and father and also has three
…show more content…
Miss Scott is Ha's new American teacher. She had no idea how to help Ha to settle into her classroom. Mrs. Washington is Ha's neighbor. She helped Ha to understand English becoming her tutor and supporter. Pam and Steven are the first to be nice to Ha in her new classroom. Pam becomes Ha's friend, giving her a gift for Christmas and supporting her when things are rough. Pink Boy is Ha's rival when she moved to her new school. The pink boy always bullies Ha. He always gave Ha a hard time. Titi was Ha's best friend back in Saigon. But she had to flee the country leaving Ha alone in …show more content…
Her father is in the army while her mother is a tailor. She has 3 older brothers. It was Tet, Chinese New Year in Vietnam. The Vietnamese celebrate this holiday to bring luck to their family for the whole year. The oldest boy must wake up early and bless the house by stepping his feet on to the carpeted floor. Ha wanted to do it instead she woke up early and placed her foot into the carpeted floor. The day after Tet they went to the fortune teller. The fortune teller said their lives will turn inside out and back again. In the distance, bombs explode like thunder. They decided to flee Vietnam because they knew it's not safe anymore. They escaped by a ship going to Guam. There they were questioned on where do they want to go. One soldier came up to them and said that the United States offer scholarships and better services for them. So her mother chooses to go to the United States. They went to a refugee site in Florida waiting for someone to adopt

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    It was written about the Vietnam War. Walter Dean Myers was a war veteran who enlisted in the war at the very young age of seventeen and wrote about his experiences. He thought enlisting in the military would be a better way of life and give him a way out of his current life he wanted better for himself and that is why he made the choice he made. Myers was in the military for a total of three years. His book basically reflected his experience, a few things where changed slightly like the name of the characters.…

    • 943 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    She also comes back to getting used to new foods. When Ha is bullied at school she wants to hurt someone, then Ha used Pink Boys strategy and used her words to fight. When she calls Pink Boy names he is astonished. “Bully! Coward!…

    • 1257 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Proyecto Argument Essay

    • 461 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Her husband was taken outside and shot. She escaped to Kenya and eventually came here, but her three children remain at a Kenyan refugee…

    • 461 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Racism is embedded into essentially every American institution and is nurtured by people who have racist predispositions. Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me, writes “the ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out” (Coates, p. 28).…

    • 2399 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    She “seemed fascinated by it” and by the time she adapted to it, she had “a sudden new composure, almost serene” (O’Brien Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong 93). As she became more involved and interested with the war, she wanted to explore and see what else the land had to offer. Unlike the other men, she had a desire to learn about the Vietnamese people and how they lived; this lead to her living the way everyone else did in the bush. She no longer used her cosmetics, “she stopped wearing jewelry,cut her hair [wrapping her hair] in a dark green bandana”(O’Brien Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong 94). She was allowing the war to become a part of her, which unmasked a new person that was molded by the war.…

    • 1028 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    She was one of four children but she lacked the attention she needed for her other. After giving birth to…

    • 1495 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Careful analysis of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and Harold Moore’s and Joseph Galloway’s “We Were Soldiers Once… And Young” reveals two markedly different portrayals of the United States’ army during the Vietnam War. This change mirrors the dwindling optimism of the American people from Moore and Galloway’s account of the 1965 Battle of la Drang and O’Brien’s more comprehensive account of the later stages of the war and post-war period. While O’Brien, Moore, and Galloway all served extensive time in Vietnam, their portrayals of the American military differ in tone and narrative.…

    • 1990 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    American culture often associates war stories with masculinity (Boyle, 2011). However, the Vietnam War affected a wide variety of people: American men, who served in combat, American women, who served as nurses, as well as the Vietnamese, who lived in the area and saw the effects of war every day (Kazemek, 1998). Reflecting this is a growing body of work that adopts alternative perspectives to tell war stories (i.e. nurse, child) (Kazemek, 1998). Tim O’Brien, in his The Things They Carried, describes the Vietnam war through the traditional perspective of a combat male, he represents Martha, Mary Anne Bell, and women in general as taboo or dislikeable objects (Barden, 2010). Martha, Lieutenant Cross’s girlfriend, is labeled negatively in the novel via the obsession with her virginity and purity (Smith, 1994).…

    • 555 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    (Lai 147-148) Clearly, Ha doesn’t want to learn the language, but she forces herself to, so she can eventually stand up for herself. This shows she is trying to adjust to her brand new environment. After being refused help by the butcher, Ha’s mother stands up for herself, “She has me ask the butcher, Please grind our pork.... Motions us away....…

    • 900 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The story revolves around O'Brien's first time killing someone. He feels such shame over the occurrence he even writes the story in third person. He negotiates his confusion and feelings by creating a fantasy. He copes with the shame by imagining the man's life as is he never died. O'Brien imagines the Vietnamese soldier is a student like him, has morals such as he does, just going to war to please to country and fulfill a patriotic duty.(O’Brien 121)…

    • 827 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Vietnam war is well known in the world for its brutality. And there are an abundance of stories to this day about the war. One of these stories is called The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, give his point of view of the war, as an American soldier. Similarly, another text about the war is called Salem, by Robert Butler, a Vietnamese soldier giving his point of view of the war. Both of these texts explore the ideas that killing someone isn’t easy, even in war, also that war impacts soldiers and people not only physical, but emotionally and psychologically, by both of their uses of juxtaposition and through the different characters.…

    • 653 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” Katherine Boo argues that societies are becoming corrupt because of capitalism’s prevalence in modern societies. Capitalism is creating an economy where products and profits are owned by companies and individuals instead of the government. ("Capitalism" Merriam Webster) Having profits owned by individuals drive owners to create inequitable systems that take advantage of lower class citizens. The systems drive the lower class to compete against one another to create a small profit, that will soon be taken away by the individuals or companies that “own” the profit created by the system.…

    • 820 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Neverending War War will never end for the soldiers who are among the living, the ones who have seen the end are dead. The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien tells what he and his fellow soldiers had experienced in the vietnam war, during and after, what they had to do and how they feel. There thought’s were not only just on the war, but on their family and friends. In the soldiers heads, they are constantly thinking of the past, mostly the war, and what they had to do. In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, shows the theme of grief and shame the soldiers experienced during the war and after the war, to them the war never ended.…

    • 1062 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    “I know pink boy will get me, but right now I feel smart”(Lai 187-188). In addition to Ha feeling smart again, she also learns to defend herself which boosts her self-confidence. As explained in the first paragraph Ha is being bullied in school. Now that she understands what they are saying and knows that she can fight back she does.…

    • 1373 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The chapter ” On the Rainy River” opens up to Tim O’Brien’s first person point of view, allowing us to see his stream of consciousness as he recounts his story of guilt and shame about being drafted to the Vietnam war. We follow Tom O’Brien as he leads us to the moment where he has the chance to swim away from the draft. His integrity creates conflict between what he decides is the right thing to do and what he wants. As he tells the story,he uses sentence variations to add effect to the scene.…

    • 1129 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays