Summary Of The Sweetheart Song Of Tra Bong

In “The Sweetheart Song of Tra Bong,” O’Brien creates a specific depiction of Vietnam as a world that affects the foreigners--such as Americans--who inhabit the land. O’Brien portrays a clear distinction between the environment of Vietnam and the society that Americans live in. Mary Anne Bell fully embraces Vietnamese culture which helps establish the main idea of “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” Mary Anne’s transformation in the chapter “Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong” was to demonstrate the breaking of gender norms/stereotypes. This chapter disposes the stereotypes of women, especially the notion that they only serve as comfort and sexual satisfaction to men. When Mark Fossie becomes intrigued to bring a girl into a medical compound that is safe and …show more content…
This piece of evidence helps support the suggestion that Mary Anne’s transformation is to break feminine habits or characterics. To further prove this-before Mary Anne arrived in Vietnam, it was expected that she would act innocent, impressed, or to afraid that it would seem cute, that is why she was believed to act as comfort for the men because it would remind them of the girls back in America. Rat Kiley even explains to the reader that he loved Mary Anne because she reminded him of how pure and innocent the girls were in America yet how Anne was unique/different from typical woman. Rat Kiley claims, “‘I loved her’...’The way she looked, Mary Anne made you think about those girls back home, how clean and innocent they all are, how they'll never understand any of this, not in a billion years’....’There it is, you gotta taste it, and that's the thing with Mary Anne. She was there. She was up to her eyeballs in it. After the war, man, I promise you, you won't find nobody like her’” (O’Brien 108). Mary Anne’s transformation is so surprising and spontaneous because she was expected to behave a lot differently than she did during her time in