Vietnamese Heat
The first-person narrator/protagonist wanted to spend the summer in California but has wound up in Vietnam. Hot summer days are not created equally, apparently. "I lean my head out the window, letting the wind rush deep inside my ear, the sound of a lullaby. It’s still sticky hot, making oil ooze all over my T-zone." The imagery here is of a carsick and homesick teenage girl looking for relief from the oppressive heat of the homeland of her family she knows only as just another foreign country. The complaints about the hot wind and unforgiving effects of the sun on skin underline just how much she would rather be almost anywhere else.
Food
Describing tamarind balls rolled in licorice flakes stimulates the protagonist to one of the most memorable uses of imagery in her narration. "I swear they look just like miniature horse poops rolled in hay but taste like sour-sugary dream." A negative appeal to the visual sense is juxtaposed with the positive appeal to the sense of taste in this example. The result is a description that is very easy to imagine both in how it looks and its surprisingly good taste.
The Smell of Life
A visit to an open-air market is characterized most effectively using imagery. "Although it’s open air, the smells are overwhelmingly bad and good, like life itself. Sweat and fruit and boiling oil and raw meat and rows and rows of flowers." The description of the smell is like life would just be a vague simile if not for the follow-up. The commingling of foul odors and pleasant scents facilitates the explanation of the simile.
The Weight
The narrator's grandmother muses upon the metaphor of trauma being a heavy boulder weighing down upon one's chest. She then argues that this very same weight stimulates the will to live. "The wind and the rain will wear the boulder down to manageable rocks, and those rocks will dwindle to pebbles, which will become sand and will grind yet smaller until it becomes dust and enters the blood." Her metaphor is given an added dimension of depth with the precision of imagery that treks the weight from the unbearable heaviness of a boulder to the bearable lightness of dust.
