"The Good Daughter" and Other Writings Literary Elements

Non-fictional essay/memoir

America, early 1980’s to late 1990’s.

First person narration by author expressing a perspective of a first-generation Korean-American woman.

The tone of the essay is both subjectively personal and objectively analytical informed by a mood that stars with a painful discovery and moves toward a firmer grasp of self-awareness.

Protagonist: narrator and author. Antagonist: identity confusion.

Internal conflict within author over issues of split identity between Korean culture of parents, American culture of assimilation, and prejudicial influence of a discriminatory Euro-centric educational system

In an unusual move, the author actually chooses to place the climax of her story at the beginning. The climax is the existential epiphany of being ridiculed by an older Korean woman for not knowing how to correctly pronounce her own name in its native language.

The author’s admission that she can speak Spanish, German and Latin with greater fluency than she can speak Korean foreshadows evidence of a prejudicial preference for European history and values systemic in the American educational system to come.

The narrator’s mother response to being asked why they never taught her daughter the proper way to pronounce her own name is an understated “big deal” and “so what.”

The narrator is not specific about when she attended high school, but it can be effectively pinpointed with an allusion to one member of a group of actors known as the Brat Pack which reached their peak of popularity in the mid-1980s.

Imagery is used to convey the emotional and mental state of the author which reaches a traumatic climax after being ridiculed for not knowing how to say her name: “I had torn up my map for the future, the one that said not only where I was going but who I was. My sense of identity was already disintegrating.”

The author flatly states the paradox of her circumstances: “Children of immigrants are living paradoxes. We are the first generation and the last.”

N/A

The mother’s understated response to her daughter’s query about not being taught how to say her name goes to deliver an example of metonymy that covers the entirety of a massively complex system of identification: “So what if you can’t pronounce your name? You are an American.”

“And as I near that age when the question of marriage stalks every relationship” attributes predatory human response to the concept of civil unions between romantic partners.