12. Consider the poem's title - Do you think it references his commitments to his family ... or theirs to whom? What is the substance of the commitments?
I feel that he feels as if he has major commitments to his family. He is a placeholder in the family pictures, and most of the time he is left empty handed. At the same time though, this all could mean that his family feels they have a commitment to him. They keep putting him in the background of the photographs, and they never give him anything to hold. He feels he needs to be the "normal" son for his parents, while his parents feel they need to keep acting like there is nothing wrong with him even if they believe him to be wrong in some ways. The end of the poem, he mentions that in the pictures there is nothing out of the norm, but he smiles as he "serve my duty". Everyone feels as if they have commitments to each other, since they are a family.
13. Kitty Tsui's poem is dedicated "for the one who was not invited", which we take to be the narrator's same-sex lover. In the end, the narrator wishes to tell her family that [her] back is healing/she dreams[s] of dragons and water/my home is in her arms/our bedroom ceiling the wide open sky" (Lines 49-52). Analyze these metaphors as they relate to the space between her relationship with her lover and her relationship with her family, two relationships that appear will not cross over one another.
Due to her being a lesbian, home with her family has never actually been home to her. Her back healing could mean that her family has turned from her or stabbed her in the back. She is healing now that she has found a girlfriend. The home that she feels most comfortable with is her girlfriend. She feels safe and at ease in the arms in her arms. They have the freedom of enjoying the wide open sky, and their bedroom ceiling is wherever they want it to be. I am not sure what the dreams represent, but dragons have often represented good luck or fortune to the Chinese, and water overcomes fire in the Chinese zodiac. The narrator has a new found freedom of being herself and she is going to overcome the anger that her family contains. The two relationships in her life will never cross over, because her family will never accept the real her or her relationship with a woman. Her mother will always just shake her head as a response to what the narrator is saying, and she will never actually listen to her daughter and finally accept her.
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My understanding of what the narrator meant of "I dream of dragons and water" is that, dragon is a sign of power, strength, success, luck and honor in the Chinese culture. However I do not know what water represents in their culture but water is one of the five elements in the chinese Feng Shui. But water means life generally, so I think the narrator also wish for a real life. And when the narrator also said, "our bedroom ceiling is the wide open sky" - the bedroom is the place of rest and solace and by saying that the "wide open sky" is their ceiling it just means to me that for the narrator and her lover/partner, they look up to possibilities and to both of them find freedom and they do not worry about anything...they find peace with each other.
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