Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice

The beginning of the story introduces you to the son and the father. They are both of Vietnamese decent however you learn that the father is visiting from Sidney, Australia and the current setting is in Iowa, where the son now goes to school. The son sounds like the average college or graduate student. A very messy apartment. Clothes and papers everywhere, a mountain of dishes in the sink, an ashtray full of cigarette butts, liquor handles stashed away. Right off the bat i knew that i could relate in some ways to this character. The son begins to use the term Ba when talking to his father such as: "You'll sleep in my room, Ba" I figured that this was the Vietnamese way of saying father or dad, but i looked it up online just in case and it is. While at it I also looked up the definition for the words rueful, as in his dad gave him a rueful smile and exorbitant. Rueful basically means sympathetic, and exorbitant is exceeding all bounds, so he gives the bartender generous tips. I was kinda confused when the son was recollecting on his time with his girlfriend the day before, he talks about how beautiful she was but then states "staring at her face made me tired." i'm not sure if this meant that looking at her beauty made him tired, or if it was foreshadowing some trouble between the two of them, if he is growing tired of her. While him and his friends are drinking i got a good laugh when his friend was telling him how easy it is for him to write, just writing about Vietnamese subjects then says "But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans--and New York painters with hemorrhoids" I could see him actually writing about the Colombian assassins and Hiroshima orphans, but lesbian vampires and painters with hemorrhoids? is that for real or just part of his drunk humor? well i guess the vampire one might be able to work. As you continue reading on, Nam explains the way his father was toward him when he was young. Very strict and disciplinary he tells that when he found out that a certain food made him vomit his father "forced me to eat it in front of guests" and saying that hunger finds no fault with food. Thats a little too intense for me, i think if i were raised like that i would leave the house a soon as possible. When the story continues it gets to a point where the father is telling war stories to friends while drinking. You learn that he has seen a lot of terrible things in his lifetime, such as witnessing one of his grandfathers get his throat slit while his grandmother got shot and a daughter raped. this sort of justifies why he was so hard on his son growing up. I had a feeling while this story was going on that it would be material that Nam would soon write about. The story is keeping me interested, but as i read along, i keep finding myself going back and forth wondering during certain section whether he is talking about something in the past or in the present tense, it seems a lot of it is in the past but i guess i just miss a lot of the transition periods. Nam and his father have a sit down talk and his father tells of his life and the things that he had seen. The next morning after Nam had finished his paper which was due that day, he awoke to find that his dad had gone for a walk and went to read his new paper. After finding his dad down by the river with the man by the barrel he sees that he is empty handed. So his dad threw the paper into the barrel? After seeing this Nam states that he wishes he had known then what he knew later then he would have said the things he did. So this must mean that Nam was angry and said some bad things toward his dad such as i wish you never would have come, and what he did was unforgivable. I think everyone who realizes that their paper had been thrown in the fire would have been very angry though. But following this i think Nam realizes what this paper did to his father. His father had spent his whole life trying to forget these terrible memories and having told those stories throughout the night and reading the paper on himself had reopened those wounds that he had spent so long trying to sew up. As Nam looks at the river getting colder behind his dad he realizes something. The last sentence of the story is "And it occurred to me then how it took hours, sometimes days for the surface of a river to freeze over--to hold in its skin the perfect and crystalline world--and how that world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable. I think this is a metaphor for something along the lines of, his father had spent so long to sew up those wounds that had haunted him forever and finally brought him piece of mind and something so simple such as small stone (paper or words) could shatter all of that. So in general the story was good, but i still am sort of confused at the end it, what is exactly happened and what all of the things Nam was saying at the end really meant.