1. Explain the sentence “J’ai franchi le seuil du Malheur” p. 113. (3 sentences)
Until she was expelled from school, Bê had been a perfect student, successful and loved by her teachers and her peers. Nevertheless, when she is banned from school as punishment for locking the cruel professor Gia in the bathroom, she accepts the consequence, despite having had the choice to avoid it by letting others stand for punishment in her stead. Bê is experiencing what she had thought until then to be the worst possible fate, but upon reaching that point, she is comforted by the discovery that her sense of justice, loyalty, and sacrifice is more important to her than school.
2. Pp. 201-257. Faites une liste de 12 activités (ou objets) qui montrent la culture et les rituels vietnamiens.
-The the albino horse, whose bones are used to make healing gelatin.
-The informal adoption(s) of Dung le Maigrichon.
-The simple food of the mountains: grilled manioc, molasses, potatoes with honey, snails found in the stream, rice, etc.
-Bê must wait to be spoken to before she can express her desire to go on the hunt for the tiger.
-The mountain inhabitant’s negative feelings toward fencing in livestock.
- Môc using his own blood to give strength to his wine.
-The hunt: girls are not allowed to participate, the hunters must leave early in the morning “like shadows”.
-The claw of an old injured tiger, promised to Bê by Môc, which has protective powers.
-The story of Rôc, who lives in solitude and penitence for having killed his son.
-The old men Môc and Rôc stay with the body of the boy killed by the tiger until his family comes to retrieve the corpse.
-Giving the body of the dead man to a leper in the forest to free him from his disease.
-Burning the whiskers of the slain tiger before carving it.
3. Pp.267-fin Qu’avez-vous appris sur la vie au Vietnam d’après Duong Thu Huong ? Donnez des exemples precis. (300 mots)
By telling the story through the eyes of the narrator Bê as she grows up, Huong is able to offer a unique commentary on life in Vietnam in the mid-20th century. Even as a child, Bê is an extremely independent girl, inquisitive and skeptical of the world around her, and experiencing Vietnam through her eyes gives the reader a playful but profound insight into that world.
In this last part of the book, Bê leaves Môc, the sage old man with whom she had been living in the mountains, to go find her father, a soldier who had lived far from she and her mother for her whole life. This section is full of adventure and a cultural sense of personal responsibility towards the less fortunate which, while present throughout the book in the many kindnesses of strangers who helped young Bê, becomes even more prominent here at the end. The soldiers at Khau Phâu, the doctor whom Bê befriends who saves an entire village from disease is there, and above all Bê’s father, all represent this idea of responsibility; having lived far from his family for so long, Bê’s father explains that it is something he must do because it is right and no one else will do it.
This last section was also filled with more of the traditional superstitions that pervaded the section on Bê’s life in the mountains, as well as Bê’s own skepticism for them. This was personified by the character of the sorcerer who took offerings from the desperate families of the sick village in exchange for magic rites he promised would heal their dying family members. The presence of the doctor however, as well as Bê’s own skepticism, seem to represent a transition into a more modern, deliberate worldview in Vietnam, particularly in the rural areas.
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