Interpret and annotate What You Don't Know (Lulu Wang). Here is the story transcript. Here is Lulu Wang's website.
For this weeks blog post, I was assigned to listen to a story (in the form of a podcast) by Lulu Wang. Here is the podcast What You Don't Know (Lulu Wang), and the transcript story transcript. The story is told by Lulu Wang, an author/ director who was born in China and grew up in the United States of America. In the podcast Lulu explains how her 80 year old grandmother (NaiNai) was diagnosed with lung cancer, and her family chose to not tell her. After listening to the podcast/ reading the transcript, the assignment was to answer the following questions. Did you agree with the family's choice to deceive Wang's grandmother? And, when have you made an important choice to tell someone a difficult truth or you made an important choice to tell a lie that had a major impact on you and/or someone else? I will answer thes questions below. Did you agree with the family's choice to deceive Wang's grandmother? I found the question “Did you agree with the family's choice to deceive Wang's grandmother?” to be a particularly hard one to answer. At first, I thought “that’s ridiculous”, and “if that were my grandmother I would definitely let her know she only has three months to live”. However, as the podcast went on my opinion started to change. I started to think how differently things might have gone if Lulu’s family had told NaiNai of her illness. Would NaiNai have remained so optimistic if she thought she was going to die in three months? Would she have felt more ill and died in a hospital within the three months the doctor predicted? I’m still not 100% sure if I agree with the family’s decision to deceive Lulu’s grandmother, but the more of the podcast I listened to and better understand the situation, the more my opinion transitioned towards agreeing with them. My father has told me stories about how my own grandmother hid the fact that she had breast cancer from her family, I guess she chose to keep it a secret so she would not be a burden to them. Apparently, she even lied about where she was going when she went to get chemo therapy. I know one thing, if I am dying of cancer and have a limited amount of time to live, I’m not going to be stuck in a hospital, I’ll be trying to cross everything possible off my bucket list. When have you made an important choice to tell someone a difficult truth or you made an important choice to tell a lie that had a major impact on you and/or someone else? My family and I have all made the important decision to lie to William, my four-year-old nephew. One of my brothers is incarcerated, and if we to talk about him around my nephew we try not to use the words jail/ prison/ etc., instead we lie and say he is in school or college. As far as my nephew is concerned my brother is just going to school. He’s probably too young to even know what prison is, but I think it’s best to keep some things simple, that way he won’t go to school and tell his friends/ teachers that his uncle is in prison. I think choosing to lie or not lie in this situation could have had major impact on my nephew. If he were to know my brother is in jail he would probably ask a lot of questions that are very hard to answer and explain to a four-year-old, so not telling him prevents these hard to answer/explain questions. I try not to lie much, because one lie almost always leads to another, but I think in a situation like this it’s ok to lie because it’s not actually hurting anyone, it’s just twisting the truth a bit.
1 Comment
9/22/2017 08:25:39
Jesse, I really enjoyed the way that you really provided an argument as to why and how your mind changed throughout Lulu's story. I, personally, struggled to make my argument so clear throughout my writing, so I admire yours. On some level, I can relate to your personal story because I once had an uncle that was incarcerated. I'm sorry to hear about your brother, as it's probably hard for you to lie about it to your nephew William, but I'm glad that you were comfortable enough to share this with us.
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