reading response one

Hogg's "I'm a believer" and Black's "The Joy of Mud" are two typical and successful personal essays that share many same features of the form Ballenger talks about.

Both of the two essays are written in first person, it is easily to detect because they use "I": "I believe this was some kind of privileged access I had.", "I feel solid and more connected to the living," They are the actresses of their own story.

The subjects of the two essays are very commonplace. Hogg tells us a story about her obsession with Davy, a band's leading singer, for many years since her childhood. Black talks about her one day's experience of helping Hawaiian to harvest their food with her friend and some Hawaiian people in a very beautiful valley in Hawaii. I do have something in common with both writers. I had my favorite singer and liked him for many years since I was 11, I glorified and "created" him to be a hero for a long time and not until recently do I find out that despite that he is authentic and gracious on the stage or in his books. I still do not know who he really is. I also know something about harvest since there are nearly 1 billion peasants in China and I have helped to harvest in a remote country so I can relate myself to Hogg's experience about harvest. When talking about "rootless", I think I'm quite "rootless" now. Living in a new country I'm not belonged to which is faraway from my hometown. Sometimes I do separate myself with the other people because I feel insecure and lonely.

Both of them use narrative method to develop their essays. They also use very vivid sentences. Hogg states "Micky's hair would not behave," the contrast strongly convinced me that Davy is more handsome. Black draws a nice picture "The forest is a lush wall on all sides, and the mountains are crowned with clouds overhead" to show the beautiful scenery she explored.

I find out that the thesis of he two are implicit and emerge in the end. Hogg tells her story in a chronological order from her childhood to her 27 when she meets Davy, has picture taken with him, and realizes him. In the last few paragraphs, she expressees "I accept, finally, that this person I know so well I really don't know at all, and I, the daydream believer, am just a fan.", "Davy just played his role as a singer." such feelings leaves much to be thought about. In "The Joy of Mud", Black begins her story in one summer morning. And she mimics the dialectical process successfully. She always deviates form what happens now to her past and portraits herself used to be a "bicultural and bred on mobility" girl, who spends most of her adolescence in Hawaii but wait impatiently to escape. For instance, she buried herself in "novels set in faraway times and places" and studied French instead of Hawaii's pidgin English. She felt rootless all the time, and was pride of that. But in this morning, during which she pulls out the weeds in the lo'i with her feet in the Waiahole mud, and then rinses the corms and steams them for lunch, she finds out that she is increasingly absorbed in this wet world, "aches with a kind of goofy happiness", and feels blissful...she feels surprised that after 16 years of being in the place she never cared for, she suddenly explores her love with this place.  She shifts back and forth like this from the present to her memory many times and in the end she expresses her willingness to stay in Hawaii and accepts Hawaii as her home, "Maybe it's the one that will eventually lead me home."