1. Group B---tsmith27

In my book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, the characters don't really have control over where they live or how their lives turn out. They are mostly controlled by the regime, family, trauma, violence, and a curse. The book follows three primary characters: Oscar, a Dominican American nerd, who was bullied a lot for his appearance and his interest in sci-fi. Lola, his sister, who rebels against her mother, and Beli, the mother, whose childhood was destroyed by poverty, being an orphan, abuse in her relationships, and the Trujillo regime. Oscar, Lola, and Beli were all under a curse called the Fuku. The Fuku is an ancient curse from Africa that has affected Dominicans. 

Oscar doesn’t choose to be isolated and feels out of place. As a young child, Oscar was the definition of a Dominican boy, being a ladies' man with two girlfriends. However, he quickly lost confidence after his girlfriends dumped him. Once he hit puberty, he gained weight, developed acne, struggled with being able to impress the girl, and being the Dominican man that his culture expects him to be. This is all caused by the curse of the Fuku that hangs over his family. Lola tries to rebel, become a punk, and runs away. The narrator explains that “each of these attempts to assert her identity failed since, for Lola, the primary goal was less to find herself and more to spite her mother.” (Diaz 89) For Lola, the Fuku shows up as a witchy feeling she gets before major negative events that affect her family. Lola's witchy feeling all began when she found a lump on her mother’s breast; the sicker her mom got, the more nasty she got, and the more Lola decided to rebel. Beli, in her childhood, tries to take control of her life when she begins working at Palacio Peking, a Chinese restaurant. However, she fails to take control when she falls for a Gangster, and becomes pregnant, then finds out the Gangster was married to the sister of the Trujillo Regime. She ends up getting kidnapped, brutally beaten, losing the baby, and forced to leave the country for her safety. All part of the Fuku destructive pattern. 

This connects to Anna Crowe's TED Talk, The Power of an Immigrant Mindset, about immigrants “Around us, people like you and me living, working, picking up their kids from preschool, cramming for their next exam, all while caring with them the invisible weight of reinvention of being uprooted and replanted in unfamiliar soil, often without knowing the language.” All three characters try to reinvent themselves and adapt to their new circumstances; however, they carry this invisible weight of the Fuke. The Fuku makes it harder, causing difficulty to move forward.

The novel “The Sun Is Also A Star” by Nicola Yoon shows how two teenagers experience the first stages of “love at first sight” in their own unique ways. Daniel is a lot more spiritual than Natasha in the fact that he believes in fate and love. Poetry is one of the things he loves which his parents think is basically a waste of time. He is fairly different from the rest of his family, his older brother goes to Harvard and he feels the need to be like “the perfect son” and his parents are being pushy for him to go to Yale while he tries to follow in his brother’s footsteps but also trying to make his own decisions. Especially when Natasha comes into his life. Natasha is a “keep to herself” kind of person. She is scheduled to be deported back to Jamaica, but she’s nervous to go back to her old life that she’s already left behind. Being deported is not her decision, it’s the government’s decision because she is an illegal immigrant, with a false social security number, which is also not her decision. Unfortunately the day that she is set to meet about the deportation she, literally, bumps into Daniel, or “Red Tie” and starts to fall for him.

Daniel is in a tough situation where he does want to make his own decisions but his parents are trying to control what his future will look like, “But we’re not allowed to change in my household. We’re on a track to be doctors, and there’s no getting off” (Yoon 30). His parents also want him to marry “a lovely Korean American girl” but he is falling in love with a black Jamaican-American girl he just met. These “rules” that Daniel’s parents have for him are their way of ensuring they achieve the “American Dream” to be successful and with a lot of money.

In my book, “Breathe and Count Back From Ten” by Natalia Sylvester Veronica has many friends. She has lived there since before she can remember so she's never had to think much about fitting in unlike her mother and father. They push her to be very perfect and do nothing wrong, but while they think it's for the best they are really taking away all her freedom and choices. Rather than her trying to fit in because of her ethnicity she has to fit in due to her hip injury; her hips are lopsided, and she just found out her parents have been keeping a huge secret from her. She thought she was finally starting to heal but the truth is the tissue around it is dying and it can fall apart at any minute. 

Veronica never really gets to make her own decisions, due to her parents constantly worrying about her health and their need to be perfect all the time. Even when she should know about things or get to choose because it's such a large detail or part of her life she's not able to. For example her job, she has to lie about the job she got (which was her dream job) just because it's not something they want her to do. Another example is her hip, the tissue dying and her needing a life altering surgery is something she should know about and be able to help deal with and yet they hid it from her until she discovered it herself. “Sometimes I think the only reason they still bring me here is to remind me that they’re the ones making big decisions about my body. Not me.”(Sylvester 85) This is showing a situation where they are in the hospital for a normal checkup on her hip, but she has no control over anything that happens because rather than talking to her they only talk to her parents just like always. 

In the ted talk “Hi. Im Nic” by Nic Stone, she talks about how she was having an identity crisis. Eleven years of not knowing what to do next or having any idea of who she was or who she should be. I look at that as having a huge choice and being able to make the decisions for your life, unlike Vero in my book who has no choice and has to wait for her parents approval Nic gets to choose what path to go down. “I’d tried on a variety of metaphorical shoes at that point- undergraduate psychology major, retail store manager, personal assistant, youth group leader, fitness trainer, model, teen mentor, aspiring singer, seminary student- and had yet to find a pair that really fit.”(Stone). This shows how she has control over what she does, whether it's jumping down a completely new path or trying to add onto another one she gets to choose how to continue her journey with nothing truly controlling her or holding her back.

In my book Out of Nowhere by Maria Padian Tom Bouchard is a great student, a good soccer player, and a bad decision maker. One night he and his best friend went to the Maquoit school and wrote “you suck Maquoit” on their school rock. He gets in big trouble with the school and has to do like 100 hours of community service so he can walk at graduation. 

No, my characters do not struggle with what if. Tom basically has always been confident. “Here’s the fact, and I know I'm gonna sound like a jerk but whatever: girls like me” (padian 8). 

how did the family get the Fuku curse? 

what do you think Daniel is going to do when or if he finds out about her deportation? 

is there a reason her parents are so controlling? 

why is he so confident? 

The fuku is a curse that originated in Africa and was said to have been brought over to the Caribbean by the traumas of the slaves. The fuku curse is said to affect all Caribbean people, including Oscar's family, who are from the Dominican Republic. Legends say the curse is passed down from generation to generation. Through Oscar's family, we hear different stories about how the fuku continues to affect the family across generations. The fuke curse doesn’t disappear once you leave the Caribbean and come to the United States, but continues, which suggests that the curse is tied to the Caribbean people rather than the Caribbean itself.