Wonderful book: Hunger of Memory, by Richard Rodriguez

Reading Rodrigue’s story, I immediately think about my children who have been experiencing their first days at a public elementary school in Houston. Despite being prepared for their bilingual programs since kindergarten, I am still wondering how they would be struggle themselves psychologically in a new setting with different cultural behaviors. I believe some children could be very fast learning and adapt with new environment but some others could find hard to express detailed meaning as they could with their native language and would have tendency to be left behind, especially with some more non-favorite conditions. However, family cultural context is also significant for children development, I believe in the case of Rodrigue, there would be some other options to improve his English but not trade off the family intimacy.

In this book, Richard Rodriguez told us his experience as an immigration young little boy at an US elementary school in his famous book Hunger of Memory published in 1982, the boy who spoke Spanish and only knew about 50 words of English.

In the first chapter Aria, Rodrigue spoke Spanish at home with his parents and soon realized that the sounds of Spanish were soft and comforting to him as a child, making him feel recognized and family intimacy. After a visit of nuns from his school to ask his parents using English at home, he was pushed to speak English and he started to focus on the meaning, instead of sound. However, the more he improved on his English speaking at school, the more he found silence in communication with his parents at home. Through this struggle, he found comfort in reading books and that reading helped make him a more confident English speaker and writer.

In chapter 2 The Achievement of Desire, Rodrigue at last achieved great academic success as a Fulbright Scholar studying in the British Museum. However, his memory about first visit home from college feeling was more like an interview than a conversation with his parents. And he began to engage with the question of how his parents’ memories differ from his own. The cause of these difference he found was from his education, not from the lack of family intimacy as his thought. Then Rodriguez tried to explore his relationship with books. And he tried to read as many “important books” as he could, including many Western classics, but not truly understanding them.

In the beginning of the third chapter Credo, Rodrigue compared his experience as a Mexican Catholic to the varying practices of white American Catholics. He noticed some of the changes in the Church over time and recognized that, just as the Church had changed, so had he. This change had begun when he entered high school and began to receive a more Protestant-based education. He found that his parents assumed a Catholicism very different from him. Then he tried to blend Catholicism with borrowed insights from Sartre and Zen, and Freud and Buber and Miltonic Protestantism.

There are three main points for educational thoughts to take away from the story. The first point is bilingual school program would be great for kids from the first grade of elementary schools. I believe that bilingual programs, even from kindergarten, could help kids to obtain bilingualism and language skills better. From the age of 3 to 8, it is the period of children to develop its language skills and they could learn many languages easily.

The second point is speaking English at home would be important to improve language skills of immigration kids but also to create some constraints toward family intimacy culture. It might be true for the family sentiments if parents found hard to communicate with their children. I think, however, this is a single individual story of Rodrigue and it would be varied between kid to kid and family to family.

The last salient point is reading books could help improve academic results, including reading with pleasure or with as much as possible. There is the fact that, depend on our mood, some books could be hard to bring pleasure for us to read but others could. However, the knowledge and education through book reading are tremendous and we should help children forming the habit of reading and promote more and more reading for all age.

Hope you all will enjoy this book, too.