Q4 Outside Reading Week 1 Post A

Being not far into my book, I haven't really witnessed too much of the main conflict. What I have seen is an introduction to my narrator and characters that are important to Amir. So for this first post, I'm going to talk about family.

This is the quote that I have picked: "I watched him fill his glass at the bar and wondered how much time would pass before we talked again the way we just had. Because the truth of it was, I always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why not? After all, I had killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn't I? The least I could've done was to have had the decency to have turned out a little more like him. But I hadn't turned out like him. Not at all"(19).

In Amir's family, it is him and Baba because his mother died giving birth to him. What I'm commenting on is not actually a cultural difference but a similarity. For me, pleasing my parents is something that I find to be important. I want to know that they are proud of me and it seems that when children turn out like their parents, they are more likely to be praised. Perhaps it is because our parents live in the past or because they wish they could live through us. Whatever the truth is, they do tend to push their ideals onto their children. Amir is a child like me. Perhaps he is younger, lives in Afghanistan, and lives decades before me, but he is still a child. And all he really wants to do is make his father proud.
All children, whether they are 5 or 15, whether they live in America or elsewhere in the world, want love and affection from their parents. They want to please their parents and that can cause children to fear them too. It doesn't matter who you are, where you live, what time period you were born, we all want one thing from our parents: the recognition and pride that we are their children, in other words, love. And any negative word or phrase that is uttered about us from our parents may not seem like a big deal to them, but inside, we are dying just a little bit. So that is why, despite our many differences, I can sympathize with Amir when he hears his father saying "If I hadn't seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I'd never believe he's my son"(23).