Nick Wente
Professor Jones
ENGL 102
3/7/11
Ideology
In Kao Kalia Yang’s novel, The Latehomecomer, the Yang family goes through a lot of changes. The family have been living in America for 10 years now, putting Kao at 15 years old and Dawb just old enough to get her driving license. The small children were become not so small anymore but the apartment they lived in didn’t grow with them. With this said, the Yang family had spent the whole summer searching for a house larger enough for them but affordable. When driving through the city looking for houses for sales, Kao’s father would bring them by the mansions for inspiration to do well in school. For the first time since living in America, her family buys their own house. Kao said the house “looked like it belonged to Laura and Mary Ingalls…” She said this to describe how old the house was (built in 1895) and how nice it looked from the outside. The house may have been sufficient on the outside but the antique of a home was slowly falling apart. This taught the family learning to be grateful for what they have.
An obvious example of how some things in this novel can look fine from the outside but in reality they are is their new moldy house. No one seemed to be a big fan of the new house they moved into. Kao described it as smelling old like a thrift shop [ (Yang 196) ]. The family tends to stray from the bad and focus on the good; such as the old pencil sharpener that the father liked. It seems weird to me how Kao mentioned this. It appears to be her way of showing how the house really wasn’t that great. She spoke little of anything else but mentioned how much her father like the pencil sharpen and how it was still in working condition. The Yang family had little money to purchase luxury items, so they tended to value the small things and each other. The Yang family always found a way to look at the positives. When they first purchased the house Kao refers to her father, “My father said, ‘We can hide...