This paper is actually for a friend of mine named Jessica. I will have to tell her story because it is the foundation of the essay required to finish English 1302 at San Antonio College. She is a 34-year old single mother of a 10-year old boy. She has identified as LGBTQ. She was born in San Antonio, TX in 1988 to a Mexican-American man and a pure South Korean woman. Her dad married 4 times and divorced 3 times: wife no. 1 was a Mexican-American who bore him Jessica’s 2 older brothers; wife no. 2 was her South Korean mother. Wife no. 3 was a Thai woman; she did not have a child with her dad; she mentally and physically abused Jessica and she had to scrounge for food every day because her Thai step-mom only cooked for herself when her dad was at work;. and wife no. 4 was a Filipino woman who bore her half-sister who’s now 10 years old. Her dad was in the US army and stationed in South Korea where he met her mom who was a bar girl. They married and her dad took her to the US. They divorced when Jessica was 4 years old; she could barely remember her mom and she has not seen her since. Fresh from high school in 2006, she dated —online—a guy who lived in Washington State. All the while, she was also having casual relationships with both men and women in San Antonio, TX. In September 2009, her dad who was then divorced married a Filipino woman; they lived in the same apartment but Jessica did not get along with her; in December 2009, she flew to Washington State to live with her erstwhile online boyfriend; 5 months later, after a bitter fight, they separated and she returned to San Antonio, TX in May 2010. She trained with the Job Corps but in August 2010, she and her Washington State boyfriend reconciled on the phone and she flew back to him in December of that year. However, they broke up in February 2011 and she had a casual affair with a friend of her ex-boyfriend; she got pregnant by him and when he outwardly showed no empathy with her condition, she returned to San Antonio, TX where she gave birth to her son in 2012. She lived in a shelter for single mothers and then got into an online relationship with a man who lived in Lansdale, PA; she and her son flew there in November 2013, but their relationship only lasted 3 months and they returned to San Antonio, TX, on February 25, 2014. They lived for a week in a Salvation Army shelter for the homeless, until a Filipino friend of her dad and his daughter agreed to take them into their home. That Filipino friend is me, and they’re still living in my house. Her now-10 year old son calls me “dad”, although my relationship with his mom is purely platonic.
And here are the details of Jessica’s essay, directly quoted from her professor’s instructions:
“Length: 2 1/2 – 3 pages minimum which equals 500 to 750 words in total not including the outline.
Format: Your paper needs to be formatted according to MLA guidelines. Your paper should also have a creative title and include a separate correctly-formatted “Works Cited” page.
Instructions: For your final, choose any 2 or all 3 of the following stories:
The Joy Luck Club
The Things They Carried
A Good Man is Hard to Find
This is an opportunity to show how you have reflected upon the literary works we have read. You will be graded for your thesis, organization of your ideas, specific detail, clarity, and grammar mechanics.
PLEASE INCLUDE AN OUTLINE AT THE BEGINNING OR END OF YOUR ESSAY. BE AWARE THE ESSAY WILL NOT BE GRADED WITHOUT THE INCLUSION OF THE OUTLINE.
Discuss the work or works [the 3 stories listed above] we have studied which have served as a window to help you understand people whose lives are very different from your own. Then, discuss a work or works [same 3 stories] we have studied which have served as a mirror to help you see yourself more clearly. You must address both parts, and you should have a thesis, three or more body paragraphs, and a conclusion. In addition, be sure to use specific examples from the text and/or your experiences. For example, you might choose Shirley Jackson’s “The Lotter” and then you would apply yourself and experiences in life to this story and how they helped you to understand the story itself
