High School Reading: Grades 9-10 Quiz: Point Of View In World Literature

From the poem "Inheritance" by Lila Cardenas:

My grandmother kept her citizenship papers in the freezer, wrapped in foil, beside the tamales she made each December for a country that had, she said, never quite learned her name.

When the power went out one August, she did not save the meat. She saved the papers.

My mother laughs about this now. My mother, who leaves her passport in a drawer with the batteries and the tape, who corrects the barista's spelling with a shrug, not a wound.

I am the one who cannot decide which drawer to use.

The poem develops its point of view chiefly by

From the novel Winter Wheat:

When the county agent came to tell my father that the new hybrid seed would yield forty percent more per acre, my father listened the way he listened to weather reports: politely, and without any intention of changing his plans. He had planted the same variety for thirty-one years. His father had planted it for forty. The seed had come, originally, from a cousin in Kraków, in a paper envelope tucked inside a Bible.

"Forty percent," the agent repeated, as though my father had not heard.

"I heard you," my father said. "I am thinking about the envelope."

The agent looked at me. I was seventeen and had already applied to the state agricultural college; I knew about hybrid vigor and heterosis and the yield curves that had lifted the county out of two bad decades. I also knew that my father was not being stubborn, exactly. He was doing arithmetic I did not yet know how to do.

The narrator's final observation—that her father was "doing arithmetic I did not yet know how to do"—chiefly serves to

From the memoir A Second Alphabet:

When my father lost his hearing at fifty-three, he did not lose language. He lost, he said, a particular relationship to weather—the sound of rain on the tin roof of the shop, the way a customer's footsteps told him who had come in before the door had finished opening. He learned to sign, and my mother learned to sign, and I, who had grown up hearing, learned last and worst.

At first I thought of Deaf culture as a smaller version of the hearing one, minus a sense. This, I came to understand, was like thinking of a poem as a paragraph minus punctuation. At my father's new Deaf club, jokes worked differently: the punchline was often a face, not a phrase. Meetings began by adjusting the lights, not by asking everyone to quiet down. When two people spoke at once, no one had to choose whom to hear; you simply looked.

My father, who had been a shy man among the hearing, became, among the Deaf, someone I did not fully know—louder in his hands, quicker to laugh, no longer waiting for permission to enter a conversation.

The narrator's comparison—thinking of Deaf culture as "a smaller version of the hearing one, minus a sense" is like thinking of "a poem as a paragraph minus punctuation"—chiefly conveys the idea that

From the novel Downriver:

My father was a river pilot on the lower Mississippi for thirty-four years, and he believed, with the quiet conviction of a man who had been right about currents more often than he had been wrong, that the river was not a thing you conquered but a thing you listened to. When the new captains came down from the academies in the eighties, with their charts and their sonar and their certainties, he did not argue with them. He simply outlasted them. The river, he said, ate certainty for breakfast.

I, who had grown up watching him watch the water, went to one of those academies myself. I learned the charts. I learned the sonar. I learned to trust the instruments, because the instruments did not get tired and did not have opinions about their sons. But when I came home, and we stood together on the levee at dusk, and he pointed at a place where the surface looked, to me, exactly like every other place, and said, "There. She's moving her shoulder there"—I understood that he had been reading a book I had never learned the alphabet of.

The passage develops the father's perspective primarily by

From "The Interpreter's Daughter," a personal essay:

At the clinic my mother interpreted for the Hmong families and, on Tuesdays, for a Somali family newly arrived from a camp in Kenya. She was not, technically, a Somali interpreter; she spoke six words of Somali and a great deal of patience. What she did, mostly, was slow the doctors down.

"He is asking about your son's cough," she would say to the mother, though the doctor had asked something much shorter and more clinical. Then she would wait. She would wait longer than the doctor wanted her to wait. She would wait until the mother's shoulders came down from her ears.

Once, in the car, I asked her why she did this. She had a master's degree. She had, before we came here, taught linguistics at a university.

"In a clinic," she said, "the fastest sentence is almost never the true one. I am not paid to translate words. I am paid to translate the room."

The mother's statement that she is "paid to translate the room" reflects a perspective that

From the memoir Between Two Kitchens by Amara Okafor:

My mother's kitchen in Enugu smelled of crushed egusi and smoke from the kerosene stove; my aunt's kitchen in Houston smelled of nothing at all, scrubbed clean by a machine that hummed under the counter. When I visited Aunt Ifeoma the summer I turned fifteen, she watched me tear the corner off a plastic bag of frozen spinach and laughed—not unkindly, but with a small, tired sound.

"You still do it the village way," she said. "Here, we have scissors. We have measuring cups. We have recipes."

I wanted to tell her that my mother measured with her palm and that the soup was never wrong. But Aunt Ifeoma had left Nigeria before I was born, and she spoke of Enugu the way one speaks of a childhood friend whose phone number one has misplaced—with affection, and a certain relief. That night she served jollof rice from a glass casserole dish. It was neat. It was orange. It tasted, I thought, like a photograph of jollof rice.

I did not say this. I ate two helpings and told her it was wonderful, because I understood, even then, that she needed me to.

The narrator's description of the jollof rice as tasting "like a photograph of jollof rice" most clearly reflects which aspect of her cultural perspective?

From the novel The Salt Line:

Ciaran had been warned about the mainlanders. On the island, when someone asked how you were, they meant it; they would stand in the rain for the answer. Here in the city, "How are you?" was a door closing, not opening. He learned to say "Grand, grand" the way the others did, quick and glancing, and to keep walking.

Still, he could not train himself out of certain habits. He said hello to bus drivers. He apologized to lampposts he bumped into. When the woman at the coffee counter asked what he wanted, he gave her a small history of his morning before naming the drink. She looked at him the way one looks at a slow-loading page.

His flatmate Devi, who had grown up three streets from the flat, found this endearing for two weeks and exhausting after that. "You don't have to befriend the postman, Ciaran," she said. "You just have to take the package."

"On Inishbeg," Ciaran said, "the postman is your cousin."

"Well," Devi said, "he isn't here."

The exchange between Ciaran and Devi at the end of the passage primarily illuminates a contrast between

From the short story "The Debate Coach":

Mr. Ojo had coached the team for eleven years, and in that time our school had never lost a regional final. He had grown up in Lagos, argued his way through law school in London, and now, in a Minnesota suburb where the winters bewildered him, he coached teenagers to speak with what he called "the full weight of the tongue."

"You Americans," he said—though half of us were not, strictly, only American—"you apologize when you argue. You say I feel and I think and maybe. You leave yourselves an exit. Where I come from, an argument is a house you build to live in. You do not build a house you plan to leave."

Rianne, who was going to Yale, raised her hand. "But qualifying language shows intellectual humility. Judges reward it."

Mr. Ojo smiled. "Then win your trophies," he said. "I will teach you something else."

Mr. Ojo's response to Rianne ("Then win your trophies... I will teach you something else") most strongly reveals that his cultural point of view

From the short story "The Long Corridor":

Grandfather Wen had lived in the apartment for forty-one years, and in all that time he had never once used the elevator. He climbed the six flights each evening with a bag of oranges or a folded newspaper, pausing at each landing not to rest, he insisted, but to greet the neighbors. By the time I was in high school, most of the neighbors had moved away or died, and the landings were quiet. Still he climbed.

"Elevators forget who you are," he told me once. "Stairs remember."

I thought this was the sort of thing old people said because they had nothing new to say. Then one afternoon I found him on the third-floor landing, one hand pressed flat against the peeling green paint of the wall, breathing carefully. He was not looking at me. He was looking at the wall as though it were a face.

"Mrs. Bao lived here," he said. "She gave your father dumplings when he came home from school. I have not thought of her in a long time. But the wall remembered."

The passage most strongly suggests that Grandfather Wen's point of view is shaped by a cultural value that

From the short story "The Wake":

At my uncle's wake in County Clare, the men told stories about him for six hours. Not eulogies—stories. The time he sold a lame horse to a priest and then bought it back at a loss out of guilt. The time he fell asleep on the ferry to Aran and woke up in the wrong century, or so he claimed. My cousin Nia, visiting from Boston, kept waiting for someone to say something serious. She had brought a black dress and a small, tight speech about legacy.

"They're roasting him," she whispered to me. "At his own funeral."

"They're keeping him," I said, though I had not known I thought this until I said it.

Later, when the songs started, Nia stood in the corner with her arms folded, not quite crying, not quite anything. I brought her a whiskey she did not want. "In Boston," she said, "we would have said he was a good man and gone home."

"Here," I said, "we say he was a whole man. It takes longer."

The narrator's distinction between calling someone "a good man" and calling him "a whole man" most directly reflects a cultural belief that

From the play The Threshold, Act I:

(NANA, 78, sits at a kitchen table. Her granddaughter MELISSA, 16, stands in the doorway with a backpack.)

MELISSA: I told you, Nana. It's a sleepover. Everyone's going.

NANA: Everyone is not my grandchild.

MELISSA: Mom said it was fine.

NANA: Your mother says many things are fine. That is because she was raised in a house with a lock on every door. In my house, we had one door, and it faced the road, and we knew who came through it.

MELISSA: This is Emma's house. You've met Emma.

NANA: I have met Emma. I have not met Emma's father when he is tired. I have not met Emma's brother when he is bored. I have not met the road between here and there at midnight.

(Beat.)

MELISSA: You make it sound like I'm going to war.

NANA: No, mija. I make it sound like you are going somewhere I cannot see. That is all a grandmother knows how to say.

Nana's final speech most fully clarifies that her objections to the sleepover arise less from distrust of Emma's family than from

From the short story "Yumiko's Garden":

Yumiko had been in Vancouver for three years when she planted the first shiso in the narrow strip of dirt beside the driveway. Her Canadian neighbor, Beth, admired the leaves and asked what they were.

"For pickles," Yumiko said, because this was true and because the longer answer required a word she did not have in English. In Japanese there was a phrase her grandmother used—natsu no aji, the taste of summer—that meant not the flavor itself but the way a flavor returned you to a season you had lost. To translate it as "nostalgic" would be to translate a river as "wet."

Beth planted basil the following spring, in a matching strip on her side of the driveway. She said, laughing, that they were now a united nations of herbs. Yumiko laughed too, and did not correct her, and thought: she thinks we are doing the same thing.

The final line—"she thinks we are doing the same thing"—principally functions to