Comments on: Expatriation — Chapter 3

By: kevinf

kevinf — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:39:05 +0000

HokieKate, either that or Dick will reveal at some point that her mother really wasn’t 1/8th Fijian, and they still live out their days somewhere in the Pacific.

Marcelaine, the contempt for the Fijian natives is such an example of cognitive dissonance that she will certainly have a (very dramatic) break with her current paradigm and love them, or she’ll discover she really isn’t Fijian, and will be totally justified in her contempt, and move back stateside to Montgomery or Selma for the 1960′s.

Yikes, I sound pretty cynical, don’t I? Perhaps it is because I also somehow doubt the “natural jollity” of the Hawaiian natives. Now the most interesting outcome would be for her to discover in a museum her great-grandmother’s pot for cooking missionaries, you know, like from when she still lived in her natural cannibal state.

It’s only a historical artifact…

By: Marcelaine

Marcelaine — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:26:17 +0000

I’m trying to look at this with a 1930s perspective, but I must say I’m not feeling terribly impressed with this young woman who feels that in order to keep her integrity she must go live with her ancestors, and yet she is approaching this with an attitude of contempt towards those very ancestors. She’s even taken that attitude about her own mother, although everyone she meets talks about what a wonderful person she was. Also not really understanding why the 1/16 Fijian blood somehow cancels out the other 15/16, but oh well. It’s interesting to read this now because I recently finished the chapter about blacks and the priesthood in David O McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism.

By: HokieKate

HokieKate — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:43:35 +0000

So, Dick is secretly of mixed race and they fall in love (very dramatically) and live out their days somewhere in the Pacific.