Quang's Freedom in November, I Conclusion

I set up my practice at once. So many maladies among citizens of this town were directly related to the spiritual imbalance in the forest. Little puk-wudgees caused much havoc among the townsfolk. Oh, at first the people of Freetown had little faith in my medicine, but over time they came to appreciate that I was perfect for their unique corner of the world.

Theirs was a land haunted. People came to me when the ghosts in their attic began to make noise; when they saw lights above the forest at night; when they saw a creature from the corner of their eye. This was life as normal in Freetown. Everybody who lived there simply accepted it, without becoming creepy like such a town would seem on television. But I helped them. I helped them learn the reasons why spirits acted the ways they did. I taught them how to appease the spirit world, how to appreciate the things that they only saw from the corner of their eye.

The native peoples became some of my best friends. I do not suppose I would have made such fast friends with tribes in my homeland. Had I ventured to Sa Pa to visit the Tay or Miao people, I may have found the same kinship, but I never had such an experience back home. I made one great friend among all the Wampanoag, an aged man by the name of George Adams.

George was the local medicine man and he knew the spirits of the forest better than anybody else. I spent quite a bit of time in the forest with George, and he introduced me to every important tree and every important rock. I merely understood the spirits; George spoke with them. Each spirit had its own character -- they were all special. They came and went from our world according to their own schedule. The knowledge I gained from George was invaluable, and it helped me in my work to help the townsfolk with their spiritual maladies.When he passed, I set up a shrine in his honor in the forest. He still guides me.

Today I am as much American as I am Vietnamese. I see the world through both sets of eyes. It was an extraordinary set of circumstances, right down to the lady at the airport, that brought me to where I stand today. Those circumstances were sometimes very difficult, but ultimately it took each and every one of them to make me the man I am now. For that, I will always be grateful.

Reflection Essay. This conclusion I felt would be a fitting epilogue because it places the story in perspective by showing where the events of the story have taken Quang.

I chose to put Quang in Freetown Massachusetts because I felt that his history would mesh well with such an area. Settling in Los Angeles would have been far too easy. As well, the decision to have him become enriched in the spirit world was something that added to the interest level of the epilogue; to have him open a ph? shop would have simply been trite. I had Quang make his decision to relocate spontaneously because it makes for a more interesting narrative. The epilogue is after the end of the story; it is the very beginning of a new one. In this case, Quang realized that and started writing his own unique story right away.

One strength of my project is that shows how the life of a refugee can be largely separated from his prior world, but at the same time certain common threads can appear that bind the two worlds. A weakness of this project is that it is essentially a whole new story, bearing only limited relevance to the events of the previous one, and in a way almost teasing the reader with something that probably could warrant a full story in its own….....