September 23, 2015 - 17:23
After reading I, Rigoberta Menchu, I started to think about the importance of language and what does marriage mean to women in the society.
After the first time Rigoberta's father was arrested, the whole family strove to get him our of the prison. They spent all of their hard-earned money to pay for the lawyers and intermediaries. However, the landowners, who were the ones that paid the judge in order to get Rigoberta's father arrested, also paid the intermediary found by Rigoberta's family to mislead the lawyer from understanding what the family was asking for. Therefore, exhausted but futile in efforts, Rigoberta's family failed to save the father from prison. That was when Rigoberta and her other family members decided to learn Spanish. Obtainning the ability of speaking another language means at the same time getting a whole new perspective of what the world is really like. It also aids you to be heard, understanded, and being significant to another group of people. Personally, I could not imagine how ignorant I would be and how much knowledge I would miss if I didn't learn English well enough to make myself able to learn objectively from reading many original texts and immerse myself in another culture.
Rigoberta Menchu personally refuse to get married and I can totally understand that considering her concern of responsibility to provide her children well-being and to lead her whole community fight with adversities. However, she herself is feeling a dilemma since in her culture people respect everything in nature and have a metaphor of being mother as being the earth. She had loved ones and was engaged once, but broke up because of their disparities in life goals. It made me think of Aung San Suu Kyi, a Burmese opposition politician who founded the National League for Democracy. After she was temporarily freed from house arrest under the surveillance in Burma, her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer in UK. The Burmese government refused to issue visa for her husband and used this tragedy as an excuse to make her out of the country. Afraid that she would not be permitted re-entry, she lost her last opportunity to meet her husband who died on his 53th birthday. Even though I believe it is hard for everyone to pursue self-actualization in their careers without simultaneously sacrifice some happiness with having families, I still think it is especially hard for a woman and I am perplexed by this.