AT LEAST FIVE BUT NO MORE THAN SEVEN DOUBLE SPACED (Times New Roman, 12 font) pages you will consider the following two books we have read over the course of the class: Richard Kim’s Lost Names and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. Both of these books are memoirs, but they are also attempts at using personal stories to capture the story of entire nations during tumultuous periods in history.  Although taking place in different locations, the stories recounted by the narrators in each of these stories nevertheless share some important similarities. For example, each depicted periods of suffering at the hands of an oppressive government, each presents an intergenerational story and each tells the story of attempts to radically change the personal, familial and political identities of the protagonists involved. At the same time, both are coming of age stories that prominently feature a young character growing up in a time of turbulence. Your task will be to think about how these elements come together in these memoirs and how these memoirs resemble each other. 

AT LEAST FIVE BUT NO MORE THAN SEVEN DOUBLE SPACED (Times New Roman, 12 font) pages you will consider the following two books we have read over the course of the class: Richard Kim’s Lost Names and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. Both of these books are memoirs, but they are also attempts at using personal stories to capture the story of entire nations during tumultuous periods in history.  Although taking place in different locations, the stories recounted by the narrators in each of these stories nevertheless share some important similarities. For example, each depicted periods of suffering at the hands of an oppressive government, each presents an intergenerational story and each tells the story of attempts to radically change the personal, familial and political identities of the protagonists involved. At the same time, both are coming of age stories that prominently feature a young character growing up in a time of turbulence. Your task will be to think about how these elements come together in these memoirs and how these memoirs resemble each other.