Talking Notes (Achievement of Desire)

 

Xia Wu

September 6, 2015

The Achievement of Desire

Richard Rodriguez

 

In this excerpt of The Achievement of Desire, Richard Rodriguez discusses, in a regretful and reflective tone, how and why the schooling set him and his family apart by referring to Richard Hoggart’s concept of “scholarship boy” and by mentioning his embarrassment about his parent’s lack of education, his ambition of knowledge, his denial of his initial identity and his parent’s educational background in the text.

 

One of my favorite quotations is “Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regrets, I quickly reminded myself of all the things my teacher could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books. I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one doe not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. I remembered too well that education had changed my family’s life.” [1]I like this quote for two reasons. Literarily. this quote showed how regretful, painful and anxious Rodriguez was in a deeper way. Instead of simply saying that he regretted his behaviors towards his family members, he revealed such complicated feelings by describing a series of self-contradicted actions. Emotionally, it seems to me that no matter how hard he tried, he failed to console himself with his academic success. And I had empathy with trying to forget something horrible happened once too.

 

I would like to ask my peers about Rodriguez’s father’s true feelings about education and knowledge. I think he must have yearned for education just as much as Rodriguez did, but unlike his son, he did not get the opportunity to enjoy education unfortunately. Beneath all the contempt he showed about college, there is a man who regarded knowledge with awe and admiration but at the same time he envied educated men. The evidence lies in the text, “he said he liked to go to doctors’ offices and see their certificate and degrees on the wall.”[2] “And when I lost my high school diploma, my father found it as it was about to be thrown out with the trash. Without telling me, he put it away with his own things for safekeeping.”[3] “It was my father who became angry while watching on television some woman at the Miss America contest tell the announcer that she was going to college.”[4] .

 

I just had the feeling that I am in a similar situation as Rodriguez’s. This text seemed just to appear in advance to remind me not to do something that I will regret in the future. My parents are entrepreneurs who can not speak English at all since they have never studied abroad. When they asked me about my college life, I have nothing to tell them. It is not that I do not want to talk to them about art or school life, it is just that there is no common topic. Immediately I know that it is because I have not paid enough attention to my parents while I had been busy on my schoolwork. I think the common thing of this excerpt of The Achievement of Desire and I remember is that both of the two authors tried to look back to the past to find out whom they really were initially. But Rodriguez represents an avatar of an educated man who lost family intimacy due to education. In contrast, Joe Brainard has an avatar which has a stronger sense of time because of remarkable events such as the Kennedy assassination and celebrity such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Pat Boone.

 

[1] Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory (New York: Random House, 2005), 601

[2] Ibid., 605.

[3] Ibid., 605.

[4] Ibid., 604.