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#6 Victory Lap (George Saunders, 2009)

Rating: 8.5/10

    Adults who affect children the most in their early periods are their own parents. Parents are the social acquaintance that helps develop fundamental life skills such as socializing and psychological thought process. In the short story 'Victory Lap,' two kids and one adult, Alison, Kyle, and the Stranger, experience the same incident but reflect it in drastically different aspects. Kyle and the stranger show similar fears by being traumatized by manipulative parents. On the contrary, Alison's parents are the only refuge that protects her safe from all the harm.
    Throughout the entire story, Kyle and the Stranger fail to seek independence from their parents even after almost twenty years of death. Each character's honest inner voice was always disrupted by their parents' comments on their behaviors. For instance, Kyle his the stranger's head with Geode, which symbolizes his parents' oversimplified quantification of his goodness. Even when he tries to do the morally right, Kyle can't halt worrying about defying his parents in such dilemmatic procedures. This way, I cast doubt on the typical Asian 'strict mom' parenting method, which could infinitely trap their kids under repeated traumatic memory.

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