Battlers Homework

Pigs From Home

Hop Dac

11. Hop Dac would have felt very humiliated to have been involved with the killing of the pig when he was only thirteen or fourteen years old. Perhaps Hop Dac only started to realise how significant the sacrifice of a pig’s life was that night he was involved with the slaughter because he finally witnesses how much pain a pig has to go through when being killed, merely for the sake of party good. Hence he honours pigs rather than despise them. In addition, he sees how desperately pigs are after food when he witnesses a sow biting off a duck’s bottom, leaving the duck’s guts to fall out everywhere. He would probably have come to realise that although pigs  may seem greedy, always pushing the other animals to get to food first, they are their farm’s biggest animals, hence would need the most food. Seeing how the sow was so desperate to survive by eating the duck’s bottom would have completely took Hop Dac by surprise. This story proves that you do need to lower yourself if you work at menial tasks in order to help your family. In this instance, Hop Dac had to help his dad slaughter the pig. This says that those who do not take “any job” in order to work do not understand the need to make a living and to survive.

22. The text gives me a brutal, heart-wrenching image of all the animals getting killed for food. This includes the pig getting slaughtered and the bush pigeons getting bashed up till they die. You have to accept the harsh fact that in order to belong and thrive in a new land, you have to understand that there are things in life that people have to pursue even if they do not wish so, such as killing animals for food.

33. 

  Challenges:

-Feeding the animals every day

-Helping dad slaughter pig

Emotions:

-Surprise when seeing the sow eating part of the live duck

-Pain when witness the slaughter of the pig

-Fear that the girls they sit with on the bus would find out his family does such things like this

Hop Dac goes on trying because he knows that’s just the way his family operates to obtain food, which is also a party of Vietnam tradition. He knows that, “ …any good Vietnamese family was a self-sustaining one. “

4   4.  Physical journey is being represented in this story. Physical journey is presented when Hop Dac moves from his Geraldton in Western Australia to the other side of the country, Footscray.

   5. Hop Dac has a poor attitude towards pigs and believes, later on in the story, that you should never turn your back on it as pigs are just like the ocean. He thinks this way once he witnesses the sow eating a part of the duck, which surprised him as he always thought they were vegetarians. He would have believed pigs were just lazy and greedy animals at first, but realised they would do anything, such as becoming a cannibal, in order to survive. Hop Dac would have realised that pigs are much more powerful  than what he thought of them before.