Track Changes in English
After Jennifer Lunden’s “Evidence, in Track Changes”
Subject: Help my review assignment, please!!
Hello, Kenneth,
I have a review assignment and I choose movie review.
read and please fix my writing.
If you want to add something please do so.
Thank you!!
P.S. let me know when you plan to come home for Thanksgiving. I have a school for next Tuesday. But Emily is off from this Saturday.
I was seventeen, sixteen, fourteen, ten years old.
That time when I was sitting in my room, watching TV, playing a video game, working on homework, and I heard your voice calling my name.
I was so annoyed. Not again. C’mon.
You bought things from eBay and other online stores. Sometimes a package would be missing, or it arrived, but it was something you wanted returned. Other occasions, you were typing emails for Emily’s teachers. You needed someone to revise your writing, and it was often me.
In these emails, I pretended to be you.
I was talking to strangers on eBay, customer service employees, administrative workers, Emily’s teachers, sometimes my own teachers.
In these emails you were able to speak freely in clear and deliberate sentences.
After the five-ten minutes it took to proof emails, you always said thank you.
Once, when I was revising sentences, you said you were happy you had such a smart son.
I remember saying, “This is so easy.”
I didn’t realize how small I made you feel.
E. Lee
English 1010
The bBaby dDriver, When I first time heard of this movie title, I was confused it with other a different movie called Baby bBoss which I wasn’t interested, so I removed the bBaby dDriver from my watch later list due to this by misunderstandingtood. However, when my son showed me the bBaby dDriver movie trailer on yYoutTube, I put decided to give the movie back on my list and a chancewatched. After watching, I’ am glad that I did it.
This movie is like the perfect Thanksgiving dinner, handsome turkey with juicy gravy, moisture stuffing, and sweet tangy cranberry sauce.
“Think of the children. What about them?”
That’s what my stepdad said when you were thinking of taking a few classes and pursuing a degree.
I was nine, Emily was three.
“Who’s going to take care of the children?”
So you stayed home.
I hated the way you spoke. The accent you carried, the one I inherited. Teachers called me shy, wondered why I never spoke more in class.
But I was afraid of how we spoke, ashamed of how broken and fragmented we sounded.
Remember when I was in second grade? I was taken out of class every week for speech therapy and during one of my sessions, the instructor implied my speech problems were because of you.
When I returned home, I told you what happened, and you turned angry.
“No. Not because of me,” you said. “Did you tell her? Did you tell her not my fault?”
But I did blame you. Why couldn’t you speak English properly? Correctly?
One day, you returned home after an exchange
with a confused cashier at Walmart and broke
into tears, sobbing and sobbing.
“No one understand me here.”
I held you. “I understand you.”
You continued crying. “But one day you won’t.”
The story is: worth paying attention to. Baby is the nickname of the young getaway driver. He has the special driving skills; that he can drive wildly while whenever he listens to music on through his iPod. He works with a robbery crew assembled by a man nicknamed Doc to pay his debt. Anyhow, wWhen bBaby thinks finally paidy his debt and became free from this dangerous crews, Doc threateneding Bbaby to come back to the job, otherwise baby can put everybody he cared about would be s in danger, including himself.
When you were twenty-one, a man from the Army took you back to the States with him. You couldn’t speak English then, and when he died two years later, you were told by white people to avoid Korean and only teach English to the one-year-old son he left you.
“You don’t want to confuse him,” they said.
I never told you. I practiced in front of the mirror. Rehearsing simple words over and over again.
“Thirty” (approximately twenty-nine)
“World” (planet)
“Kenneth” (Ken)
Kids made fun of me, asking me to say words
they knew I couldn’t pronounce.
You didn’t know how to help me, and I blamed you.
I wanted you to be perfect.
That time you were on the floor. Your eyes were red, your voice was breaking, upset at the world.
“I wanted to teaching you,” you said. “I wanted to teaching you my language. But they told me not to.”
You once told me you were afraid of growing old, forgetting all the English you learned. You said speaking was like searching and fumbling for words in a heavy fog.
You asked me
how are we going to understand each other
if you ever forget English, if I never learn Korean.
I didn’t know how to answer. So I made a joke.
“Caveman grunts. UGG UG UGG.”
But I never forgot your question, and I still
don’t have an answer.
To escape from this terrible situation, bBaby betrayed his crew and triedy to run away with his girlfriend Debora, but they run into a police roadblock and bBaby surrendered to save Debora. After the trial, Baby finished was done his prison sentence and met Debora again.
That time when I thought the problem was Georgia.
“Why can’t we move to Seattle? Or California?”
You laughed. A sad laugh.
“Racists everywhere. Even Seattle.”
That time when we were fighting. A long, stupid fight about nothing.
I was yelling. “What? I don’t understand.”
You cried and yelled back. “When you saying you don’t understand, it hurting me. Like knife
in my heart. It hurting me.”
That conversation when I was seven
and wanted a lunchbox.
7 p.m., an hour before my bedtime. I was watching
a commercial on TV. Was so excited.
I raced out of my room to find you.
“Mom, I want a lunchbox.”
You were still learning English at the time and couldn’t understand me. You didn’t know what I was saying. You didn’t know lunchbox.
I had to explain it to you. I tried, and yet
we still couldn’t understand each other. Annoyance transformed into frustration, then terror,
a loud sadness.
Was it my fault? It felt like it. Years later,
you told me you felt like a failure,
how you couldn’t understand your own son.
“Lunchbox, lunchbox. You put food inside,” I said
in between muffled sobs.
You were hugging me tightly. My face was buried inside your arms. I didn’t see, but you were crying too.
What I love most about this movie is baby’s driving action is synchronize with the soundtrack. There are a lot of old Rock ’N’ Roll and easy going songs like Bellbottoms by the hon spencer blues explosion, Tequila by the champs and Harem shuffle by Bob and Earl. Every song is matched with baby feeling and moves.
The baby driver has all. The fantastic action, wonderful oldies but goodies songs, a little bit of love story, and also a happy ending. I have enjoyed watching this movie, and I am recommended anyone who likes to see fantastic action and wonderful music in a movie.
My stepdad would always correct you during dinner when you spoke.
A singular-plural disagreement.
A tense error.
A pronunciation mistake.
I sided with him when I was younger. I thought
we were helping. But I was wrong.
Lately, whenever I return home, and
I hear him correct the way you speak, it annoys me. Because I want you to talk freely,
not just at home, inside your house,
but always.
Listening to your voice, sentences drift
in and out of tense:
past, present, and future
all intertwining together.
10 p.m. You finally figured it out. I had to draw you pictures. Grabbed paper and crayons. And after a few more rounds of guessing you figured it out—lunchbox.
I was still crying at the hours wasted, the difficulty
of trying to communicate with my mother, but
I stopped after you told me it would be okay.
“It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. I’m sorry. It’s going to be okay now.”
You drove us thirty minutes to Walmart that same night
for me.
Normally, I would be in bed, already asleep,
but I was at the store, holding your hand and
walking the aisles. I picked a lunchbox. Blue.
There were Hot Wheels on the cover.
It was beautiful.
Subject: Movie Review
Hey Mom!
I gave you revisions in Word doc. You have to go to the above tab and click “Review.”
Also click “All Markup” in the tracking section. Then you can accept or reject my revisions.
Hope this helps! Love you!
Kenneth Lee is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at West Virginia University. His writing has appeared in jmww, The Collapsar, and Entropy.