“‘I want to get up every morning and know that I’m going to go do something honest. I want to stop chocking on my food because I know where the money come from. I want to stop worrying every time somebody knock at the fate that maybe it the police that come to take you or Zhang or the whole lot of us to lock us up in some stinking Jamaican jail and never again see the light of day. I want to stop thinking that maybe one day the blacks going raise up and just come murder every one of us as we sleeping in our bed at night. The Indians, the Chinese, the Jews, the Whites.”
Pao is narrated from a rather interesting perspective. It is a book written in English, but narrated by a Chinese immigrant who lives in Jamaica. Because of the “language barrier”, a lot of the English in the story is broken or not completely grammatically correct. This is showcased in a majority of the book from subjects and verbs not agreeing to runoff sentences to possession not being acknowledged. This is no-one in the books fault, as they all are trying to communicate to the best of their abilities and knowledge; however, not being able to fully articulate due to “language barriers” may make it difficult to get a point across.
In this passage, Xiuquan uses parallelism and repetition to showcase his strong beliefs. He is trying to get a specific and meaningful (to him) point across, and this comes off very strongly through his word choice. In the passage, the repeated use of “I want to” is used over and over again and this allows the showcasing of the strong passion that Xiuquan has on this topic. Rather than using a lot of different words and lengthy sentences to portray his point, the simplest use of repetition allows the reader the same effect. The use of parallelism also allows for Xiuquan to continue to showcase this strong emotion and feeling, shown through his use of “I want to” and when he names the different races, “The Indians, the Chinese, the Jews, the Whites”. He is achieving a passionate connotation that might otherwise be very difficult to showcase tot he audience considering his diction and vocabulary.