Gabrielle Alwi

February 9, 2014

English 1121

The Misery of Silence Summary

The short story “The Misery of Silence” by Maxine Kingston is about a young Chinese girl to who is very shy and didn’t want to speak. School and her social life were hard because she wasn’t the type to talk. It wasn’t that she couldn’t talk; she chose not to talk because English wasn’t her strongest language. She became silent when she began Kindergarten because that was her first time she was told to speak. Since she was little she kept learning and improved her English but she wasn’t comfortable. She had couple of classmates that were also shy talking in English. She was so silent and her behavior was so different from the other students that the teacher had to call up her parents.