The excerpt from “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz made me surprisingly interested that I found myself wanting to read more about the superstition ‘fuku.’ I suppose it was because of how Diaz was telling the history of ‘fuku’ in a style that seemed less academic or formal- like but more natural and humorous. The sentence that took me by surprise and made me laugh was “who killed JFK? Let me, your humble Watcher, reveal one and for all the God’s Honest Truth: It wasn’t the mob or the ghost of Marilyn fucking Monroe.”(4) I admit that if I were to write a novel or paper I definitely would not utilize as much curse words as Diaz but I would love to write like him in a sense that captivates the audience into reading more. Another sentence I could not help but laugh and become sort of terrified was “It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these “superstitions.” In fact, it’s better than fine- it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fuku believes in you.”(4) I never believed in superstitions, even when my grandparents told me about the superstitions in Indonesia I would always brush it off but the way Diaz described ‘fuku’ by hyperbolically asking who killed JFK, where the curse of the Kennedys came from and also talking about his family’s personal ‘fuku’ experience made me wonder and question my own belief. I admire how he didn’t really put much thought into using academic words or complex sentence structures because that was what made me as a reader understand his point. I would like to use that in my own writing, being able to capture the reader’s attention but still sound knowledgable and credible without making my readers confused.
