Wei is you were of a certain

Wei is you were of a certain

Wei Wen Professor Rowe English 101 May 9, 2011 Fuku—a curse of bad consequences “Fuku—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World,” written in the Pulitzer Prize winning novel—The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is written by Junot Diaz (Diaz 1). If you make a bad choice, you will receive “fuku,” says Junot Diaz in the interview on Q TV (YouTube). In the interview with Slate Magazine, Diaz says that the novel “is all about the dangers of dictatorship” (Rourke 3).It describes how Oscar’s family’s three generations have been affected by the dictatorship of Trujillo who was the president of Dominican Republic and different other dictatorships by Yunior’s narration.

There is no doubt that fuku is one of the most powerful dictatorships in this novel. According to the definition made by Junot in the interview on Q TV, fuku is “a curse of consequences” (YouTube). If you make a bad choice, fuku will befall you. Every day we need to make countless choices which cause countless consequences.Some consequences are good. Others are not.

Like Yunior, the narrator of the novel, asks, “Why do you think the greatest power in the world lost its first war to a Third World country like Vietnam” (Diaz 4)? That’s fuku because America chooses to start a unjust war. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, we can see how Oscar’s family struggles under the dictatorship of fuku because they make bad choices. Abelard is the first victim of fuku in his family.

He falls in the hell of fuku because of the bad choices he makes.Yunior says, “It’s a well-documented fact that in Trujillo’s DR is you were of a certain class and you put your cute daughter anywhere near El Jefe, within the week she’d be mamando his ripio like an old pro…”(Diaz 217). Unfortunately, Abelard happens to have two cute daughters. Since knowing that Trujillo keeps an eye on his wife and daughters, Abelard keeps hiding them from Trujillo.

Hiding his daughters from Trujillo is the first bad choice Abelard makes due to that fact that Trujillo will crucify or kill Abelard if Trujillo knows that he is, “instead f bringing his wife and daughter to Jefe events,” hiding them from him, which is challenging Trujillo’s authority (Diaz 216). Then Abelard makes a bad choice again. He once has a chance to send his daughters to Cube to live with his mistress Lydia’s family, so they can escape form Trujillo. However, Abelard chooses to believe “his Trujillo philosophy” that “he only had to keep his head down, his mouth shut, his pockets open, his daughters hidden for another decade or two. By then … Trujillo would be dead and the Dominican Republic would be a true democracy” (Diaz 227).Apparently, it turns out that his hope is just a hope in terms of his ending.

Nevertheless, there is third opportunity offered that is he leaves everything and runs away with his mistress. Once again, he makes a bad choice that he chooses to stay in Dominican Republic. Therefore, all he can do left is waiting for fuku. Abelard ends up being imprisoned and dying. Because of that, his family breaks completely.

Two of three daughters die in accidents after they are sent to relatives’ family. The third daughter Beli is sold to a strange family as a slave.We can easily see the reason that fuku befalls Abelard is that he makes bad choices again and again. Also, we can find the same reason that fuku befalls Beli who is Oscar’s mother as Abelard’s. Beli is the second generation of Abelard’s family under the dictatorship of fuku.

After a dark and pathetic childhood, Beli is adopted by her aunt La Inca. Everything seems turning better and better. Beli has a nice aunt La Inca to take good care of her. She gets to get into “El Rendentor, one of the best schools in Bani” (Diaz 82). However, it starts to change when she begins to know love.She chooses Jack Pujols, a white boy whose father is a colonel in air force, to be her first lover.

After the first time they have sex, Beli “tried to embrace him, to touch his silken hair, but he shook off her caresses”. Jack says, “Hurry up and get dressed. If we get caught my ass will be in the fire” (Diaz 100). His attitude doesn’t like he just has sex with his lover at all because he doesn’t even want to accept a hug with Beli. From here, it is not that hard to know that Jack doesn’t care Beli at all.

Beli is more like a sex partner for him.Nevertheless, Beli can’t see it and chooses to continue their relationships. Just as expected, after they are caught having sex in the closet, Jack, whom Beli wants to marry, “of course blamed Beli for everything” (Diaz 100).

This is the first time she receive fuku because of the bad choice she makes. The fuku is that her her heart is broken and her “tenure at the school was over” (Diaz 102). Sometimes that loss means you might get something better. It seems to happen on Beli. After Beli gets over Jack Pujols and recovers from the heart broken, she runs into the most important man in her life.

Gangster, a charming and wealthy agency, falls in love with Beli. No matter what Gangster seems to be the Charming prince for Beli. Beli is pregnant with his child. Nevertheless, the ending tells us that Beli makes the bad choice again. It turns out that Gangster is the husband of Soy Trujillo, sister of Trujillo. After Soy Trujillo hears about the relationship of Gangster and Beli and Beli is having his child, she orders her men to take Beli to a canefield and “beat her like she was a slave” (Diaz 147).In the end, Beli almost gets killed and loses the child whom she doesn’t even know what he looks like.

Once again, because of the bad choice that she picks the wrong guy to love, she gets fuku. The last time she is trying to believe in love fails too. Oscar and Lola’s father breaks Beli’s heart and her hope of love after two years they met. Since then, she never loves again. As long as she believes in love, she ends up with a broken heart. Why does she just choose not love anymore? Choosing not to love anymore seems to be a good choice for Beli.

Nonetheless, she is still under the dictatorship of fuku because she has to live with the pain of her past for the rest of her life. Therefore, Beli makes the bad choice at last and the fuku is going to last forever. Oscar, the third generation of his family, also is one of the victims of fuku. He lives with fear and trepidation under the dictatorship of fuku for almost his whole life. Oscar’s fuku starts from as a little boy. At that time, Oscar was a beloved boy that “the girls—his sister Lola’s friends, his mother’s friends, even their neighbor, Mari Colon… all purportedly fell for him” (Diaz 12).He even dates two women, Maritza and Olga, at the same time, but he has to choose either one to be his girlfriend.

Then he makes the bad choice that begins his miserable life under the dictatorship of fuku. After Maritza, the girl Oscar chooses, dumps him, “his life started going down the tubes” (Diaz 16). He is getting fatter and fatter and eventually turns into a “weighted 307 pounds” guy (Diaz 173). In addition, he has been a nerd who is obsessed with sci-fi book that always “talked like a Star Trek computer” (Diaz 173).

Because of that, he becomes a “girl nonconductor. ” He keeps his virginity until he dies, which is really pathetic by comparing to Yunior, who is a player having a lot of girlfriend. Clearly, the bad choices Oscar makes as a little boy causes fuku that makes his life miserable.

Furthermore, the wrong choices that Oscar makes when he meets his last lover cause fuku befall him and lead him to death eventually. When Oscar’s family goes back to Santo Domingo, he meets Ybon, the woman whom he will be mad about. However, it turns out that Oscar chooses the wrong woman to love.Ybon’s ex-boyfriend—the capitan is a control freak.

He doesn’t allow any man to be with Ybon even though they broke up already. Knowing Oscar having a very close relationship with Ybon, the capitan orders his men take Oscar to a canfield and beat him to half dead. Fortunately, he survives and leaves Santo Doming back to the United States. However, he makes the worst and the last choice that he decides to go back to Santo Domingo for Ybon, his love. Once again, he is taken to the canfield except this time what he gets is not fists but a bullet—death.

In short, Oscar’s pathetic life and the way he dies all due to fuku caused by the bad choices he makes. Diaz illustrates the connection between the choice and fuku by the experiences of Abelard, Beli and Oscar. As a matter of fact, Diaz is trying to tell us that if we make a bad choice, we will receive fuku. It is very easy to find out that usually we can only determine the choices the characters make are bad until the results come out. Most people would assume that’s really terrified because there is no way to avoid fuku if they don’t know if the choices they make are not bad.

However, “unknown” is exactly the reason that our world turns into what it’s like today. Therefore, we don’t need to worry fuku and feel free to choose what we want. Works Cited Di? az, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007. Print. O’Rourke, Meghan.

“Questions for Junot Diaz. – By Meghan O’Rourke. ” Slate Magazine. 8 Nov. 2007. Web.

25 Apr. 2011. ;http://www.

slate. com/id/2177644/pagenum/all/#p2;. “YouTube – Junot Diaz on Q TV. ” YouTube – Broadcast Yourself. 3 Feb.

2009. Web. 25 Apr.

2011. ;http://www. youtube.

com/watch? v=_Kc78fZQ3QM;.