The idea of the quintessential nucleus of society, the "family," is inherently complex. A cohort of people bound by fate, by blood, by love, and by choice. Through a reading of Marianne Moore's poem "The Paper Nautilus," Kim explores the darker aspects of a mother's self-sacrificial love; for the melancholia of the "devil fish" mother could be a desire that her children never let her go. To Hà Trang, family always carries sentiments of nostalgia and longings. She reads two exacts from the novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Lê Thị Diễm Thúy, where the connections between family members are severed by a physical fracture of distance and time from a journey that crosses the ocean and brings them to a completely new land.
