Anh Do's Personal Memoir, The Happiest Refugee

The personal memoir extract “Hello School Peoples .I am Anh” is in Anh Do’s personal memoir, the “Happiest Refugee”. The author is Anh DO and the point of view is Anh Do as well because he wrote it when he was going to school. The author (Anh) is reflecting on, how he was a migrant and how everyone laughed at him, all because he couldn’t pronoun words properly. Also they judged him before they even knew him. Now look at him! The qualities it reveals about Anh is that he’s self-confidence is very low and that he became humorous.
The language features that are used in this piece are simile, exaggeration, creative spelling, and repetition. The simile in this is “Saying everything that I had to say like a monotone robot”. The exaggeration I think

was “everyone started laughing”, I’m sure not everyone laughed and the other one was “I…I…should be school captains because I want to helping the students, I think he’s just saying that so he gets in with the teachers and they think that he is perfect for this job. Creative spelling was all throughout this memoir, it was all the misspelt words that he couldn’t say. The repetition was “Just blanking out everyone, every noise, every snicker and laugh”. The effect of these language features are that the similes describe something of something else, exaggeration helps and keep the audience awake. These help evoke emotion by making the reader think more about relating to the story and keeps the audience awake.
The text structures are organisation a structure tense, punctuation and sentence structures. The text is in past tense then the last paragraph is in the future tense, because Anh is looking back on this speech. Fragmented sentence was used by “soon it was over. Thank God”, he added that to create a mood or to draw the audience in more. There are a varied type of sentences that are used like simple or complexed, these are used to create tension and interest to this memoir. They also create juxtaposition of ideas. The use of punctuation make this piece easier to read and even give it more life to it! Ellipse is used by Anh Thinking or by being scared. Exclamation marks are used by “I see her trying not to laugh!” this shows that Anh is upset or angry. This makes the sentence stronger by giving it more texture. And the dashes are used to the complex sentences to construct more layers of meaning.
Overall this memoir is a great piece because the editing, language features, text structures and punctuation is brilliant. I strongly believe that this memoir was about how he’s life started out. How he was not that great at speaking in front of people and now he’s Vietnamese born Australian author, actor, comedian, and artist. You might have seen him on TV a couple of times. This section of the memoir helps the audience understand the troubles that the refugees go through when they have to leave their home country. They have to leave the country of their birth, master a new language, earn a living, understand the new society and its culture, and overcome racism. That’s why we need to be thankful for all the lovely things we have for granted.