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Part III: Aid Ambiguous
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in This Is How It Always Is, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gender and Binaries
Secrets and Misunderstanding
Violence and Discrimination
Storytelling
Family
Summary
Analysis
As Rosie is led away to the clinic, Claude is led away to the school, or what is supposed to be the school. A woman sits Claude down and tells him to teach, and then she sends in children. The children immediately think Claude is a monk because his head is shaved, but he tells them he is definitely not a monk. He just shaved his head. One of the children asks him if he did it to hide, and Claude says he did it because he was angry. As a way of breaking the ice, Claude asks the children what they want to be when they grow up, but the children automatically assume that Claude is asking them what they want to be in their “next life.”
Again, the children are Buddhists and believe in rebirth. They think of the future in terms of generations and lifetimes, not something that is reached when they grow up. This also reflects how dire the children’s situation is. They know they likely won’t have many chances in this life and are already thinking about the next one. Monks are traditionally bald, which is why the children think Claude is a monk.
Themes
Claude stays at the school all day, and then he stays behind to sweep and clean. Afterward, Claude goes back to the guesthouse and calls Penn. He tells Penn that he was forced to be a teacher and that the children think he is a monk. He asks Penn if monks can be girls, but Penn isn’t sure. Claude thinks the children are a good “blind” test. If they think he is a girl, then he is a girl; but if they think he is a boy, then he is a boy. Penn tells Claude not to think too much about it. The children have probably never seen a white person before, whether Claude is a boy or girl probably never crossed their minds. Penn asks Claude what he sees when he looks at himself. Does he see a boy or a girl? “I see nothing,” Claude says.
Again, Claude is clearly suffering because of his struggles with gender dysphoria, since he sees “nothing” when he looks in the mirror. Monks can be either men or women; although in Thailand, female monks must be brought in by another female monk to be accepted. Still, the children thinking Claude is a monk does not imply definitively either boy or girl. As most things about Poppy and Claude, the monk statement, too, is ambiguous and is neither male nor female but a combination of both.
Themes
