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Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Beloved World, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Optimism, Determination, and Adversity
Family and Friendship
Education and Learning
Puerto Rican Identity and Culture
Morality, Justice, and Giving Back
Summary
Analysis
Kenny Moy, the student coach of the girls’ Forensics Club team at school, visits often to watch wrestling with Titi Aurora. Sonia joins the Forensics Club to work on her public speaking. Ken is an amazing debate coach: he can easily dismantle his opponent’s position and does so without emotion. His family runs a hand laundry in East Harlem and since it’s an hour away and Ken’s dad is trouble, they often hang out at Sonia’s apartment. Despite being Chinese, he fits right in with the Puerto Rican kids. Forensics Club ends up being great preparation for being a lawyer, and Sonia’s philosophy class is also helpful. Both teach her to change people’s minds—and they also teach her to listen, so she can respond effectively.
As Sonia explains how Forensics Club and her philosophy class prepared her to be a lawyer, she makes the case that it’s not enough to just be smart and earn the degree. Rather, a lawyer needs to learn how to think, how to convince, and most importantly, how to listen and interpret what one hears. With this, she essentially suggests that emotional intelligence is what makes her a good lawyer—and this is also what makes her a good friend and allows her to collect friends like Ken over the course of her life.
Themes
Sonia is an exceptional listener; she began to develop the skill as a child watching for the beginning of a fight between her parents. Ken teaches her to pay attention to “vulnerable links in a chain of logic,” but Sonia knows that it’s still important to pay attention to the emotions of her listeners. For instance, at speech finals, Sonia chooses to speak about the murder of Kitty Genovese because she knows she can appeal to her listeners’ emotions. She graphically tells Kitty Genovese’s story of assault and rape and then implicates the 38 neighbors who witnessed or heard and did nothing. She insists that all humans have an obligation to care for others and wins first prize.
With Ken’s help, Sonia is able to combine her emotional intelligence and her ability to pay attention with a newfound ability to use logic. Especially at the finals competition she describes, it’s not enough to simply give the facts of what happened to Kitty Genovese and insist that people must care for each other—she has to make her listeners feel as though if they’re ever confronted with something like this, they’ll step up and do what Kitty Genovese’s neighbors didn’t do.
Themes
One night, while Sonia and Junior are doing homework, Mami bursts in and dramatically announces she can’t do it. Mami recently signed up for a course to qualify as a registered nurse. The issue is that Mami knows her stuff but is terrified in a school setting. Sonia, however, makes a habit of using reverse psychology on Mami to keep her going—so whenever Mami threatens to quit, Sonia and Junior announce that they’re done with school, too. It works.
What Sonia learns in school and at Forensics Club isn’t just useful at competitions and in the classroom—she can also use it to trick Mami into achieving her goals. The fact that Junior seems in on this suggests that Sonia and Junior’s relationship is improving as they get older; they can now work together toward a common goal.
Themes
