Read the story. The Speech

A hush fell over the crowd as Samir approached the stage; he took a deep breath and tried to still the tremble in his hands.

He had rehearsed the speech for days, practicing late into the night when the house was quiet. The night before, he had been putting the finishing touches on the speech when his mother snuck up the stairs and stopped by his bedroom door with a mug of tea.

“It looks like you will need this. How’s it coming?” She tucked the long end of her sari under her leg and sat on his bed.

The familiar smell that reminded him of trips to India tickled his nose as he took the warm mug from her; he pressed it to his lips and took a long sip. “I don’t think they’re going to understand it.”

“It’s okay if they don’t understand it in their brains; it’s more important that they feel it here.” She pressed her hand to his heart.

“My friends don’t know what you went through to get here, and I want to get it just right because I need them to like the story.”

“Your friends will like you no matter what. Practice it one more time, and then you need to get some sleep.”

He stared at the words that he had painstakingly crafted to tell the story of how his parents had immigrated to the United States from India. Even though he hadn’t been born at the time, he could feel the heat on their skin as they’d packed up their belongings in Mumbai and boarded the plane for their new lives. After a twenty20-hour flight, they landed in the chill of Chicago; they hadn’t brought enough heavy clothes with them and had to buy sweatshirts from the airport store before stepping out into snow for the first time. His mother had danced around in the swirling white like a fascinated child, tasting flakes on her tongue before the cab whisked them away to their new lives.

He didn’t know how his parents got by in those early days of loneliness and isolation, when they didn’t know their neighbors and couldn’t find their favorite spices or flavors in the local grocery store. He imagined his homesick mother making pungent curry in the tiny kitchen of the apartment that was their first home—curry that she didn’t share with anyone except her husband because he was the only person she knew.

Eventually they had made a life there, and one year after they’d brought Samir home as a newborn, his younger sister Aarti was born, and they became a family of four. Each year that his parents lived in Chicago, they spoke about Mumbai like it was more of a memory. Samir grew up hearing stories of Mumbai and taking summer trips where he heard his parents speak a language that was clumsy on his own English-speaking tongue. He couldn’t imagine leaving his life and moving herefar away, but he knew that his parents had done it for him and his sister. “It was the ultimate sacrifice,” his mother had said, “but it was worth it.”

When he had finished rehearsing his speech for his mother, she dabbed her face, and he knew she was crying. He didn’t need to ask how the speech was—her expression told him that it was perfect.

Samir’s thoughts came back to the present moment as he cleared his throat and stepped onto the stage in front of the entire middle school—his friends and teachers were all here. He had often felt different from his peers and wanted so much for them to understand his story. But looking out into the crowd at all the different faces he realized that his peers must have their own stories to tell as well. Perhaps they wanted to be understood, too. He realized the only way to be understood is to share those stories. Perhaps if he shared his own story, others would share theirs, too. Perhaps it would help them to understand one another. He found his mom’s eyes in the middle of the front row. When she nodded, he began.

“I’m going to tell the story of how my parents became American citizens.”
How does the theme that it is important to understand our family stories develop in "The Speech"?

The theme develops through the author's depiction of how Samir changes from feeling different from his peers to feeling not so different after his mother tells him their family story.

The Questions:

The theme develops through the author's depiction of how Samir realizes that Chicago must have been as strange to his parents as Mumbai was to him as a child.

The theme develops through the author's depiction of how Samir changes from being nervous about giving a speech about his family to feeling confident after he recalls his family's story.

The theme develops through the author's depiction of how Samir's recollection of his family's story before he gives his speech helps him to appreciate his family as well as the different experiences of others.