High water: stretch · Grade 12

The passage and its 8 questions

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions in full sentences.

• Linh had spent four years in Ho Chi Minh City learning to see the river as a set of numbers: flow rates, sediment loads, the height of the dry-season salt line creeping inland from the sea. Now the engineering firm had sent her back to the Mekong Delta village where she was born, with a tablet full of models and a mandate to choose the best site for a new sluice gate.
• Her uncle Thanh met her at the landing in the same wooden boat he had owned since before she could walk. He did not ask about the project. He asked whether she still remembered which side of the channel the current favored at dusk, and when she hesitated, he laughed, not unkindly, and handed her the oar.
• For three days they traveled the canals together. She took readings; he took fish. At each candidate site she explained the model's logic, and he listened with the patient face he wore for weather forecasts on the radio. Only once did he speak. At the bend where an old banyan tree leaned over the water, he said, "Here the river floods every year, and every year it leaves the fields richer. Your gate will stop the salt. Will it also stop the silt?"
• Linh had an answer, a good one, involving sediment management and seasonal opening schedules. She gave it. He nodded and said nothing more, and she found that his silence weighed more than her answer.
• On the last night she sat at the table where she had once done her school homework and ran the numbers again. The banyan bend was, by every measure the firm cared about, the best site: cheapest to build, most effective against salt, certain to protect the rice harvests of thousands of families downstream. It would also, she now saw, slowly starve the fields of her uncle's neighbors, who lived upstream of nothing important enough to model.
• In the morning she sent her report. Her uncle walked her to the bus. He did not ask what she had recommended, and she did not tell him. As the bus pulled away, she watched him shrink into the green distance, still standing, one hand raised—whether in blessing or farewell or simple habit, she could not tell—and she suspected that she was not meant to.
• 1. What conflict does Linh face, and why might the author leave her decision unstated?
• 2. What does Uncle Thanh's question about the current at dusk suggest about how he views her education?
• 3. In paragraph 4, his silence 'weighed more than her answer.' What does the word
• 'weighed' suggest?
• 4. How does the phrase 'who lived upstream of nothing important enough to model' reveal the story's critique?
• 5. Choose one critical lens (Marxist, ecocritical or postcolonial) and explain what it reveals about this story.
• 6. Copy the sentence that best captures the story's final ambiguity.
• 7. Find a word in the passage that was new or tricky for you. What do you think it means? Which words around it helped you?
• 8. Write a counterargument or alternative view and respond to it.