One! Hundred! Demons!

Nonfiction | Graphic Memoir | YA | Published in 2002

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-19

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary: “Common Scents”

Barry notices the smell of other people’s houses. She is fascinated by the mysteries inherent in these smells. She wonders about the house that smells like bleach. She finds some houses wonderful: The Palinkis’ house smells like mint, tangerines, and library books. She has trouble describing her own house’s smell. Even though it is full of strongly scented items, like cigarettes, aftershave, perfume, fried smelt, garlic and onions, hairspray, and a dog, Barry can’t smell any of it. She knows she must have the strongest-smelling house in the neighborhood, but she can only understand its aroma through that of others. When another kid tells her that her house smells like fried grease and boiled pigs blood, Barry’s mother forbids that kid from playing at Barry’s house.

In contrast to Barry’s, that girl’s house smells like a bus bathroom because her mother copiously disinfects, sprays everything with deodorizers, and fills the house with car air fresheners. The mom makes derogatory comments about how other races and cultural groups smell. When Barry relays the mom’s observations to her grandmother, Barry’s grandmother defensively reminds her that white ladies smell plenty bad. When the air freshener mom moves away, the new tenants have trouble getting rid of her smell.

As an adult, Barry reads about a murderer who buys air fresheners to cover the smell of her dead husband in the attic. Barry wonders what secret the air freshener mom was trying to hide. Barry considers how even though nobody particularly likes how air fresheners smell, they are always tempting. Her grandmother tried one but hated the smell, preferring the smell of fried fish instead. Barry wishes she could bottle up the smell of her old house and her grandmother’s cooking.

Chapter 6 Summary: “Resilience”

Barry wonders when she became a teenager. It wasn’t when she turned 13 or had her first kiss in a dark, creepy ravine with a paper boy. Barry alludes to awful experiences from earlier childhood that had introduced her to sex in “harsh ways” (65). Most kids in her neighborhood experienced some sort of trauma that made it hard for them to grow up. Barry reflects on the way people talk about resiliency in children, as if forgetting about traumatic events eliminates their psychological effects.

After kissing the paper boy, Barry talks about him with a new classmate from home economics class. That girl was already more sexually experienced by age 12. Barry tells the paper boy about her and he immediately asks that girl out, sidelining Barry. Barry floats through different social groups but has trouble fitting in. Barry tries to stay away from the darkness of her inner life, fracturing her identity into pieces. Adults think this dissociation is a form of resilience.

Barry again wonders when she became a teenager—whether it happened when she began acting out, stealing, and doing drugs. She determines that she became a teenager when she discovered that certain harmful and thrill-seeking behaviors could give her a sense of wholeness. She alludes to the shattering event from her childhood, depicting a man offering to take her and her doll for a ride.

Chapter 7 Summary: “Hate”

Barry remembers early friendships and how normal it was to temporarily hate your friend while you were fighting. Eventually she gets a lecture about how she should never say the word “hate.” Even Barry’s mother, with all her rage, does not admit to hating anyone. Despite this, Barry hates lots of people, particularly one bully, Ronnie Delgado, who always pushes her down. She also hates characters in books, like Huck Finn’s drunk father. She hears a sermon in church about hating the sin but not the sinner, but still feels hatred toward Ronnie. Learning not to tell anyone about her hatred to avoid the lecture, Barry worries that she is secretly evil because she can’t stop hating people like Ronnie.

A new substitute teacher changes Barry’s perspective. She gives a talk on prejudice and teaches the students about different kinds of hate. She explains the difference between hate with “destructive intent” (84) and the kind that’s a “response to something destructive” (84). Even though the substitute teacher gets in trouble, Barry feels grateful to that teacher for making a young Barry feel understood.

Chapter 8 Summary: “The Aswang”

As a kid, Barry believes in ghosts and spirits. Her grandmother tells her the story of the Aswang—a half-dog, half-woman with a blood-sucking tongue. Grandma explains that if Barry sees a strange dog with extra-long back legs watching her, it’s the Aswang in the daytime. At night, the Aswang takes the form of a flying beautiful woman who can separate her top and bottom halves; crawling across the ceiling, she uncurls her tongue and sucks your blood. Barry and her grandmother aren’t afraid of the Aswang, but Barry’s mother is. Instead, Barry is afraid of her mother. Barry reflects on the clarity of monsters—something concrete usually transforms them into their monstrous state.

While arguing about the Aswang with her mother and grandmother, Barry notices that her mother worships Grandma, while Grandma treats her daughter with detachment. Barry wonders if Grandma treated her mother the way Barry’s mother now treats Barry. A generational cycle plays out across the women of the family.

Chapters 5-8 Analysis

Barry grounds each chapter in strong sensory description. This is most obvious in “Common Scents,” where Barry describes the smells of the various houses she visited during her childhood. Her ability to translate this olfactory experience into stories about the families living in these houses reveals Barry’s deeply observant and imaginative nature. She takes these smells and imagines a narrative around them; in one example, she wonders what secrets the bleach-smelling family might be hiding, interpolating the idea that car air fresheners could conceal the odor of a dead body. The combination of mystery and darker motivations in this imagined narrative hints at How Creativity Transforms During Adolescence, as readers see the seeds of Barry’s eventual passion for storytelling. This chapter turns when Barry hears from a friend that her own house smells bad and feels ashamed that the Filipino cooking she is used to seems so strange and off-putting to her white neighbors. Suddenly seeing herself from the outside the way she did when a friend told her she danced poorly, Barry now conceptualizes herself in relation to hegemonic whiteness and faces the destabilizing feeling of being other. However, with the distance of adulthood, Barry longs again for the smell of her grandmother’s cooking, rejecting the prejudicial white gaze.

In the chapters “Resilience” and “Hate,” adults project some kind of principle on Barry as a child that contradicts her actual lived experiences. Barry critiques adults that call children like her “resilient”—this label disregards a child’s real interiority, assuming that repressed trauma is the same thing as mental health. Barry dramatizes the process of dissociating and banishing traumatic memories by alluding several times to what readers probably interpret as an early childhood sexual assault, but always forcibly banishing the memory. Several times, Barry begins to bring up the memory, and then stops, deciding that some things must be forgotten. This construct disproves the notion that children are resilient because they forget about bad things that happen to them. Rather, Barry demonstrates the Impact of Trauma on Identity: Children learn to fracture their identities and force themselves to forget, while suffering emotional and behavioral consequences.

In a similar way, Barry deconstructs the concept of hate, examining the hypocrisy of adults condemning her for being hateful or using the word hate, while plainly behaving in hateful ways. Barry has trouble squaring their claims that hate is forbidden with the visceral hatred she feels toward people who bully and abuse her. In a brief departure from the pain and trauma of these chapters, Barry describes a positive moment of seeing herself through another’s eyes. When her kind teacher explained different kinds of hate, Barry felt validated for the first time, gaining confidence and security in her own feelings.

In the Aswang chapter, Barry puts the idea of seeing herself through another’s eyes into generational context. She analyzes the power dynamics between the women of her family. Her grandmother shows Barry kindness, but treats Barry’s mother coldly. In turn, Barry’s mother treats Barry with cruelty. Both mother and grandmother bristle at mentions of their own mothers. After observing these women, Barry no longer sees her relationship with her mother as an indictment of Barry’s personality; instead, it is part of a repeating cycle of generational trauma passing through her family.