His wings were pinned and he was bigger in my hands a than I had ever imagined. But a Vietnamese woman in experienced in these things and Mr. Green did not have a chance even to make a sound as I laid him on his side, pinned him with my knee, slid my hands up and wrung his neck.
Throughout the story, the woman’s grandfather constantly tells her that she can’t do something because she is a girl or that she doesn’t want to be like the old women. Since she was a child, she has always looked up to her mother and wanted to be like her when she was grown. The parrot symbolizes the grief that she had with her grandfather. When she was a little girl, she wanted to be able to do anything for him and she was told that she couldn’t because she was a woman. The bird takes the voice of her grandfather, so after the grandfather dies, he is still present in her life. At the end of the story, the woman can see that the bird is acting how her grandfather did before he died. She then takes the bird to the garden and does what her mother taught her to do with birds. She has taken the path she wanted and become the woman she wanted to be. In the last couple of sentences in the story, the woman talks about Jesus and how when he died, women were around to see it. She says, “They couldn’t do anything for Him. But neither could the men, who had all run away.” This shows the realization she made to herself; being a woman doesn’t mean that you can’t do certain things like her grandfather told her; it means that you can do as much as the men can.
Be careful about tense. I had to make lots of edits here.