How Does It Feel to Be a Problem ?

Besides the author’s writing style, the plot of this book was very interesting and sad. Jamal’s older brother was in jail due to murder and his mother is a single parent that has to work nearly 24 hours a day to support Jamal and his

The way in which this story is told I find is very unique. The Book Of Unknown Americans is written in a first person perpective where each chaacter gets to personnaly introduce themselves and explain their life story. When reading this book it almost feels as if you are talking one on one with a close friend. Henriquez has a way of pulling your right through text and submerging you into the same word as the characters throughout the book. Henriquez makes a point of keeping the characters thoughts and emotions very clear, its as if we are the character. Its very easy to realte to eachinduvidual in the story, which is purposefully done by the auther in order to make Henriquez message clear on what she wants us, the reader, to take away from her fictional book. No matter where we come from, we all want the same things in life, to find love, safety, and a sense of purpose inthis world. Just becasue osmeone is a foreigner does not mean that their ambitions what they strive for in life are foreign concepts as well. We are all human and must treat one another as nothing less.

The novel shows equality and gives the reader information on hardships experienced by Latinos without a show of feelings or complaint. When reading the novel, I found it interesting to read that Puerto Ricans are exiled and I found it

To many people, the United States is more than just a country; it’s a place of ideals. To some, those ideals are liberty and freedom. To others, the American Dream is democracy and unity between all people. Many people, especially immigrants, see the many opportunities that America offers as its greatest ideal. House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III, focuses extensively on economic opportunity, telling the tale of former Iranian Colonel, Massoud Behrani. Behrani hopes to strike it rich in the real estate market with a home he bought, so he can work towards restoring his family’s honor. Sadly, his dreams fall flat and his entire family ends up dead. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford, is about social opportunity America can offer. A young Chinese boy named Henry Lee becomes good friends with a Japanese girl named Keiko during World War II, despite that their people have long been enemies. When the government sends Keiko and her family away to an internment camp, Henry is separated from perhaps his only friend. Both House of Sand and Fog and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet discuss the opportunities that America offers, and how sometimes these opportunities fail people.

What are Arab Americans? An individual can be classified as “Arab” if the person speaks Arabic, practices Islam, and identifies with the traditions of Arabic-speaking peoples. (Aguirre and Turner 276)These individuals are usually subject to negative and differential treatment by others. It is essential to identify the differential treatment of Arab Americans by others in society. The mistreatment of Arabs in the United States can be contributed to many factors; however, there have been certain events that have occurred in the United States, which have increased and enraged these strong emotional feelings in many Americans. Discrimination and stereotypes of a culture or group mainly develops from a lack of understanding. We can become a

Although James Joyce short story “Araby” might be seen as a straightforward love story which ends up in failure, it discusses more issues than just love and failure. The concept of capitalism and materialism are also depicted in the story through the use of young boy who became immersed in a culture that believes in capitalism. Through this, the readers experience a unique journey a poor and discouraged person.

Every individual, no matter who they are, will all face challenges that result from their backgrounds and cultures. Born in Calcutta, India and later moving to the United States, Amin Ahmad was an individual who discovered this harsh truth firsthand. In his essay, “I Belong Here,” Ahmad reflects on his experience of being treated differently from those around him based off his cultural background. He analyses the emotional barrier that forms between the journey of immigration and the continuous feeling of inferiority based solely on the desire to belong. The article is written to provide a different point of view; one focused on introducing to the world the challenges and emotions immigrants face after starting the journey towards a new life.

Chapter 9: “Middle Eastern and North African Americans” gave me a different prospective from the negatively outlook portrait by the media in America. I realize that this group is far more that what we hear around. Immigrants from this region of the world are people who are simply looking for a better life, just like any other immigrant group that is migrating to America. Despite their hardship suffer from wars in their native countries that are usually cause by their indifferences in religion and sometimes by dysfunctional governments that don’t care for the wellbeing of the people. I found very interesting to know that most of the individuals from this groups come to the United States a lot more prepared in terms of education than other groups. Although,

How does it feel like to be a problem? Many would answer this question in different ways. Everyone has experienced “being the problem” in different ways. However, in terms of race, the answer to this question was similar among most African Americans. Living like they are a problem, consists of a majority of their lives. Different documents ranging from 1903 to our present day in 2015 mirror this same ideology. People such as W.E.B DuBois, Anne Moody, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama, expressed the same concern. Many people in our society, past and present, see being African American as a sign of inferiority. Race shouldn’t be the distinguishing factor between people. Moody, King, Obama, and DuBois all show that the fixation on race was a debilitating problem and appealed to their audiences for action to break free of these prejudices by trying to identify the problems and recommending courses of action.

For the podcast, I interviewed Lina Abdulnoor, with the intention of exploring the intricacies of refugeehood by analyzing Lina’s refugee experience. Lina lived in Iraq with her family until they began receiving death threats due to their religious beliefs. Convinced that they needed to flee the country to survive, they left Iraq as refugees. After leaving Iraq, they settled in Jordan, where they waited two years until the U.N. to approve their request to move to the U.S. in 2012. Lina and her family initially settled in Virginia, where she experienced culture shock as she adapted to American culture and the English language. However, Lina did not feel accepted in Virginia; her experiences in the state led her to think that Americans treated her according to negative stereotypes of Iraqis. After living in Virginia for several months, Lina and her family chose to resettle in San Diego, California, which harbored a larger Iraqi population than Virginia did. Supported by San Diego’s Iraqi community and various refugee organizations, Lina flourished, and she currently studies at UCSD while holding a stable job.

In the novel The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini purposely utilizes setting to play a pivotal role in the portrayal of an important focus when narrating a post 9/11 Afghan and American novel. The author’s deliberate incorporation of Afghan and American settings over a 3-decade time frame successfully illustrates the differences and similarities between Eastern culture and Western culture, as well as highlighting the harm each culture cultivates. The emphasis placed upon the discrimination of Hazaras by the Pashtuns not only informs the readers of the socio-economic relations in Afghanistan but also addresses a parallelism of harm towards Afghanis from Americans. Hosseini breaks down post 9/11 stereotypes by showing that a person's socio-economic class or ethnic group does not determine their ability to form friendships, feel guilt and seek redemption. Khaled Hosseini rehumanizes a culture which has been demonized by the generalizations of many individual Americans and many Hollywood films. He does this by developing universal themes which demonstrate that Afghans and Americans

The story “Araby” as told by James Joyce is about a young boy that is fascinated with the girl across the street. But deeper down the story is about a very lonely boy lusting for her love and affection. Throughout the story, we see how the frustration of first love, isolation and high expectations breaks the main character emotionally and physically. James Joyce uses the first-person viewpoint to tell this story which helps influence the plot, characterization, themes, and understanding of the main character.

Although "Araby" is a fairly short story, author James Joyce does a remarkable job of discussing some very deep issues within it. On the surface it appears to be a story of a boy's trip to the market to get a gift for the girl he has a crush on. Yet deeper down it is about a lonely boy who makes a pilgrimage to an eastern-styled bazaar in hopes that it will somehow alleviate his miserable life. James Joyce's uses the boy in "Araby" to expose a story of isolation and lack of control. These themes of alienation and control are ultimately linked because it will be seen that the source of the boy's emotional distance is his lack of control over his life.

“Araby,” is a story of emotional passion carefully articulated by the author, James Joyce, to mark the end of childhood and the start of adolescence. It is told from the perspective of a young boy who is filled with lust for his friend, Mangan’s, sister. He lives in a cheerless town on a street hosting simply complacent families who own brown faced houses that stare vacantly into one another. The boy temporarily detaches himself from this gloomy atmosphere and dwells on the keeper of his affection. Only when he journeys to a festival titled Araby, does he realize that his attempt at winning the heart of Mangan’s sister has been done in an act of vanity. Joyce takes advantage of literary elements such as diction and imagery to convey an at times dreary and foolishly optimistic tone.

To what extent is Midaq Alley an “Arab” novel? Does this add to or detract from the novel’s overall impact on an international audience.