preview

Jennifer Tseng's Autobiography Of An Immigrant

Decent Essays

Since I moved to Toronto, I’ve been getting a lot of questions like “where are you from?” or “where is home?”. I guess the question is only natural since Toronto is a big city where people from all over the world gather. Whenever I get such questions, I tell them that it’s hard to say since I’ve stayed in multiple places and had countless places that felt like they were home and not. To me home has always changed, home was always changing based on the circumstances, or the chance to find a better place. As much as I would have wanted to feel a ‘rootedness’ in one place by staying put, I realized later on that just because I stay there for a long time does not necessarily mean home. Country to country, province to province, city to city, explaining …show more content…

In her text Tseng uses the formal element of the text effectively to communicate her experience regarding ‘home’. Each stanza of her poem is formed with 2 lines: 1 print, and 1 italics. Tseng goes back and forth between the print text and the italics to communicate how she communicates her home to others, and how she remembers her own home. Through this action she seems to counteract her perception of her home between how she tells others and how she remembers. Tseng starts off the poem with a line that seems to give no importance to her birthplace, “My birthplace is incidental.”(Tseng) She then continues under in italics and state, “Never forget your Mother Country”(Tseng) which hints her true feelings towards her birthplace and reveals a sense of nostalgia. Throughout the poem she accepts the stereotypes that americans, and outsiders place on the chinese in print text. She simplifies her journey to United States, and life in United States and then she continues to reveal the truth behind the first statement. The poem is a constant battle between the facade she puts on, and the actual author behind the facade. In her poem she talks of her experiences and homeplaces as if they are of no importance in the print text, but you can see that in the italicized text that they are the foundation of who she is today. In the last three stanza of her poem Tseng discards the Print text and stresses her true experience of her hardships, and the journey. In these last texts she creates a very vivid images of couple of her nights on the boat that she was on to get to United States. The last lines of the poem shows that her journey was truly a life or death

Get Access