Not Easy To Be An Immigrant Nguyen Analysis

Through the personal stories of his hair, love life, and behavior, Liu is able to show the effects of his assimilation. The second section deals with Liu’s struggles to conform to white stereotypes as an Asian American. With his personal anecdotes, he establishes himself as a more credible source to speak on the subject of assimilation. The second section uses narration to provide evidence about Liu’s definition of assimilation.

in Nguyen’s essay the two girls go to school and are automatically placed in a bilingual education system based on their physical features. This leads people around these characters to make assumptions of them not being able to understand english; when in reality, that is not the case because in Tan’s essay the mother understood and read a variety of newspapers. In Nguyen’s the girls also understand the materials in class and excelled in academics.

He also creates a very strong and intimate bond with other immigrants throughout the entire paper. He used pathos by telling the story of his own immigration, of the day he was brought to America, and of having to jump through certain loops to stay under the radar. He discusses having to lie to friends and coworkers and not being able to obtain a driver’s license or job without going to the extremes. By laying out every obstacle he had to jump over he immediately creates credibility and a link between him and other

Many new arrivals still struggle to survive and often Chinese Americans still encounter suspicion and hostility. Chinese Americans have achieved great success and now, like so many others, they are stitching together a new American identity. As Michelle Ling, a young Chinese American, tells Bill Moyers in Program 3, “I get to compose my life one piece at a time, however I feel like it. Not to say that it’s not difficult and that there isn’t challenge all the time, but more than material wealth, you get to choose what you are, who you are.” (www.pbs.org)

While reading through different non-fiction essays, one that left a great impact on my thoughts was “I’m a Banana and Proud of It” by Wayson Choy. Choy gives his story as a North American citizen with a Chinese background. Families pushed for their children to belong in North America, causing children to be labelled as “Bananas” for being “yellow on the outside and white on the inside” (Choy); a term to describe people in Choy’s generation who assimilated very well into the American culture. Many teenagers like him were attracted to the American culture and strayed from their Chinese culture. Although at the same time, they didn’t feel like they belonged as an American due to looking Chinese. People had difficulties placing themselves in one

Humanity is ever so much more complicated than one could have ever imagined. Humans can thrive on change, but ultimately look for something to declare as home. In search of this home people travel long distances and risk everything they have. When an American contemplates the word immigrant, one imagines the countless people from Mexico crossing into our country or the refugees that hope to make this country their home. What eludes most of us, however, is the reality that most people were, at one point, immigrants to this country and that our forefathers came here exactly the same as refugees come today. What is brought to mind when I hear the word immigrant is hope and perseverance. I remember the countless people who have traveled here

On the other hand, Nguyen talks of the language difficulties that she experienced being a Vietnamese in the United States. At first, she is enrolled to a school far from home as it offers bilingual education to help her integrate with the system of learning. She works hard to raise her academic performance with hopes of falling in favor with the teacher. However, as the teacher knows her Vietnamese origin, she manifests her stereotype on Nguyen’s comprehension in literature readings. For instance, while it was her turn to read, the teacher would interrupt her making sentiments such as “you are reading too fast….things she did not do to other students” (Nguyen, 35). She also faces a “school-constructed identity” together with her sister with all sorts of jibes thrown against them. As Vollmer puts it, “such assumptions affect the interpretations made of student behavior and school

Through interviewing my roommate Linda Wang, I have gotten the opportunity of hearing a first-hand account of what it is like being a young immigrant living in the United States. At the age of eight, Linda, along with her father, mother, and aunt, emigrated to America. Linda’s family currently resides in Bayside, Queens and she is a student-athlete on the St. John’s women’s golf team. Linda was kind enough to share her immigration story with me so that I may use it as a manifestation of what life as an immigrant, and the immigration process itself, entails.

“The Arrival,” by Shaun Tan, is a wordless novel that depicts the experience immigrants go through when vacating their home countries to start new in a different country. Readers can see that on the first page there is a collage of headshots from multiple people of different ethnicity and religion. The first image page of the wordless novel helps viewers get a clearer image of what the novel is about. In “The Arrival,” Shaun Tan depicts the hardships and enjoyment that immigrants experience when moving to a new country, since the piece was written in 2006, there seems to be more hardships than enjoyment when coming to the United States, which means the idea of the United States being a melting pot is flawed.

9 voluntary agencies existed whose job was to “coordinate the refugee’s eventual resettlement with local sponsors into communities throughout the United States.” (Povell)

For millions of immigrants, America has been seen as the land of opportunity where anyone could become anything he or she wanted to be. A family that believes strongly in the American dream can be found in Amy Tan’s short story, “Two Kinds.” The story centers around the daughter of a Chinese immigrant who desperately wants her daughter to become successful. In the story, the author shows the difficult lives immigrants face when moving to a new culture. In this short story, the theme shows the protagonist’s conflict with her mother on the type of daughter her mother wants her to be. The author establishes the theme of how difficult mother-daughter relationships can be through characterization, setting, and symbolism.

If you knew about the Vietnam war, you would understand why Vietnamese people who had been living in America called April is the “Black April”. Every year on the 30th of April, while Vietnamese who live in Vietnam are celebrating this day happily, the other Vietnamese immigrants, who live in the States of America as well as other countries like Canada or Australia, … are commemorating in sadly. I have this interview for my parents, Mr and Mrs Vo, who had come to the United States since 1993. Through their stories about life in America after they had settled on this soil, I then realize how racism exists and that racism is always toward to those who are not in the same color.

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge give acumen to the Asian assimilation experience with recrudescent themes of struggling with self identity while facing discrimination, retaining East-Asian culture in a foreign environment, and dealing with traditional mother-daughter conflicts and expectations. Universally, many Asian-American and Asian-Canadian immigrants struggle with the sense of self-identity while facing significant discrimination. In the mid-twentieth century, many first generation immigrants felt isolated, disenchanted, and thwarted in their Western worlds. Many immigrants often had erroneous hopes of a prosperous future for themselves and their

Wong feels that she needs to fit into the dominant culture from an early age. The reason for this is because society stresses the dominate culture, promotes the dominate culture and pressures immigrant children to fit in. Wong uses herself as an example of the tremendous pressure children of immigrants are under to fit in, which is a burden placed on them by society. The pressure is so great that many are embarrassed by their roots and their heritage. Wong experiences this burden, and this is what drives her to want to become the stereotypical All-American girl. She learns to hate her culture so much that she does not want anything to do with it and she wants a divorce from her ethnic roots, “Wong’s adolescent embarrassment of her ethnic

Dinaw Mengestu, Richard Rodriguez and Manuel Munoz are three authors that have been through and gone through a lot of pain to finaly get accepted in their societies. They are all either immigrants or children of immigrants that had trouble fitting in America’s society at the time. They struggled with language and their identities, beucase they were not original from the states and it was difficult for others to accept them for who they are. They all treated their problems differently an some tried to forget their old identeties and live as regulalr Americans others accepted themselves for being who they are, but they all found a way to deal with their issues.