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Immigrants Fight For Acceptance Essay

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The Immigrant Fight for Acceptance in America The path for an immigrant to be an American is a desired yet tough challenge. This theme encompasses the three books titled Two Kinds by Amy Tan, Who’s Irish by Gish Jen, and Children of loneliness by Anzia Yezierska. All three stories follow the lives of immigrants living in the new world of America. The child viewpoint portrays the emotions and actions that the immigrants go through. These children are just fighting to be apart of their new world; they are fighting for acceptance as Americans. Although the American dream, in a traditional sense, is the guiding ethos of immigrants striving for success in a new country, in the stories Two Kinds,Who’s Irish, and Children of Loneliness ,the American …show more content…

In all three stories, the immigrants fight to escape their old country and start over but this can never be fully accomplished because they are still emotionally connected to their home. Rachel in Children of Loneliness fights an internal battle between fitting in America or in her homeland with her parents. She struggles to accept America as her home when she “can’t live with the old world, and I’m yet too green for the new. I don’t belong to those who gave me birth or to those whom I was educated” (Yezierska 189). She fights so hard to become something she is not. She fights to become American but she is never fully able to accept it because she was born an immigrant from somewhere else. The daughter in Two Kinds always fought for her independence from her mother but when she is older she realizes that "Pleading Child" was shorter but slower; "Perfectly Contented" was longer but faster. And after I had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song” (Tan 8). The daughter craved that independence portrayed through her actions as pleading child, but she realizes she was supposed to also be perfectly contented. This is the connection that shows that she can never escape her homeland because her mother always told her to be perfectly

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