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Ethnic diversity pro and cons
Challenges of diversity
Challenges of diversity
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Ethnic diversity pro and cons
Challenges of diversity
Challenges of diversity
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
In the article “My “Oriental” Father: On the Words we use to Describe Ourselves” Kat Chow explains her opinion on her father’s choice to continue to use the word “oriental” to describe not only himself but anything of the Asian culture. Chow’s father, originally from Hong Kong, moved to the U.S. in 1969. He opened an oriental restaurant in a Connecticut suburb, but it eventually went bankrupt. The author explains how her father using the word oriental made him out to be looked at like a “caricature of a grinning Asian man with a ponytail and buck teeth.” Kat shares a story of when she was working at her father’s restaurant.
This story is exactly what Julia Alvarez went through. It’s her life story. In the book Yolanda plays Julia’s role. The story relates accurately to how the family struggled having to adapt to the American culture. “As the only immigrant in my class, I was put in a special seat in the front row by the window, apart from the other children so that sister Zoe could tutor me without disturbing them” (“How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” 166).
The article "The Struggle to be an American Girl" by Elizabeth Wong it is about a Chinese girl who did not want to learn or speak her first language and chose just to speak English. However, being bilingual has benefits like communication, jobs opportunities, etc. I chose to be bilingual for two reasons. the first reason is communication. Communication is important and if we know more than one language, it is possible to communicate with more than one group of people.
There daughters were always ashamed of and resented their mothers, especially while they were young. The daughters felt this way because of the way their mothers raised them. The mothers were very hard on their daughters, and pushed them towards successful, sometimes causing their daughter to feel overwhelmed. The mothers wanted their daughters to keep their Chinese heritage and culture, but also take advantage of the opportunities they have in America. The daughters were often ashamed of their Chinese heritage, and the way that their mothers acted.
His only “primary goal was to blend in” with others to not get bullied and feel isolated from everyone else. He then learns to embrace being an immigrant and had no reason to blend in as he discovered his identity and learned to utilize it (Kim 1-4). A deeper analysis of the purpose of each detail in American Born Chinese reveals underlying meanings to each series of
In the novel Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng describes a Chinese American family living in the 1970s in Ohio, and how they go through the tragedy of the favorite child’s death. The Lee’s family is the interracial family that makes up of the white American woman, Marilyn, and the Chinese immigrant man, James, with their three children, Nathan, Lydia, and Hannah. Lydia becomes the favorite child of her parents because she is inherited the blue eye from her mother and the black hair from her father. Therefore, she is expected to do things that fulfill her parents’ dreams. However, the Lee’s family’s poor communication within their family dynamic, the pressure of parents’ expectations and social environment results in Lydia’s frustration
In Patricia Smith's’ What It’s Like to be a Black Girl (for Those of You Who Aren’t), she eliminates the use of stanzas in her poem, which makes it appear as a miniature short story to the reader. Without the stanzas, the reader is encouraged to read the poem straight through, only breaking where there is punctuation. Her powerful words keep the reader attentive and truly capture the essence of her life. She begins her poem with the line “First of all”, the F in first being the only capitalized letter in the poem. She does not use other transition words like then, next or second, which one would expect, however, with each line, she takes the reader as she transitions from childhood to womanhood for a young black girl.
Living as a Chinese-American, the narrator had to take on American attributes in order to be accepted -- for example, while normal Chinese women spoke with strong and assertive voices, the narrator adopted a whisper in order to appear “American-feminine. ”(1) As a result, however, her shy demeanor caused her to be an unpopular outcast. She saw herself in another Chinese-American girl at her school, as they had certain, negative similarities. “I hated the younger sister, the quiet one.
Fitting Into American Culture In the excerpt from The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston reveals the importance of fitting in by retelling the hardships of a 1st generation immigrant in the American school system. Embarrassed by her accent and broken English, Kingston refused to talk in Kindergarten, a problem many 1st generation immigrants have faced. Kingston’s self-esteem was completely based on how her voice sounded, claiming that, “lt spoils my day with self-disgust when I hear my broken voice come skittering out into the open” (132). Self-worth and the idea of fitting in goes hand in hand, so when Kingston felt as if she could not fit in because of her voice, her self-worth went down, straining the importance of how abandoned one feels
In this story by Gish Jen's called “Who’s Irish?" it tells a story about an elderly Chinese woman living in America as she and her family struggle with issues concerning the correct way to raise a child, and cultural differences between the two families. She is an old fashion elderly lady who migrated from China. When she came to America she had a hard time and struggled to adapt to the new lifestyle. Having a daughter that's married to an man who is not Chinese and having a mixed granddaughter made it more complicated for her to adapt emotionally as well.
Cultural differences is something important to the author herself that somehow helps her to become what she is really today. In the beginning of the novel, there are many traumas deal with cultural differences that the author undertaken. One of the traumas she experienced is when she 's in the United States living with Melvin and his mother, she felt like "she doesn 't want to wear American dress" (Le 16,17). This is understandable when a six-year-old girl wanted to keep her Vietnamese traditional culture. And because she is young,
The two main subjects of Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood” are the author’s coming to terms with the intersection of race and opportunity, and her disappointment with fictional literature. 10-year-old Annie Dillard understands how gender and racial stereotypes play a huge role in her 5th-grade world. “I nevertheless imagined, perhaps from the authority and freedom of it, that its author was a man.” During the 1950s, males had more authority in their everyday life compared to women. For example, they are given power over women, they had better jobs than women and men and typically the men have a better education for more of them went to college.
Tan talks about the different types of English she used and learned while she was growing up. Tan’s English wasn’t all so great when she was in grade school but in college she switched to an English major from pre-med. English was Tan’s second language so she wasn’t so encouraged to become a writer. Others could not understand her mother’s “broken English”, but Tan could because she grew up listening to it, which is why she named this story “Mother tongue”.
Throughout the entire novel, the mothers and daughters face inner struggles, family conflict, and societal collision. The divergence of cultures produces tension and miscommunication, which effectively causes the collision of American morals, beliefs, and priorities with Chinese culture which
In the poem, "When I Was Growing Up”, Nellie Wong relates the struggles of a Chinese girl growing up, searching to find her voice in a predominantly white cultural majority. The speaker begins the poem with, “I know now that once I longed to be white,” (1). This speaker longs for the privileges she attributes to being a member of the cultural majority. Ashamed of her darker Asian skin and Chinese culture, the speaker laments, “…I could not change, I could not shed / my skin…” (49, 50).