When I first read about Thi Bui's immigrant experience it made me think of my family's own experiences in America. While my parent's immigration was largely a result of my father pursuing a master's education at USC, I feel that a lot of the experiences Thi Bui shared regarding how her family "assimilated" in America were similar to my own.
When my parents first moved to America, they were lucky enough to live in an apartment complex where they were surrounded by many likewise Indian couples. I've heard various stories over the years about my parent's time there and their time with their friends. This community they had was so close to the point that my parent's still have a group chat with a lot of their neighbors and friends from that time. I found this similar to how when Thi Bui's family moved to America she lived with her mom's older sister. They taught and gave Thi Bui's family an opportunity to "modernize" by enrolling them in American schools, signing up her parents for an American education and learning English. Likewise, my mom's friends would take her shopping at the mall, teach her new American recipes and tell her about all the new opportunities she had in America. Like Thi Bui's mom, who used to be a teacher in Vietnam, my mom used to be a professor in India at a local college before she moved to America. Here her degrees were pretty much useless so my mom would take classes at local community colleges in and libraries for an American education.
While Thi Bui's family moved from the northeast to California my family actually did the opposite. When I was about 4 my family moved from San Francisco, California to New York City for my dad's job. While my parents actually knew English before coming to America, they still had trouble navigating cultural barriers like driving and racism. In the book Thi Bui's mom often asks her neighbor for a ride to her kid's events. Similarly, my mom actually struggled a lot with driving since in India her family had a driver, so she never really had to practice driving. In San Francisco my dad had to pretty much force my mom to lock in and start driving so that she could get her essential tasks done like picking me and my sister up from daycare, going shopping etc.
As immigrants my parent's struggled with assimilating and being seen as "Americans" an issue that I myself have also struggled with over the past years. Just like how Thi Bui can find intersecting parts of her identity surrounding being a Vietnamese refugee and American citizen my parents found intersectionality in their identities as indians and americans.
Hi Avani, I enjoyed reading your in your blog and getting to know about your family. The experiences your family faced and the challenges Thi Bui faced are similar and representative of many immigrants. I noticed just how different their lives in the two countries were and how frustrating it was.
ReplyDeleteThis was beautifully written Avani, I loved how you showed parallelism between your parents journey and Thi Bui's parents journey. I think that adds a personal sense to your blog. It truly shows how much our parents sacrifice to come to a better country and so their kids can have better opportunities than they ever did. Great job!
ReplyDeleteBeing an ABCD truly made me resonate with the book in many senses, and I think you were able to beautifully shine light on how Conflicting cultures can affect ones upbringing. It was beautiful to see the parallel That you drew between Thi Bui And your own life and I love reading it. Especially since you and me grew up with similar background, it was really nice to see your blog as I felt like I resonated too many parts of it. Great blog Avani 😛
ReplyDeletethis is very good. I liked learning so much about your family and truly resonated with the complications that being born apart from your culture can entail
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