Becoming American: The Chinese Expereince

Race is a group of people united or classified together on a basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution. As you continue on reading I’m going to tell you a little about people of the Chinese race and their struggle to become American. Many of these people not better or worse then you or I have had a rough time making some of their dreams come true. They had to fight and struggle with discrimination just because they were “different”.

Gish Jen is a daughter of immigrant parents. She now is an American citizen but here life wasn’t always easy along with her parents. As asked in an interview about her writing, she said she didn’t think she would have been a writer today if it weren’t for her parents being immigrants. She felt as if she was living in two different worlds. Gish Jen came from a world where everything that was done was an idea that there were obstacles everywhere

that someone could not simply go out and do what they wanted. That she had no choice but to be smart and to be “perfect” in everything that she did. She had to have extremely high goals and there was no choice other then to reaching them.

There were many things about the Chinese home and the American home that played a role in how she was raised. There were things about the Chinese family that she was happy to get away from. Such as a girl’s education was not as valuable as a boy’s education. Where in America they try to make it more equalized. In a Chinese family everybody is very close. Where in American families there is always a little bit of isolation. People can go and do their own thing, not everything is family oriented.

Later on Gish Jen and her family moved to a more upscale community. Things were very different there then in the suburb outside of New York City. This area she said was probably about 40 percent Jewish. So it was a place where the

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