Okay here it is.. its not amazing and im sorry if i interpreted/ took liberty with anything you said! i didnt really mean it lol. thanks for all the help! yall are amazing
Adopting a New World
Throughout this quarter, we have read many books describing the immigrant experience of women from Middle Eastern and Asian cultures. However, I chose to interview women from the Netherlands, Australia, and the New Zealand to gather their perspective on being an immigrant in the United States. The results could not have differed more from the stories that we read in class, but they were the same as well.
The general perspective of America, it seems, from all countries is that everyone has money, is perfect, and as Sandra from the Netherlands stated, “that everything was big.” As with the immigrants in the books we read, the majority of the perceptions comes from television shows and gives these people a false hope of a better life with “roads… paved with gold.” Unlike the Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants such as Jane in Jasmine, all of these people came to the United States legally. One thing that these people had in common with many of our guest speakers was that they came over for their husbands or stayed in the United States because they met their husbands here.
One common theme I saw in the interviews I conducted was that many of the people were not satisfied with our public transportation systems or our public health systems. This differed from some of the books we read where health care was not even available in the countries. One example of this was with Farah and how she had to be transported to Germany to have her leg fixed when it was blown up by a land mine. She then had to have a wooden foot glued onto her prosthetic because she could not afford a new lightweight one. However, when she came to America she was given free health care and she was able to get a new prosthetic leg, although she had to wait months to receive it. The general consensus from my interviews was that our country has a “lack of health care” as stated by Hayley. In the book Polite Lies, the main character was shocked to learn that in Japan, her home country, that the doctors would withhold information about things such as cancer. This is viewed as a way to let the patient live a full life. However, as an American, and it seems the author agreed, that having the information disclosed was an advantage to possibly beating the cancer at hand.
As we learned in class, it takes a long time to get a green card, no matter what country you are from. It took thirteen years for Sandra from the Netherlands to obtain her green card and Fliss and Hayley are not hopeful of obtaining their green cards at all. However, their children will have dual citizenship, even their adopted daughters from China.
Discrimination is more prevalent for “different looking” immigrants from places like Afghanistan and China, especially with the recent terrorist attacks in the past years. The only discrimination that the women I interviewed experienced is based on their physical appearance in weight. As Hayley replied to the question “have you been subject to any discrimination in America,” “Hell yes… more than you would ever have imagined. I am a ‘larger’ lady and I had NEVER experienced discrimination because of my weight before… “This is a discrimination that people even American born have to deal with on a daily basis, but the general consensus was that other countries are more laid back about appearances. This can be seen with America’s amount of plastic surgery compared to other countries. In addition, these women are not discriminated upon by dress or appearance alone because they appear to be American from the outside. In every story that we read, the character had some type of discrimination against them. The most memorable one was in Funny in Farsi, where the main character was asked to calm another lost child down since they looked the same. However, they were not from the same country and did not speak the same language.
As immigrants, I thought it would be interesting to hear the women’s opinions on immigration into America. In general, it seems that they all had about the same opinion. That they were okay with it as long as it was done legally. This differs from the promoted idea that immigration into America should be stopped since Americans view that they are losing their jobs and land to “foreigners.” This idea strikes me as funny since everyone in this country started off as immigrants as well. I also found this interesting as the last story we read, Jasmine, the main character came over to America illegally on a boat although she originally planned to immigrate legally. I also found it interesting that with our guest speakers, that the visas had to be obtained on the basis of returning to the original country. In addition, most of the characters and guest speakers like Carmen that moved here illegally, did it to support their family or because they felt like they had no other choice, versus the legal immigrants who mostly came over either for school or they stayed here because of their husbands.
One of the interesting things I found that was common among the books, guest speakers, and the interviews was how the people changed once they moved to America. The most prevalent answer was that the immigrants had to become more independent. In the books, this was shown mostly by the children having to communicate for their parents, translate, pay bills, etc. We could also see this with the younger immigrants and first generation Americans, such as Olivia, that were our guest speakers as well. Since the women I interviewed were older, most of their family has stayed in their home countries, so they did not have this issue to deal with, just being independent for themselves.
Another common theme among these women is that, as Hayley states, they have become “more neurotic” and care more about their appearance. Many of the immigrant women from places that traditionally wear head coverings stopped following this tradition once they moved to our country. Also, they start to become more about promoting the singular person and not the community. This was prevalent in Polite Lies where the character had trouble speaking in Japanese because she did not want to offend anyone by speaking her opinion. She also did not want to sign the papers allowing her father’s estate to go to her stepmother, giving up anything she would inherit.
With the unrealistic views foreign-born people have of America, it does not surprise me that they have some culture shock when they arrive. Most have seen television shows with either beautiful people and places or pamphlets of the same. When they come here, they seem surprised that we have “ghettos” as well and that we are not clean. Fliss was shocked “that it was dirty on the highways” and that she would see people “walking and throwing garbage (trash) on the ground etc and not think twice about it.” When Farah and her mother moved to America, they were expecting a large apartment with many utilities, utensils, and commodities at their disposal. However, they were shocked that they just had a small apartment. Jasmine was shocked as well at the dirty hotel half-face took her to when they arrived in America.
I asked the women that I interviewed if they were judged differently because they were adopting from another country besides America, since they are from another country as well. However, all three of the women had the same response that they have not had any additional issues with the adoption process, at least none that differ from what my family has gone through. The main issue most people have is that there are so many children needing families in the United States, why adopt from another country. I feel that these women may also have a bit of feeling that is similar to Jasmine’s feelings towards her adopted son from Vietnam, that they might have someone to relate to in the family. Just like in the town where Jasmine was living as Jane, most of the international families have not had any issues as to discrimination.
The most interesting differences that I found were the overall opinion of America once the immigrants arrived. I feel that this has to do with the development of the country that the immigrants were coming from. New Zealand, Australia, and the Netherlands are all mostly equal to the United States economy wise. With these immigrants, they were not awed by America and their living situation here. This is in contrast to the immigrants that we had speak from places like Mexico, Japan, China and the books that we read about these countries as well as Middle Eastern countries as well. These immigrants were coming from less economically developed countries, where the everyday person does not equal to what we consider middle class. To people like Farah and Jasmine, simple things like glass windows and bathrooms seem elegant and a huge step up from where they were in their lives.
The most common thing I noticed between all of these women is a split between being American and being their original nationality. All of the women miss certain things about their home countries and have certain dislikes about America, the most common being our health system and how self-absorbed people are.
Through my interviews, listening to the guest speakers, and reading the books in this class, it amazes me that most Americans just assume the immigrant experience is the same for each person. If we interviewed men from the same countries, same age, and the same experiences, we would have a different perspective on the immigrant experience as well. The only thing that I believe that these immigrants would have in common is the hyphenated life of being Japanese-American or Chinese-American. An immigrant experience can not be assumed by knowing the person’s nationality alone, it fully depends on their life stories and the experiences they have gone through.
