Immigrate To America

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In Vietnam, when a person says he or she is going to settle down to America no matter what the purpose is: to immigrate or to study abroad, that person is always considered as the luckiest and the others look at him or her with their eyes of jealousy. People around the world think of America as a nation that can satisfy each person’s individual dreams and give them the opportunity to make their dream come true. I was one of those who used to think that way. For someone, the time ten years seem like too short to measure a human’s life, but ten years to keep someone waiting for something is really overwhelming. My parents and I had been waiting that such a long time to get a chance to immigrate to America. When I first got off the air plane,…show more content…
In order to stay away from the disrespect, to get more benefits as well as the deference, assimilation is considered as a solution. In “Leave your name at the border”, Manuel Munoz point outs an example of his stepfather. He reluctantly anglicizes his Mexican name in order to be advantageous from work (11). Some even unhesitatingly erase their old traditional values, and are willing to adapt a completely new culture because of the fear of cultural rejection. One example is from K.Oanh Ha, a Vietnamese woman who immigrated to America at the early age. Growing up in a world surrounding by those who mostly are not Asian and do not speak Vietnamese. Ha customarily felt like eating “hamburgers and ketchup” and “longed to lose” the accent (275). She herself little by little pushed her original Vietnamese heritage far away even if her parents attempted to preserve. She anglicized her name to Kyrstin, craved for being a “full-fledged American”, and saw college as a best way to get away from “the house that always smelled of fish sauce and jasmine tea” (275). Both Munoz and Ha are trapped in the same situation: they worry about the society would not accept who they are, where they come from. Assimilation is such an influential word “It is the displacement of one culture over another, the inability to sustain more than one way of being.” (115). It also induces people relentlessly to erase their original identities, and turn them into a state of cultural

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