Between Two Lives and Culture

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Between Two Lives and Culture People come from all over the world to United States to start a new and better life for themselves. However, in order to do that they may have to leave behind their families and friends. There are good and bad sacrifices because you can make a name for yourself but you are separated from your loved ones. In Two Lives by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, she shows her personal experience of living between two cultures. She focuses her problem of living between two identities, which makes her feel that she does belonging and does not belonging to either one. Basically, she lives unhappily in two different worlds abandoning her “true” self. Lim feels like a wraith because she is all alone with no family, house, or society and see herself as an outsider. “Unlike the happy immigrants who sees the United States as a vast real-estate advertisement selling a neighborly future, the person who enters the country as a resident alien is neither here nor there” (58). In other words, she describes how immigrants view the United States in such high expectations hoping for a brighter and better future. Instead she feels like an outsider or a misfit because if she dies right there now no one would know or mourn for her. She there with no family and the These resident aliens such as herself, faced reality the hard way and all the obligations that came along the way while she struggles to balance her family and her own personal life. She feels like a stranger at first; however, soon she adapts and finds a job, a lover, a child, and a telephone friend. She does all this just to keep her busy and tired. This will make time would go by faster and that she will not feel like a stranger anymore. She then considers this life was better than her old life in Asia, where it is always crowded of unhappiness. However, she questions herself if she did leave behind a crowded
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