Struggles of a Dual Identity (Compare and Contrast Jhumpa Lahiri & Amy Tan)

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Tracy 1 Kenesha Tracy Professor Clayton Short Story Analysis 9 January 2013 Speak Our Tongue in Our Two Lives We bleed that red, white, and blue. We live in the land of the free. We live in the United States of America. The United States has been referred to as “the melting pot”. The melting pot is simply defined as a land where people from many different backgrounds and cultures with numerous ethnicities, religious groups, skin colors, and languages come together to form one single nation. While us Americans have our day to day struggles, immigrants and children of immigrants have it even more difficult. For example, immigrants have to overcome the typical stereotypes of being a foreigner, like not knowing English well, being looked down upon, and struggling with social interactions. The immigrants have to balance their dual identities of being accepted as an American while also sticking to their roots and not turning their back on their homeland; which one would assume are very stressful. Two well-known authors, Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri, have portrayed in their short stories of how they overcame their struggles of having a dual identity by introducing literary devices, literary terms, and how those devices and terms were used to convey thematic concepts. Amy Tan expressed in her nonfiction short story “Mother Tongue” in an eager manner of how she valued the diversity of the Englishes and languages and the powers that the languages have in evoking emotions, visual images, complex ideas, or even a simple truth (Tan 242). Being a first generation Asian-American, Tan believed that her English language derived from multiple Tracy 2 “Englishes.” The “simple” English she used when speaking to her mother, the “broken” or “fractured” English her mother used when speaking with her, her translation of her mother’s Chinese language which, she

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